There are those that believe in reincarnation and others that believe that when a person dies, they go to heaven or hell and only live the one life they were given. What about seeing spirits? If someone has passed over to the other side, does their ghost or spirit come down to roam the earth or visit from time to time? If that’s true, and there is reincarnation, how can their spirit still be here among us? On the other hand, if the person has gone to heaven or hell, how can their spirit be here? There are so many questions and so much confusion.
Have you ever thought that the soul has two parts? If you think about it….it makes sense. In Vodou, it is believed that the soul does indeed have two parts, the Gwo Bon Anj and the Ti Bon Anj. Upon birth, the Magic Mirror (the reflective surface of the Waters, reveals this soul double to the individual. The reflective soul lives with us throughout our lives. It is the life force that is within our consciousness and creativity. It flows through our blood and breath and is the energy in our bodies. The Gwo Bon Anj isn’t our breath or the blood itself but it’s the life force that motivates these functions and gives our bodies the will to live. The Gwo Bon Anj is contained within our body during life.
The Ti Bon determines the moral choices made by a person and is the conscience that distinguishes between good and evil, right and wrong. It is your personality and ego. Through your Ti Bon Anj, you experience emotional responses to your moral behavior. The Ti Bon Anj mirrors the presence of the Gwo Bon Anj into a physical manifestation of tears or laughter when you are expressing sadness or happiness. The two parts of the soul mirror each other and create harmony with one another.
Upon death, the parts of the soul separate. The Ti Bon Anj is exhaled with your last breath. It rises above the dead shell of the body. The body then returns to the earth, where it dissolves back into water and clay. It waits there to receive the will of God or Bondye, to be reanimated as a new body. The Ti Bon Anj stands before Bondye, but loses its personal individuality and it has no further influence upon the living. The Gwo Bon Anj lingers by the grave for nine days after someone’s death. The death rites separate the soul from the body. The Gwo Bon Anj returns to the immortal Waters of Ginen where it joins the other ancestral dead. After one year and one day, reincarnation rites call the Gwo Bon Anj back into the community of the living. There, it offers help and guidance from its new body, formed of a specially made earthenware jar, called a govi jar. The Gwo Bon Anj can become a Lwa eventually or can be reincarnated in the form of succeeding family generations.
Vodou believes that death is part of the cycle of life and it is a process that leads to further rhythms and there is nothing to be afraid of. Life is magical and so is death.
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