Voodoo in Haiti
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One of the peculiarities of West African religions is their domestic quality. Each sib has its own hereditary gods, which it honours to gain favours and avoid wrath. It is a striking fact that of the vodû still invoked in the temples of Haiti, quite a number belong to the royal family of Abomey: for instance in Haiti today people still worship the god Agassu who, when he possesses a devotee, obliges him to crook and stiffen his hands like claws. In Dahomey, Agassu, the result of the union of a panther and a woman, is the founder of the royal line of Abomey. In Haiti, he is associated with water deities and sometimes takes the form of a crab, one of the mythical creatures who once gave assistance to the Ancestor (and thus became taboo). Another god worshipped in Haiti is Three-horned-Bosu: Justin Aho, chef de canton in Dahomey and grandson of King Gléglé, to whom I mentioned this god, told me that Bosu was a toxosu, that is to say a sacred monster of the royal family, a deformed child or an aborted foetus, shaped like a tortoise with three protuberances sticking up from his shell. All these survivals suggest that members of the royal family, reduced to slavery, carried their own gods with them to Haiti, since no one else would have been qualified to establish their worship. The hazards of war and the exportation of slaves on a huge scale thus succeeded in planting in America gods whose cult in Africa has either vanished or lost importance.
Although some Moslem Negroes must have been imported to Haiti from the markets of Senegal, Mohammedan influence on Voodoo is imperceptible. It should be noted, however, that when a Siniga (Senegalese) spirit possesses one of his adherents he obliges him to go through a strange salutation—to move his right hand first to his forehead then to his left shoulder, then to the right shoulder, then to his chest and finally to put his thumb to his mouth, saying ‘ânâdiz sâdrivo—hibi wadhau—minâ âlahim—kalabudu’, or ‘Salama Salay gêmbo’, or ‘Salam, salam malekum, salay salam ma salay’, which seem to be corruptions of Moslem salutations.
In West African society religion is so closely bound up with every detail of daily life that we can hardly be surprised at its survival in the New World—even in the face of all those factors which ought logically to have destroyed it.
For the slave the cult of spirits and gods, and of magic too, amounted to an escape; more, it was an aspect of the resistance which he sustained against his oppressive lot. The degree of his attachment to his gods may be measured by the amount of energy he spent in honouring them—and this at risk of the terrible punishment meted out to those who took part in pagan ceremonies in which the colonists saw nothing but sorcery. Slavery could have demoralized them completely and sunk them into that gloomy apathy which goes with servitude. Mere physical exhaustion should have prevented them from dancing and singing as Voodoo ritual requires. Apart from the cruelties of which they were the helpless victims, slaves were made to work, even by good owners, to the limit of human capacity. ‘For the Negroes work starts before dawn’—wrote Girod-Chantrans{7} in 1782. ‘At eight o’clock they get their dinner; they go back to work till midday. At two o’clock they start again and carry on till nightfall; sometimes right up to ten or eleven p.m.’ The two hours allowed in the middle of the day, and all holidays, were given over to the cultivation of their own foodstuffs. This account is confirmed by many other travellers of the same period. The over-exertion was so crushing that the life of a Negro sold to a plantation in Saint-Domingue was reckoned at never more than ten years. We can but admire the devotion of those slaves who sacrificed their rest and their sleep to resurrect the religions of their tribes—this under the very eyes of the Whites, and in the most precarious conditions. Think what energy, what courage it took to enable the songs and rites due to each god to be handed down across the generations! Writers who have described for us the Saint-Domingue of the eighteenth century often refer to the nocturnal escapades of the Blacks. The French owners, in that siècle galant, regarded them as love trysts. They were surely right, in many cases, but how often too must these dangerous nocturnal expeditions have led to some glade where everyone danced ‘Voodoo’? An Ordinance of 1704 specifically prohibited slaves from ‘gathering at night under the pretext of holding collective dances’. It can hardly have been very effective for the police soon had to issue further decrees to prevent ‘gatherings of Blacks’. Night dances or calenda were forbidden to coloured men and Negro freedmen after nine o’clock in the evening and in addition they had to have a Judge’s licence. A planter was fined 300 livres for having ‘allowed a gathering of Negroes and a calenda’ on his property. When, in 1765, a body of light troops was formed and named The First Legion of Saint-Domingue, it was assigned the rôle of ‘breaking up Negro gatherings and calendas’. The word calenda, which is no longer used, must certainly have meant Voodoo. It was already suspect with the authorities. The Blacks cocked a snook at all these regulations and danced the calenda up to the Revolution. Moreover, in certain circumstances the owners allowed it, notably on the arrival of a mailboat from France.{8}
Officially all these Blacks who showed such loyalty to their ‘fetishes’ were Christians. A police decree issued in 1664 by M. de Tracy, ‘lieutenant-general for the king of the French Islands of America’ compelled owners to baptize their slaves. Article 2 of the Code Noir (March xo, 1685) states:
‘All slaves who come to our islands will be baptized and instructed in the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion. Residents who buy newly-arrived slaves must inform the governors and intendants of the said islands within eight days at latest under penalty of immediate fine. The Governors will give the necessary orders for the baptism and instruction of the slaves within a suitable period.’
