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Based primarily on an amalgamation of spirit and ancestor cults and healing traditions brought by African slaves to the New World, and secondarily on African and European forms of folk Catholicism, Vodou (Voodoo) is the most popular religion among Haiti’s eight million citizens, most of whom are peasants. It is also practiced by a sizable minority of the two million Haitian immigrants (and a small number of converts of diverse ethnic backgrounds) in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and North American cities like Miami, New York, and Montreal. The first Vodou practitioners in the United States were the African and Creole slaves of French plantation owners fleeing the violence of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), who settled mainly in New Orleans, where the religion remains part of the city’s religious fabric, sometimes practiced in concert with Hoodoo, a form of African American folk spirituality that is also based on ancient African traditions. Like any religion, Vodou is a system of symbols, beliefs, and practices that provides its adherents, whether in Haitian or American society, with a sense of meaning and purpose in life, a means of communing with the sacred, moral guidelines, a source of personal identity and group solidarity, and the courage to face life’s struggles.
Vodou emerged in the sixteenth century among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the western region of the Spanish Caribbean colony of Santo Domingo, which became the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1697 and eventually the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Although possessing deep roots in West Africa and Central Africa, the religion is more correctly identified as African-derived or African-based rather than African, even if the term vodou (whose original meaning in the West African Fon language is “spiritual entity”) was reappropriated by practitioners of traditional African religions in West Africa in the twentieth century to designate their own religion. Like Santeria and other major African-derived religions in the Americas, Vodou is an example of diffused monotheism, meaning that the sacred power of a single creator god, called Bondye (Good God) or Granmet (Great Master), is diffused through a pantheon of divinities, which in Vodou are called lu>a, and throughout nature. As such, the lua are deeply enmeshed in nature, and each Lua is associated with some natural force or feature, like rivers, rainbows, the earth, and the sea.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, a total of some 800,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Santo Domingo/Saint-Domingue, the majority from the West African Fon and Central African Kongo ethnic groups. Numbering relatively few and facing opposition by slaveholders, Catholic missionaries managed little success in evangelizing slaves beyond administering the legally required sacrament of baptism. The syncretism that would thereafter characterize Vodou thus resulted, as Catholic saints merged with African spirits, and crosses, holy water, and rosaries joined spiritual forces with amulets that slaves refashioned from African traditions, which proved remarkably resilient in the face of the unspeakable oppression of slavery.
Prior to the Haitian Revolution, a multiplicity of African religious traditions thus persevered in Saint-Domingue, whose sugar plantations made it Europe’s most lucrative colony. To speak of Vodou prior to the revolution is therefore somewhat anachronistic, as three of the religion’s cornerstones were not laid until the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century: (1) the unity of purpose of the Haitian Revolution, as exemplified by the powerful ceremony at Bwa Kayman in August 1791, led by a prototypical Vodou priest named Boukman Dutty, which is widely credited with having sparked the revolution; (2) the integration of essential African religious traditions that were being practiced during the colonial era in clandestine maroon settlements of escaped slaves in the island’s mountains and forests; and (3) the acceleration of the adoption of Catholic elements (especially hagiography) during the period of the “great schism” between Haiti and Rome from 1804 to 1860, when the Vatican refused to send Catholic priests to the young nation. After the schism, the Catholic Church, in alliance with the Haitian government, orchestrated several formal campaigns to suppress Vodou. These ultimately failed, however, and today the religion enjoys protection under the 1987 Haitian constitution, while in 2003 its baptisms and marriages gained legal recognition in Haiti.
Vodou has always been heterogeneous and decidedly uncentralized, relying on neither the teachings of a founder, nor scripture, nor formal doctrine. In some parts of Haiti, for example, the religion is primarily characterized by ancestor veneration, and elsewhere by cults of spirits of West African origins, such as Ezili, the female Iwa of love, sensuality, and feminine power, and Ogou, the male Iwa of iron and all powers associated with metals. The Vodou pantheon is divided into two principle rites: the rada, whose Iwa are “cool” and serene; and the petwo, whose Iwa are “hot” and feisty. Many Iwa have manifestations in each rite. Rada and petwo cults are supplemented for most practitioners by the veneration of their ancestors (zanset or lemo, “the dead”). Collectively, the lwa, zanset, and lemo, along with angels and Catholic saints, are identified simply as the “mysteries” (miste).
Principal forms of communication and contact with Vodou’s miste include prayer, praise, ablutions, offerings, spirit possession, drum and dance ceremonies, divination, and animal sacrifice. These rituals’ overarching aim is to ensure, establish, or reestablish harmony between practitioners and the miste, or to protect practitioners from sorcery (wanga). In the event of bad things happening, Vodouists consult with ritual specialists (female: manbo; male: oungan), who perform divination and orchestrate ceremonies (which most often take place either in temples (ounjv), family burial compounds, or public cemeteries) to provoke spirit possession and thereby enter into communication with the miste in order to discover the cause of the underlying discord, disease, problem, or misfortune, and to determine and prescribe means of reestablishing harmony, healing, or achieving relevant solutions. Further drum ceremonies may be prescribed, while others are held according to a liturgical calendar derived from Catholicism.
Harmony between humans and the miste and healing comprise Vodou’s raison d’etre. In general, such harmony requires the ritual appeasement of the miste, whether through splendidly artistic communal drum and dance ceremonies, animal sacrifice, or more frequent personal devotions such as praising and feeding the lwa. Healing, meanwhile, often involves herbalism and ritual baths. Leaves, water, song, dance, drums, blood, healing, and communion with the sacred are thus what Vodou is truly about. It is a dignified and complex religion of survival, resistance, and African roots that is quite the opposite of the ignorant and racist stereotypes that malign Vodou in Western imagination and media.
Bibliography:
- Desmangles, Leslie G. 1992. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- Hurbon, Laennec. 1995. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit. Trans. Lory Frankel. New York: Abrams.
- Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America.
- Metraux, Alfred. [1959] 1972. Voodoo in Haiti. Trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Schoken.
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