The Origin of Voodoo

Voodoo worshipers have never forgiven outside interpreters for insulting their religion by saying it is a mixture of sex and superstition. Nor have they forgotten the book by W.B. Seabrook who branded them in his book The Magic Island, as a blood-maddened, sex-crazed people, who venerate a deranged god who is a hermaphroditic deity. Another author described it as "pure sexuality" and Faustin Wirkus in his book The white King of La Gonave identified Voodoo as a worship centered around a black pope and black queen which flourishes in a series of sexual orgies. Noe the unfairness in movies that show a primitive group of people dancing wildly around summoning up evil spirits. One Voodoo initiate responded by pointing out " There is no more emphasis on sex in Voodoo than there is any other religions and maybe not as much." To get at the truth of the matter it is necessary to understand how and why this ancient faith was introduced into Haiti and to see what part it played in the black man's struggle. On December 6, 1492, a ship sailed into an inland bay on a Caribbean Isle. The name of the ship was the "Santa Maria" and the adventurer captain of the ship was Christopher Columbus. He planted the flag of Spain on the Island and named it La Espanola near what is now Cap Haitian. The number of inhabitants at the time were a million brown-skinned Arawak natives, proud and unacquainted with conquest by foreigners. Spain lost no time in sending settlers to their first European settlement on the "American Continent." Within fifty years the forty Spaniards whom Columbus had left on the island was joined by three thousand of their countrymen. They robbed the natives of their gold and started to build an empire. Since the Arawaks were fixed on fighting to the death instead of being taken into slavery, they were totally annihilated. The Christian colonizers then turned to the dark jungles of Dahomey in Africa (now Republic of Benin). Here they found black men practicing their religion by beating drums and chanting their hymns to spirits called the loa. The Spaniards uprooted these aboriginal people from the only land they knew and aggressively coerced and forced them into cargo ships. They were brought in chains to the strange and cruel island where they were sold as slaves, beaten into submission, and killed when no longer useful to their masters. The Spaniards' wanton cruelty set a pattern which were followed by both French and English buccaneers who for two centuries fought to claim their countries' share of the coveted island. The slaves were caught between the barbarism of these opposing forces. They were the pawn in both triumph and defeat. The only comfort they could make out of their misery was their faith in the loa the invisible, personalized spirits of gods and men that had been worshiped in their African homeland. The loa were guardian angels,protectors, spirit guides and friends. It sustained the slaves when they laboured in the insufferable mines, when they dragged the mahogany timbers beneath the blows of the whip, and when they hauled the crushing cargo wagons to build a white man's world. The ioa were the "little gods" who represented the one great god the Gran Mait, in a religion the French called vaudou. It was the staccato beat of the Voodoo drums that filled the slaves with the messages of hope. Voodoo dances were a therapy. Voodoo chants and fires accompanied with voodoo rituals aroused in the slaves' tortured body a will to live. Voodoo was the composite of all instincts and emotions, it was a release from the realities of a miserable life. Voodoo is a religious hybrid related to Christianity and their special holy days follow closely the Christian Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. The voodoo faith is a strange and curious mixture of Christianity, spiritualism, and a belief that all natural phenomena have souls independent of their physical being. Today,the "Voodoo services" near Port-au-Prince are staged for tourism but worship of the loaand the black and white magic of Voodooism can still be found in the Haitian backcountry where visitors seldom go. It is the year 1700 and you are visiting a remote village in Haiti. A Voodoo priest greets you and you soon notice that he is a man chosen for his position because of his supernatural, psychic talent. He wears no priestly robes and he lives and works with the land as do the Voodoo followers. As you look around you see a group of men and women have gathered in a thatched-roof building where in the shadows, three drummers with their straw hats pushed back over their heads, are leaning over their drums. They solemnly watch as a group of white clad female assistants place jars and burning candles around a center pole. The pole is symbolic of a phallus and the roughly shaped alter encircling it is the yoni. You are informed by the