VODOU

VODOU is a sometimes misleading, but nevertheless common, name for the religious practices of the majority of Haitians. Outsiders have given the name Vodou to the complex web of traditional religious practices followed in Haiti. Only recently, and still to a limited extent, have Haitians come to use the term as others do. Haitians prefer a verb to identify their religion: they speak of "serving the spirits."

A mountainous, poverty-stricken, largely agricultural country of approximately eight million people, Haiti has a land area of 10,700 square miles and occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic.

This is where Caribbean Vodou began, but Haiti is not the only place Vodou in practiced. Vodou is also a central part of everyday life in Haitian diaspora communities in New Orleans and Santiago, Cuba, both products of the upheaval caused by the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). More recent political and economic struggles in Haiti have also led to Vodou communities in New York City, Miami, Montreal, and Paris.

In Haiti, vodou originally referred to one ritual style among many in their syncretic religious system, the style most closely connected to Dahomey and the Fon language. The word vodou is derived from the Fon vodun, which means "god" or "spirit." Hoodoo is a related term from the same Fon word, yet, in the United States, it is almost always used as a derogatory term that focuses on black magic spells and charms.

Sensationalized novels and films, as well as spurious travelers' accounts, have painted a negative picture of Haitian religion. Vodou has been depicted as primitive and ignorant. Vodou rituals have been described as arenas for uncontrolled orgiastic behavior, and even cannibalism. The same writers stir up fear of Vodou and suggest that if whites get too close to a Vodou ceremony terrible things could happen. These distortions are attributable to the fear that the Haitian slave revolution sparked in whites. Haiti achieved independence in 1804, and thus became the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere at a time when the colonial economy was still heavily dependent on slave labor.

In Vodou there are three (not always clearly distinguished) categories of spiritual beings: lemò, lemistè, and lemarasa (respectively, "the dead," "the mysteries," and "the sacred twins"). While certain Vodou prayers, songs, and invocations preserve fragments of West African languages, Haitian Creole is the primary language of Vodou. Creole is the first and only language of more than one half the population of Haiti. It has a grammatical structure familiar to speakers of West African languages and an eighteenth-century French vocabulary mixed with a smattering of English words and expressions.

Although individuals and families regularly serve the Vodou spirits without recourse to religious professionals, throughout most of Haiti there is a loosely organized priesthood open to both men and women. The male priest is known as an oungan and the female priest is a manbo. There is a wide spectrum of Vodou ritualizing. There are individual acts of piety, such as lighting candles to petition particular spirits, and elaborate feasts, sometimes lasting days and including the sacrifice of several animals as part of the meals offered to the spirits. Energetic singing, dancing, and polyrhythmic drumming accompany the larger rituals. In the countryside, rituals often take place outdoors, on family land set aside for the spirits, and there is often a small cult house on that land where the family's altars are kept. Urban Vodou rituals tend to take place in an ounfò ("temple"). Urban altars, dense with sacrificial food and drink, sacred stones, and chromolithographs of the Catholic saints and other images, are maintained in jèvo ("altar rooms") off the central dancing and ritualizing space of the temple, the peristyl. In the cities, those who serve the spirits also tend to keep more modest altars in their own homes.

The goal of Vodou drumming, singing, and dancing is to chofè, to "heat up," the situation sufficiently to bring on possession by the spirits. As a particular spirit is summoned, a devotee enters a trance and becomes that spirit's chwal ("horse"), thus providing the means for direct communication between human beings and the spirits. The spirit is said to ride the chwal. Using the person's body and voice, the spirit sings, dances, and eats with the people and also deals out advice and chastisement. The people in turn offer the spirit a wide variety of gifts and acts of obeisance, the goal being to placate the spirit and ensure his or her continuing protection.

There are marked differences in Vodou as it is practiced throughout Haiti, but the single most important distinction is that between urban and rural Vodou. Haitian society is primarily agricultural, and the manner in which peasants serve the spirits is determined by questions of land tenure and ancestral inheritance. Urban Vodou is not tied to specific plots of land, but the family connection persists in another form. Urban temple communities become substitutes for the extended families of the countryside. The priests are called "papa" and "mama"; the initiates, who are called "children of the house" or "little leaves" refer to one another as "brother" and "sister." In general, urban Vodou is more institutionalized and often more elaborate in its rituals than its rural counterpart.

