For your review: a juju manifesto
Defining the boundaries of 'jazz' is the first step to truly believing in it.
Hello, and welcome to another ‘episode’ of Do While Thinking, my anti-thinkpiece. It is “action!” with a bias for thought, and today I am finally ready to do some thinking about something I’ve been doing for a while.
All aboard the world of speculative fiction!
This ‘episode’ is inspired by an ongoing conversation on Twitter that has happened several times in the past: some players talk about ‘otherworldly’ things that happened to them, proclaiming it the work of ‘juju!’ and other players cast systemic doubt in those stories by saying something like ‘if juju worked, where are the photographs? Is juju bigfoot? Is it camera-shy? And, why, Julius, I find it suspicious that such powerful witchery chooses to deal in the mundane when it could be unseating presidents at Aso Rock!’
I typically refrain from entering those conversations - they’re rarely interesting in themselves, but today I decided to think of the juju phenomenon as a world-building challenge.
For context, I am a sucker for world-building, though I have never built one of my own. I’ve mostly borrowed from Sherlock Holmes lore (as you will find here, and here), from time-travel (I consider that a trope within the scifi genre that has differing implementation philosophies depending on the resolution/school of thought you subscribe to ab initio), but mostly from the broader umbrella of scifi.
Recently, I got introduced to (and promptly fell in love with) CONFINEMENT, a YouTube series by Lord Bung (watch a pilot here), which led me into the delightfully detailed world of SCPs. SCPs are special anomalous entities with behaviors that no humans possess. They are contained and tagged (with identifying numbers) and their powers/abilities studied. The SCP wiki is updated by SCP enthusiasts, and the wiki serves as a substrate for creatives (like Lord Bung) to write stories anyone who follows SCP can relate with. You see a teleporting entity that disappears and appears in a different country with no recollection of who they were before teleporting? Oh, right! That’s SCP 10111 (completely made up ability, completely made up SCP tag - I’m lazy)!
My point is, worlds like Hogwarts, the Galaxy (from Star Wars and Trek), Dracula’s, the one of werewolves, etc have rules that govern them. The reason we can choose to accept or debunk the premise that garlic kills mutants gives us something to work with (and even try to import into a scientifically plausible domain, as in I Am Legend - the book, not the movie).
In other words, things get really interesting when we can take a phenomenon that’s interesting, but considered bullshit, and set boundaries around it. Let’s call that Making Fun Bullshit (MFB).
You know what’s overdue for a MFB makeover? Yes. Juju. If you’re Nigerian (and, I imagine, African), you’ve consumed a lot of content about juju, and while some of the rules are inconsistent, many of them aren’t. We know juju is fundamentally evil. We know that people who solicit babalawos/dibias (middlemen of the juju) end up very terribly in the end. All stories tell you that juju is bad, and I consider that very boring and limiting.
If we start from the assumption that juju is a thing that…exists, and humans can interface with it in different ways, we have the beginnings of a world artifact - something that we can import into a creative exercise to do interesting things.
In other words, what would a Juju Wiki look/read like?
Reversin’ (the) Genie
Let’s begin, as always, with a quote:
Mister Aladdin, sir
What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order
Jot it down
You ain't never had a friend like me!— Genie, from Aladdin
In Aladdin, a young boy with a pure heart discovers a lamp that he rubs to get a finite number of wishes. He then uses those wishes to acquire for himself a young princess and a lot of wealth. The first iteration of Aladdin - given that I was but a wee toddler - was fun, but the second one, starring Will Smith, made me think.
The design of a genie is paradoxical: he is an almighty, immortal, powerful cosmic entity, but he is a slave, subject to the whims of a human with an unwashed arse. In a specific scene, the Genie comments on this by yelling:
The more you explore the paradox of the Genie, the more you realize how curious his situation is. Here are the ones I can come up with, off the top of my head:
The Genie can do literally anything, but you have to frame your request properly (with no room for misunderstanding), or you will get something you did not bargain for. One is reminded of the joke of the fella who finds the lamp, and for his wishes asks for a ‘huge ride to pick up babes, and for my dick to reach my knees’, and so he becomes a dwarf who is a school bus driver.
The genie’s powers are only limited by your imagination. You’re either toying with matches or an atomic bomb, depending on how creative you are.
A genie is unopinionated. He’ll carry out the wishes of a benevolent player as well as that of a sinister one.
Why are these paradoxical? Because you have (what is possibly) the most powerful agent in the universe and they’re throttled by mundane, specifically human attributes.
A simple experiment would be to reverse the powers of the genie to see what you come up with: a non-infinitely powered entity that can carry out your wishes exactly as you want them (even if they are not properly articulated - because they read your heart, not your words). This entity has an opinion, which means they can choose what wishes they want to carry out, and (possibly) the way they would execute those wishes.
My simple posit is that with this experiment, we have created what we call ‘jazz’, or ‘juju’: a hard-to-pin entity we sacrifice boiled eggs and alligator peppers to at junctions.
A ‘Jujunic’ Premise
A juju is a reverse genie for the following reasons:
We can safely assume they’re not infinitely-powered, or the things they’d do would be a lot more devastating.
They do not bungle requests: they give to their human customers exactly what they wish for (we’ll ignore the movie ‘Bewitched’ for this argument - as that was merely subversive comedy, really)
They have an opinion on the type of wishes they’d execute, and they choose belligerent, harmful requests to achieve. They do not do things like ‘world peace’ (though if they could, it would be beyond their scope, because they’re not infinitely powered), or ‘grant unto us a good economy in these capitalism times.’
