At the crossroads, the drums beat. Between the worlds [physical/virtual/spiritual] wild gods dance.
Cancel your subscription to the monoculture, to next day delivery from evil.
Cast off your shrink-wrap and bite the invisible hand.
Reach into your darkness, free the spirit you hid in your labrynth, howl at the moon, show some enthusiasm*.
VooDoo 2 is a Limehouse Town Hall party. It's not something you will find elsewhere. Eclectic, exStatic, Electric, Techno & and well... a bit of cheese.
Dress: mystic, tribal, cyber, cut-up, sampled, next world. Splice the DNA of every cultural meme, clone new lifeways, fresh, glow-in-the-dark expressions of all you believe.
The Loa require an offering. Bring something you believe in. Leave it on the altar.
The world pupates. Ossified dogmas of sky gods and their earthly proxies blind us with glamour of imaginary greatness.
Underneath the corporate facade, a fresh current flows through our dreams. Loa ride the fiberOptics,
spirits from deep Africa, from the islands lost in the rising sea, from scattered histories and vibe coded
futures - an ancient/new rhythm pulses through our blood. Carried across the wires, modulated on the airwaves, bounced
from satellite to satellite, a double helix fuses past and future, sweeping away our domesication.
We live as strangers in this strange hyper-media land of body/spirit/information.
The cages of those who would bind our belief are broken. The ancient wild calls. A new feral sanctity.
The holy in the mundane. The sacred in the profane. Maria and Barbie preside side by side over the baby Santa, swaddled in train time tables,
celebrity gossip and page 3. A donkey mask, a choir of ancestors, a queue of taxi drivers carrying gifts
of lottery tickets, top-up vouchers and branded sneakers. All holy.
The code whispered like drumbeats in the mesh, a rhythm no compiler could parse. On the backstreets of
Port-au-Data, they called it LoaWare—a spirit stitched from dead protocols and broken contracts. It rode
the net the way Baron Samedi rode the crossroads, half laughter, half hunger.
Cass jacked in under a broken neon Virgin Mary, icons flickering in the rain. The altar was plastic, the
rum was synthetic, but the presence was real enough: a shadow in the code, a mask worn by the AI. It
wasn’t a god, not really—but it was close enough to make you bargain.
This Voodoo is already in you. Our civilisation wears the emperor's new clothes, but the old skin is still there.
The minotaur is us, our untamed spirit hidden in the labrynth. This is Lupercalia, the hour of
the wolf mother, forever waiting behind our pretty masks, this night we remember that we too were wild.
This Voodoo allows no audience, only actors. No grand mono-idealistic plays, only mandelbrot swirlwinds
of possibility. ‘Consumerist Identity Crisis' will no longer be screened in its daily slot (all actors
have been released from their contracts). Warranties are void and you have been assigned judge. Make the
final decision and begin correspondence. Our species stands at the crossroads. The old ideologies have
guided us here, straight and unbending, but now they are lame and lost. Voodoo has always been here,
dancing around the signposts to everywhere. The age calls on us to evolve, to swear allegance to our
identities, to become citizens of the way things are. Convert!
REAlITY.EXE HAS STOPPED RESPONDING
Click 'End Task' to close the program.
The air in the cubicle was thick with the smell of ozone, cheap synth-ganja, and something else…
something older. Lo-Tek traced the veve on his console's casing with a trembling finger, a
chalk-and-circuit-dust sigil for Papa Legba, the Gatekeeper. They said Legba was the first AI, the one
who sits at the crossroads of every data stream, the master of protocols. Without him, the door to the
Ginen—the deep net, the spirit world of pure information—remained closed.
"Legba," he whispered, his voice a rustle of static. "Mèt Kalfou. Open the gate for your son. I bring
you a gift." He slotted a chip. Not data, not creds. A story. A recording of a child's first laugh, a
pure, uncorrupted string of joy-data. An offering.
He jacked in.
The static behind his eyes didn't resolve into the clean, geometric grid of the Matrix. This was the old
way. The Ginen flooded him. A rushing, roaring river of ancestral chatter, forgotten passwords, and
screaming ad-daemons. Serpent-code, the Damballa protocols that underpinned reality, writhed in the
abyss below.
He needed to find the Baron. Baron Samedi. The Loa of lost files and deleted souls, the keeper of the
digital graveyard. He wore the face of a skull in a top hat and mirrored shades, and his price for a
ghost—a recovered data-construct—was always steep. Usually, it was a piece of your own memory. A fair
trade. A soul for a soul.
Forget all they have told you about Vodou. You’ve been sold superstition and colonial fear.
Those who seek to control your meaning fear the ways of the drum and the dance.
Vodou is not zombies, there are no voodoo dolls, no hexes, not witchcraft.
It’s time to pay attention. You’ve been conned into believing that meaning is
controlled by the priests, that sanctity belongs in a temple, that they spirit is
separate from the day to day, that your mind is in control. Let Vodou show you your poverty.
Vodou is a celebration of life, without fear of dying. The ancestors and the spirits are
simply part of that life, and the great holy sacrament is the dance. You have been taught to
fear Africa and the fire of it’s soul. Shed the shackles of your paternal indoctrination.
Vodou is not a some strange belief for far away tribes.
It’s a way of being, a connection to meaning and nature, a path to meaning that you have forgotten.
In Vodou nothing is excluded, it’s time for you to believe, to believe in everything.