African Influence

Haiti's slave population was built up in the eighteenth century, a period in which Haiti supplied a large percentage of the sugar consumed in Western Europe. Vodou was born on sugar, sisal, cotton and coffee plantations out of the interaction among slaves who brought with them a variety of African religious traditions, but due to inadequate records, little is known about this formative period in Vodou's history. It has been argued by Haitian scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot that the religion did not coalesce until after the revolution, but others suggest it had an effective presence, particularly in northern Haiti, during the latter part of the eighteenth century. James G. Leyburn in The Haitian People (1941) and Carolyn Fick in The Making of Haiti (1990) argue that Vodou played a key role in the organization of the slave revolt.

Among the African ethnic groups brought to Haiti as slave laborers, the most influential in shaping Haitian culture, including Vodou, were the Fon, Mahi, and Nago from old Dahomey (the present Republic of Benin), those who came to be known as the Yoruba (Nigeria), and Kongo peoples (Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Many of the names of Vodou spirits are easily traceable to their African counterparts; however, the spirits have undergone change in the context of Haiti's social and economic history. For example, Ogun among the Yoruba is a spirit of ironsmithing and other activities associated with metal, such as hunting, warfare, and modern technology. Neither hunting nor modern technology plays much of a role in the lives of Haitians. Haiti, however, does have a long and complex military history. Thus, the Haitian spirit Ogou is first and foremost a soldier whose rituals, iconography, and possession-performance explore both the constructive and destructive uses of military power, as well as its analogues with human relations—anger, self-assertion, and willfulness.

Africa itself is a powerful concept in Vodou. Haitians speak of Ginen ("Guinea") both as their ancestral home, the Guinea coast of West Africa, and as the watery subterranean home of the Vodou spirits. Calling a spirit franginen, ("fully and completely African") is a way of indicating that the spirit is good, ancient, and proper. The manner in which an individual or a group serves the spirits may also be called franginen, with similar connotations of approval and propriety.

Roman Catholic Influence

For the most part, the slaveholders were Catholics and baptism for slaves was mandatory by French law. Many have argued that slaves used a veneer of Catholicism to hide their traditional religious practices from the authorities. While Catholicism may well have functioned in this utilitarian way for slaves on plantations, it is also true that the religions of West Africa from which Vodou was derived, already had a tradition of borrowing the deities of neighbors and enemies alike. Whatever Catholicism represented in the slave world, it was most likely also used as a means to expand Vodou's ritual vocabulary and iconography, thus helping captive laborers function in a nominally Catholic world. In 1804, immediately after Haiti declared its liberation, the Catholic Church withdrew all of its clergy from the new republic. Yet Catholicism survived in Haiti for fifty years without contact with Rome and it did so through the imitative ritualizing of a Vodou figure known as prêtsavan ("bush priest") as well as the competitive market for healing charms and talismans that was kept going by defrocked Catholic priests and the self-appointed "clergy" who ended up in Haiti in the early nineteenth century.

Catholicism has had the greatest influence on the traditional religion of Haiti at the level of rite and image rather than theology. This influence works in two ways. First, those who serve the spirits call themselves Catholic, attend Mass, and undergo baptism and first communion. Because these Catholic rituals at times function as integral parts of larger Vodou rites, they can be even directed to participate by their Vodou spirits. Second, Catholic prayers, rites, images, and saints' names are integrated into the common ritualizing of Vodou temples. The prêtsavan is an active figure in Vodou. He achieves his title by knowing the proper, that is the Latin or French, form of Catholic prayers.