The next challenge would be to answer the question of ‘why are they so throttled?’. There needs to be a satisfactory (if non-logical) reasons for why juju is attenuated by default, for example. I’ll attempt a few explanations below:
The only kind of juju that would strike a bargain with humans is a low-ranking one
Remember that on a high-level, the battle is between Good and Evil for the soul of man. This is a macro problem: neither good nor evil zooms in on a particular human . being, but they consider ‘humanity’ as a whole as the territory. In other words, the Big Players on the side of Good vs Evil do not think specifically, but broadly - they are the C-suite execs of this great cosmic battle.
Small juju, on the other hand, handle the details, like social media executives. They know your faces but also have the least ability to cause the most damage to established Devilish strategy. In other words, by dealing with humans directly, we can assume that the juju is very low-ranking and cannot tap into a lot of bureaucratic resources.
They also cannot do something damaging to the broader goal of Higher Up Juju, which means their execution must necessarily be localized so that it doesn’t attract the attention of More Powerful Forces, both Good and Evil. They’re like drug dealers hanging around the block past 7pm, asking if you’d like to try some crack.
Because they are mostly operating illegally, they have to fly under the radar
The ultimate goal of a good juju is to corrupt the human soul, but they must do it without compromising the Broader Goals of the Higher Juju. For example, if they overrode free-will (more on this later), they’d get the attention of Good, who insists that man must have free-will. In other words, there are things that small Juju cannot do, no matter how much you want them to do so.
One of the things small juju should not be able to do is change the weather. That’s a cosmic-level event and Someone Would Notice. As a result, I think any form of rain-making juju is purely coincidental or the babalawo owns a smartphone. Sorry - I don’t make these rules (oh, wait. I do.)
Small juju, however, should thrive on a person-to-person level, and they do. You, an individual, should be able to enter into a Faustian Bargain with a small juju to affect the life of one individual. That seems to be more in the range of possibilities of a small demon. Why? Because it localizes the problem and allows the demon play under the radar without drawing attention from either Good or Evil.
This means that love potions, money rituals, deaths, etc can be caused by small juju, and it would actually be fair game.
Example: if I told a juju that I wanted you, dear reader, to fall in love with me, it would be within the powers of the juju to make that happen. To the unsuspecting eye, it would look like I overrode your free-will and made you fall in love with me, but the juju would be doing something far more resourceful (remember, overriding free-will is a no-no).
Juju cannot override freewill, but they wouldn’t have to. They’re omniscient.
So.
Say I want you to fall in love with me. I sign a deal with some juju. The god of love potions. It says in seven days you will fall in love with me. I smile and walk away, thinking you’ll wake up randomly and become stupidly in love. At least that’s how movies portray it.
I find that unrealistic because humans have biological ‘striving’ mechanisms that make someone falling pointlessly in love with them revolting. It has to follow a more organic time-stream, and this is where the omniscient quality of your juju comes in.
Your juju can see all infinite possibilities of your life. They know where you’ll be tomorrow, and what you will be doing there. And they see the possibilities of your victim (love interest?). What they need to do is pull on the string of possibilities that bring you both together. Do they have coffee at the shop by 3pm everyday? They suddenly plant a craving for coffee in your head by 2:45pm. You arrive at the shop, and it’s crowded, so you both share a seat. You glance at her computer, and she has a Netflix screen open. It’s a movie titled ‘Always Be My Maybe’. Generally not your thing, but two days ago, the juju made you so bored you watched it. A conversation ensues…while the juju is tugging along two timestreams at the same time, forcing a meld.
And soon you’re both in love. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. For everyone else it looks like overriding free will, and on some level it is. But the point is, it doesn’t make Good look downstairs to find out what’s happening.
(Detour, and bonus: this may also answer the question about why demons just don’t repent. They’ve seen their end. It’s not pretty, along any string of possibilities. So they may as well corrupt as many souls as they can barter with.)
Juju only cares about the soul, and on a micro level
Now we’ve established the limitations of the juju, we can answer that one niggling question: ‘why can’t juju powers be used for good?’
Because juju doesn’t particularly care about good. Or world peace. Or any of those things. But it would be wrong to say they, by default, want to cause evil. Evil is just a more straightforward means to achieve what they want - the corruption of the human soul.
Juju would give you wealth - which you would, of course, consider to be good - if they can guarantee your soul’s corruption, and perhaps the corruption of other souls by proxy. They are opinionated players, with a simple goal of causing soul decay.
You are their KPI, and once they acquire your rotten soul, they add it on a cosmic spreadsheet, and the Higher Up Devils only see the outcome, never the process.
A rough, wordy submission, but -
Even though this is the first draft, I hope it has been interesting enough as an idea. The best way to test the integrity/interestingness of this would be to write a story that centers the ‘Juju Laws’ and put human players interacting within those boundaries. I’d gladly read that story. I may even write one.
Some things are missing for this to be a robust world-building template, namely:
A classification system for all the jujus out there
Edge cases where the rules can be broken
Further grounding of the human world and the juju world, with a means of crossing between them. We know babalawos/dibias, for example, have no problem straddling either world, but how/why? Is it a genetic affordance, or a supernatural one? How is this dispatched?
A study into smaller Good players, and how they run their own form of the anti-juju crusade (target and save smaller souls without upsetting the Ultimate Good Plan)
The more I think about it, the more I think we may be able to build a solidly defined Embedded Universe.
Closing notes
I’ve been told by a dear friend that when I write freeform, I sometimes lose coherence because I’m tugging at multiple strings in realtime and cannot properly tie them together. That’s good feedback.
Point is, I’m accepting feedback for Do While Thinking. This is the third episode, which means it can only get better. Let me know what you think, whenever you think them!
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