priest that the pole, the pitou- mitan is sacred to Damballa, a mighty loa whose symbol is the serpent. When the early Christian colonizers heard of Damballa, they insisted that voodoo was snake worship. They failed to see that Damballa represents the fertilizing phallus of creation. He was androgynous, as were all creative nature-gods and was originally called Damballa-Wedo. In time the female attribute was personified and renamed Aido-Wedo. Her sign was the circle. She was pictured with her royal consort, Damballa, in poses of conjugal love. Their home was everywhere -on earth, in the seas, and in the air. Their castle was the rainbow. As you fix your eyes on the center pole, visualizing that the serpent, Damballa, is coiled around a tree, you are asked to recall that Damballa is also the source of all knowledge. Coiled forever in the Tree of Life, he tempts man to know himself. As a sign of immortality, he sheds his skin and reappears in a new body. As a symbol of time without end. He is depicted as a snake in the shape of a circle eating his tail. His devotees venerate him and become his bridegroom or bride in special Voodoo ceremonies. In Africa, where he originated, Damballa was honored by building snake houses beneath the tallest and most beautiful trees. In these "serpent- chapels" they kept a living snake which they carried on a carpet of silk in religious processions. Its writhing form was setting inside the center of a golden crown representing the female womb. When the black man heard the Christian story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, he imagined that the snake was Damballa. To him the Biblical account of the temptation was just another story of the "great god sex" and if the Christian did not understand the symbolism, the voodoo followers did. Now the drums start beating and the houngan(male priest) steps authoritatively to the circular alter. He is rattling the asson a small hollowed out shell covered with beads and snake vertebra having a small bell attached. It is the symbol of the priest's office, a kind of holy emblem of the magical power that starts the service in a burst of drum beat and sending the believers into a swaying dance, with candles burning on the alter. Above the entrance to the enclosed space a lamp is lighted and in the shadows the worshipers begin to murmur and sway to the hypnotic rhythm of the drum. At the motion from the priest rattling the asson, the drums begin a muffled beat and the priest intones an invocation honoring the snake god Dambella. The litany mingles Christian creeds with Voodoo charms and chants call upon Catholic saints and Voodoo Ioa. The believers form a semi-circle around the central post and respond to the priest's chants. Then the priest and the followers make the sign of the cross. Everything is a mixture of Christianity and animism which was introduced by the early evangelists. Ever since the black mans' first exposure to the Christian gospel as he listened with rattling chains around his neck, he felt he understood the white man's religion. Why could the white man not understand his? Did not the Christian know that every divine phenomenon must be a universal phenonmon, that it could not be confined to any one place or to any one person? The Voodoo followers was convinced that what had happened in Biblical lands had also happened in African jungles and could also happen in Haiti by reason of the fact that people take their loa with them, whether they go as masters or as slaves. If the Christian wished to believe that it was Jesus who walked on the water; the followers of voodoo knew it was actually Ague, their loa of the sea. If the white priests insisted that it was the virgin Mary who miraculously conceived, the black man knew that the virgin was actually the loa called Erzilie Freda, who knew the secret of bearing children without having intercourse with men. The religiously-active mind of the Voodoo follower satisfies itself with similarities to the Christian faith. The pictures affixed above the Voodoo alters in homes are pictures of Christian saints turned Voodoo saints. The old pictures of St. Patrick had snakes around his feet which is another incarnation of Dambella. Abraham entertained loa, instead of angels, and when the dead rose with Jesus at the time of His resurrection, was evidence that zombies are real. Zombies in Voodoo are supposed to be the living dead, those who have died and been resurrected by the mystical power of the priest who works with God. Through the years the voodoo beads were intertwined with the Catholic rosary and drink Voodoo rum on Saturday night in the Voodoo circle and sip Christian communion wine on Sunday morning. It appears that religion,the mystery of sex and the spirit, moves in the consciousness of the universe with its own standards, and it evolves only with the intervention of human minds.