Over the years, a system of parallels has been developed between the Vodou spirits and the Catholic saints. For example, Dambala, the ancient and venerable snake deity of the Fon people, is venerated in Haiti both as Dambala and as St. Patrick, who is pictured in the popular chromolithograph with snakes clustered around his feet. In addition, the Catholic liturgical calendar dominates in much Vodou ritualizing. Thus the Vodou spirit Ogou is honored in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora on July 25, the feast day of his Catholic counterpart.

Bondye, "the good God" is identified with the Christian God, and is said to be the highest, indeed the only, god. The spirits are said to have been angels in Lucifer's army whom God sent out of heaven and down to Ginen. Although the Vodou spirits may exhibit capricious behavior, they are not evil. Rather, they are seen as intermediaries between the people and the high god, a role identical to the one played by the so-called lesser deities in the religions of the Yoruba and Fon. Bondye is remote and unknowable. Although evoked daily in ordinary speech (almost all plans are made with the disclaimer si dye vle ("if God wills"), Bondye's intervention is not sought for help with life's problems. That is the work of the spirits.

Both the Catholic Church in Haiti and the government of Haiti have participated energetically in the persecution of those who serve the Vodou spirits. The last "antisuperstition campaign" was in the 1940s, but clerical and upperclass disdain for the religion has persisted much longer. In the twentieth century, Catholic clergy routinely preached against serving the spirits, and those who served them remarked, "That is the way priests talk." Many Catholic holy days have a Vodou dimension that church officials routinely manage to ignore.

For years Catholicism was the only religion in Haiti with official approval. Thus, the degree to which Vodou has been attacked, oppressed, tolerated, or even encouraged through the years has been largely a function of local politics. Presidents Dumarsais Estime (1946–1950) and Francois Duvalier (1957–1971) stand out from other Haitian heads of state because of their sympathy with Vodou. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was first elected president in 1990, was also a supporter of Vodou; in fact he changed the balance of religious power. On April 5, 2003, President Aristide fully recognized and fully empowered Vodou as a Haitian religion that could legally exercise its influence throughout Haiti according to the constitution and the laws of the republic.

Vodou Spirits

The Vodou spirits are known by various names: lwa, a common name with an uncertain origin; sen,"saints"; mistè, "mysteries"; envizib, "invisibles"; and more rarely, zanj, "angels." At some point in the development of Vodou the spirits were sorted into nanchon, "nations." The nanchon at an early point in their development appear to have functioned primarily as ethnic slave categories. The majority of the nation names are easily traceable to places in Africa: Rada, Ibo, Nago, Kongo. Later, however, these so-called nations became religious categories, diverse ritual styles of drumming, dancing, and honoring the Vodou spirits.

The Rada spirits (named after the Dahomean principality Allada, once a busy slave depot) comprise a collection of ancient, sweet-tempered, wise, and usually patient lwa. Then there are the fiery and powerful Petwo spirits. The origin of the name "Petwo" is contested, but the strong Kongo influence is not. The home of the Ogou, also hot spirits, is the Nago nanchon, a Dahomean name for Ketu Yoruba. Most big feasts end with the playful Gede, inveterate rule breakers, who insist they are a fami ("family"), not a nanchon. In rural Vodou, a person may inherit responsibilities to one or more of these nanchon through maternal or paternal kin. Familial connections to the land, where the lwa are said to reside in trees, springs, and wells, may determine which particular spirits are served. In urban Vodou, there are a few important spirit nanchon that make their appearance, according to seniority and importance, in most major rituals. In Port-au-Prince, two nanchon, the Rada and the Petwo, have emerged as dominant largely by absorbing other nanchon. Rada and Petwo spirits contrast sharply. The Rada are dous, "sweet," and the Petwo, cho, "hot." When an individual, family, or temple is described as ritualizing in a mode that is Rada net ("straight Rada"), a great deal is being said about how that person or group functions socially as well as ritualistically. Each spirit has drum rhythms, dances, and food preferences that relate to its identifying characteristics. For example, Danbala, the gentle Rada snake spirit, is said to love orja, thick sugary almond syrup. His devotees perform a graceful spine-rippling dance called yanvalu. By contrast, the Petwo rhythm played for rum-drinking spirits is energetic and pounding, and the accompanying dance is characterized by fast, strong body movements.

The Vodou View of Person

In Vodou teachings the human being is composed of various parts: the body, that is, the gross physical dimension of the person who perishes after death, in addition to two to four souls, of which the most widely acknowledged are the gwo bonanj, and ti bonanj. The gwo bonanj ("big guardian angel") is roughly equivalent to consciousness or personality. When a person dies the gwo bonanj lingers, and immediately after death it must be protected because it is most vulnerable to capture and misuse by sorcerers. During possession, it is the gwo bonanj who is displaced by the spirit and sent to wander away from the body, as it does routinely during sleep. The ti bonanj ("little guardian angel") may be thought of as the spiritual energy reserve of a living person and, at times, as the ghost of a dead person.

Each person has one special lwa who is their mèt-tet, "master of the head." (The top of the head and the back of the neck are places where spirits may enter and leave.) The mèt-tet is the most important lwa served by a particular person and it reflects that person's personality to some degree. A Haitian whose family serves the spirits may inherit spiritual responsibilities to a deceased family member's mèt-tet. That is a big responsibility, but there are also things that can be gained. If the mèt-tet is conscientiously fed and honored, good luck and protection from both ancestor and lwa will be gained. In addition to the so-called masters of the head, most people who serve the spirits have a small number of other lwa with whom similar reciprocity has been established.

Unlike Catholic saints who are usually known through formulaic hagiography, Vodou lwa have richly developed histories, personalities, needs, desires, character strengths, and flaws, and even taste in food and drink. Because the lwa are fully developed characters and interact so intimately with vivan-yo, "the living," the practice of Vodou also functions as a system for categorizing and analyzing human behavior, in the individual and in the group. One of the characteristics of virtually all Caribbean African-based religions is the great amount of care given to analyzing social behavior and dealing with the results of that behavior.

Vodou and the Dead

Cemeteries are major ritual centers in both urban and rural Haiti. The first male buried in any cemetery is known as Bawon Samidi. Bawon's wife (or sister) is Gran Brijit, the first woman buried in the cemetery. Most cemeteries have a cross for Bawon either in the center of the cemetery or near its gate. Lakwa Bawon ("Bawon's Cross") marks the site's ritual center. Lighted candles and food offerings are left at the base of this cross. People stand with their hands on the cross praying aloud. Rituals for healing, love, or luck performed in rural cult houses or urban temples are not considered complete until physical remnants of the "work" are deposited at crossroads or at Bawon's Cross, which is itself a kind of crossroads marking the intersection of the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Haitians who serve the lwa usually make a clear distinction between the dead and the spirits. Yet a few of the ancestors, particularly if they were exceptional people when alive, actually evolve into spirits or lwa. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and John Kennedy have all been reported making cameo appearances through possession in Vodou ceremonies. The group of spirits, known as the Gede, have Bawon as their leader and are spirits of the dead as might be expected, but they are not ancestral spirits. Instead, they stand in for the entire community of human beings now deceased and in this context, Gede's crude comic performances make some sense. They are designed to bring the haughty to their knees and convince them that in the end, human beings all face the same fate. The Gede are inclusive, with no limits, and therefore almost any image will work on a Gede altar. Statues of the Buddha, LaoTzu, King Kong, St. Gerard, and Elvis Presley have all been sighted on Vodou altars. In and around Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti and its largest city, the Gede are the object of elaborate ritualizing in the cemeteries and Vodou temples during the season of the Feast of All Souls, Halloween.

The Gede are not only spirits of death but also boosters of human sexuality, protectors of children, and irrepressible social satirists. Dances for Gede tend to be boisterous affairs, and new Gede spirits appear every year. The satirical, and often explicitly sexual, humor of the Gede levels social pretense. The Gede use humor to deal with new social roles and to challenge alienating social structures. Through possession-performance, they not only appear as auto mechanics and doctors, they also critique government bureaucrats, military figures, and Protestant missionaries.

Vodou Ceremonies

In some parts of rural Haiti, the ideal Vodou ceremony is one that serves the spirits as simply as possible because simplicity is said to reflect discrete but strong spiritual power, the African way of doing things (Larose, 1977). In practice, rural ritualizing tends to follow the fortunes of extended families. Bad times are often attributed to the displeasure of family spirits. When it is no longer possible to satisfy the spirits with small conciliatory offerings, the family will hold a large drumming and dancing feast that includes animal sacrifice. Urban Vodou, by contrast, has a more routine ritualizing calendar, and events tend to be larger and more elaborate. Ceremonies in honor of major spirits take place annually on or around the feast days of their Catholic counterparts and usually include sacrifice of an appropriate animal—most frequently a chicken, a goat, or a cow.

In both rural and urban settings, a rich variety of ceremonies meet specific individual and community needs: For example, healing rites, dedications of new temples and new ritual regalia, and spirit marriages in which a devotee is wed to a spirit usually of the opposite sex and must pledge sexual restraint one night each week, when he or she receives that spirit in dreams. There is also a cycle of initiation rituals that has both public segments and segments reserved for initiates. The latter include the kanzo rituals, which mark the first stage of initiation into Vodou, and those in which the adept takes the ason, the beaded gourd rattle symbolizing Vodou priesthood. Certain rituals performed during the initiation cycle, such as the bule zen ("burning the pots") and the chirè ayzan ("shredding the palm leaf") may also be used in other ritual contexts. Death rituals include the desounen, in which the soul is removed from the corpse and sent under the waters of Ginen, which is followed by the wète mò nan dlo ("bringing the dead from the waters"), a ritual that can occur only after a person has been dead for one year and one day. Herbal good-luck baths are routinely administered during the Christmas and New Year season. Elizabeth McAlister's 2002 book on Rara has convinced scholars, in the habit of dismissing Rara as an entertaining aspect of Carnival, of the deeply religious character of these irreverent parades that pour from the Vodou temples into the cemeteries and streets during the Catholic Lent.

Annual pilgrimages draw thousands of urban and rural followers of Vodou. The focal point of these Catholic-Vodou events is often a church situated near some striking feature of the natural landscape that is sacred to the lwa. The two largest pilgrimages are one held for Ezili Danto (Our Lady of Mount Carmel) in mid-July in the small town of Saut d'Eau, named for its spectacular waterfall, and one held for Ogou (St. James the Elder) in the latter part of July in the northern town of Plain du Nord, where a shallow, muddy pool adjacent to the Catholic church is dedicated to Ogou.

Vodou and Magic

Serge Larose (1977) has demonstrated that magic is not only a stereotypic label that outsiders have applied to Vodou, but also a differential term internal to the religion. Thus an in-group among the followers of Vodou identifies its own ritualizing as "African" while labeling the work of the out-group as maji ("magic"). Generally speaking, this perspective provides a helpful way to grasp the concept of magic within Vodou. There are, however, those individuals who, in search of power and wealth, self-consciously identify themselves with traditions of what Haitians would call "the work of the left hand." This includes people who deal in pwen achte ("purchased power points"), which means spirits or powers that have been bought rather than inherited, and people who deal in zonbi. A zonbi may be either the disembodied soul of a dead person whose powers are captured and used for magical purposes, or a soulless body that has been raised from the grave to do drone labor in the fields. Also included in the category of the left hand are secret societies known by such names as Champwel, Zobop, Bizango, and Zanglando. In Urban settings in the late twentieth century secret societies began to operate as if they were a branch of the Mafia, but their deep history is quite different: They once represented religiously enforced rural law and order. The secret societies were groups of elders who used their power not for personal gains but to enforce social sanctions. For example, Wade Davis (1985) says that zonbi laborers were created by secret society tribunals who voted to use zonbi powder against a sociopath in their community.

The "work of the left hand" should not be confused with more ordinary Vodou ritualizing that can have a magical flavor, such as divination, herbal healing, and the manufacture of wanga, charms for love, luck, or health, or for the protection of the home, land, or person. Much of the work of Vodou priests is at the level of individual client-practitioner interactions Theirs is a healing system that treats problems of love, health, family, and work. Unless a problem is understood as coming from God, in which case the Vodou priest can do nothing, the priest will treat it as one caused by a spirit or by a disruption in human relationships, including relations with the dead. Generally speaking, Vodou cures come about through ritual adjustment of relational systems.

Vodou in the Haitian Diaspora

Drought and soil erosion, poverty, high urban unemployment, and political oppression have led to massive emigrations from Haiti in the last half-century. Vodou has gone along with the Haitians who, in search of a better life, have come to major urban centers of North America. In New York, Miami, and Montreal, the cities with the greatest concentrations of Haitian immigrants, Vodou ceremonies are carried on in storefronts, rented rooms, high-rise apartments, and basement storage areas. North American rituals are often somewhat truncated versions of their Haitian counterparts. There may be no drums, and the only animals sacrificed may be chickens. However it is possible to consult a manbo or oungan in immigrant communities with ease, and the full repertoire of rituals can be followed there, in one form or another. Even the pilgrimages are duplicated. On 16 July, rather than going to the mountain town of Saut d'Eau to honor Ezili Danto, New York Vodou practitioners take the subway to the Italian-American Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem.

See Also

Santería; Yoruba Religion.

Bibliography

Alfred Metraux's Voodoo in Haiti (New York, 1959) is a complete and accurate, if not sympathetic, treatment of Haitian Vodou. Melville J. Herskovits's Life in a Haitian Valley (New York, 1937) is an early and popular ethnography of the Mirebalais Valley located fifty-five kilometers inland from Port-au-Prince. Herskovits worked there during a period when Vodou influence had been significantly repressed by Christian missionaries and consequently he saw it as a dying religion. Maya Deren, dancer and filmmaker, wrote a rich and insightful work on her encounter with Vodou, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953; reprint, New Paltz, N.Y. 1983). In addition, Harold Courlander's The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley, Calif., 1960) provides much helpful information about Vodou and its larger cultural contexts. It is especially good on music. To greater and lesser extents all of the above works are outdated. Donald Cosentino's, The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Los Angeles, 1995), a selection of essays by leading Haitian scholars and also the catalog from Cosentino's highly successful exhibition of the same name, is the richest and most diverse academic work on Vodou. A classic article by Serge Larose, "The Meaning of Africa in Haitian Vodu," can be found in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, edited by Ioan Lewis, 85–116, (New York, 1977).

The most complete, although not necessarily the best, history of Haiti and Haitian Vodou is still James G. Leyburn's The Haitian People (1941, rev. ed. with a new introduction by Sidney Mintz, New Haven, 1966). Joan Dayan's Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, Calif., 1998) brings postmodern analytic skills and fresh archival work to her gendered account of Haiti's revolutionary history. Carolyn Fick's The Making of Haiti: The San Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990) makes a carefully researched and convincing argument that Vodou played a significant role in Haiti's revolution and did so from the beginning. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who argues that Vodou came together only in the first half of the nineteenth century, does a brilliant job in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1997) of problematizing other versions of Haiti's taken-for-granted history.

Anne Greene's The Catholic Church in Haiti: Political and Social Change (East Lansing, Mich., 1993) provides important information about the role of Catholicism in Haiti, as does Terry Rey's Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary In Haiti (Trenton, N. J., 1999). Leslie G. Desmangles's The Faces of the Gods: Voudou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993) explores the syncretism dimension of the relationship between Vodou and Catholicism. Robert Ferris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1981) contains the best analysis yet done on the specific African retentions within Haitian Vodou.

A handful of scholarly works cover new areas in Vodou scholarship. E. Wade Davis opened the world of the secret societies in The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York, 1985) and Passage of Darkness (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). Elizabeth McAlister's Rara: Vodou Power and Performance in Haiti and the Diaspora (Berkeley, Calif., 2002) changes the relationship between Vodou temples and Carnival, and thus, to some extent, between the sacred and the secular. My own work, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley, Calif., updated edition, 2001), provides an extensive case study of Vodou in diaspora.

Karen McCarthy Brown (1987 and 2005)