Royal authority set great store by these decrees since the only moral justification of the slave trade was the conversion of the Negroes. But in practice colonists did not care. The only article of the Negro Code which was properly observed was the one relating to baptism. The newly arrived Negroes wanted it because the sprinkling of holy water was part of their initiation to life in the colony and saved them from the disdain of the Creole Blacks, whose companions in misfortune they became.
After this ceremony the owner felt acquitted of his duty to God and king. No religious instruction was given to the slaves. Few planters would allow priests on their land, fearing censure of their immorality and of their cruel treatment of the slaves. They were also dimly aware of the revolutionary implications of the tenets of the Gospel. ‘The owners of Saint-Domingue’—states a document of the time—‘far from being concerned at seeing their Negroes live without religion, were, on the contrary, delighted, for in Catholic religion they saw nothing but the teaching of an equality which it would be dangerous to put in the minds of slaves’.{9}
Similarly the owners were not the least anxious that slaves should fulfil their religious observances. Saints’ days and religious processions were largely considered a waste of time. The planters even asked the king to obtain a decree from the court of Rome reducing the numbers of saints’ days without work to ten. Others cast a disapproving eye on religious ceremonies simply because they gave the Blacks ‘increased opportunity to see and understand each other which is to be avoided for fear of revolts and mutinies.’{10}
Supported by the royal Government, the clergy rehearsed to the owners the advantages of religious education for slaves...in terms which owners might appreciate. They described it as the only brake strong enough to contain a slave’s desire for freedom since ‘only by fulfilling the duties of the condition and situation to which Providence has called him, can a man achieve sanctity’. Religion, said they, would be the best way of preventing ‘all running away, poisoning and abortion’.{11}
What requires explanation, is not so much the persistence of African cults, but their rapid intermingling with so many Catholic elements which were greedily adopted by slaves who were forbidden the means and opportunity of becoming familiar with Christian doctrine and practice.
The only Blacks in a position to acquire even a veneer of Christianity were the house slaves who lived in
the bosom of the Whites’ family life, went to Mass with them and took part in family prayers every evening. Freedmen, too, had opportunities of getting to know Christian doctrine and practice.
A statute of the Conseil du Cap (1761){12} tells us that a Jesuit lived in that town for no other purpose than to teach the Negroes. Instead of shutting himself up in catechism, sermons and prayer this priest took on all priestly functions single-handed. The result was the Blacks were formed under his guidance into a corps of adherents, different and distinct from others; some of them became cantors, churchwardens and vergers and ‘pretended to copy the practices of a Church Council’. This solicitude for the Black soul was considered irregular. It figured among the crimes of which the Jesuits were accused at the time of their expulsion in 1762.
We are quite justified in labelling as ‘Voodoo’ all those gatherings which the slaves of the Cape ‘covered with the veil of obscurity and orthodox religion’. These took place in churches which ‘had become the refuge of runaway slaves and, often, hotbeds of prostitution’.
All doubt is removed when one reads in the Decree that members of these gatherings ‘often mingled the Holy utensils of our religion with profane and idolatrous objects’. It seems, too, that wherever there was a shortage of priests, some Blacks took it upon themselves to catechize or preach to the others and thus ‘the truths and dogmas of religion were altered’. Here, straight away, we hit upon the root of that ‘blending’ which, two centuries later, was to provoke the indignant wrath of the Catholic clergy of Haiti against Voodoo.
The police decrees forbidding Blacks to gather at funerals, and prohibiting the sale of charms and macandals (amulets), suggest the existence of the very pattern of beliefs and practices from which Voodoo would be born.
That excellent observer Father Labat{13} had already pointed out a fusion of Christianity with fetishism among the slaves of the Antilles: ‘The Negroes,’ he wrote, ‘do without a qualm, what the Philistines did; they put Dagon with the Ark and secretly preserve all the superstitions of their ancient idolatrous cult alongside the ceremonies of Christianity.’
Essay on Slavery, a manuscript work of 1760, contains a very precise reference to the phenomenon of ‘possession’: ‘The dance known in Surinam as Water Maman, and in our colonies as La mère de l’eau, is strictly forbidden. They build it into a great mystery, and the only thing known about it is that it greatly heats their imagination. They work themselves up to a frenzy whenever they contemplate some mischief. The ringleader goes into a trance of ecstasy. When he comes to himself, he says his god has spoken to him and told him what to do; but since they none of them have the same god they fall out and spy on each other, and this kind of project is nearly always betrayed.’ In 1777, in a letter quoted by de Vaissière,{14} a certain Monsieur de Blaru records that ‘the slaves danced in silence’ all round him to get their gods to grant him a cure.
But it was not until the monumental work of Moreau de Saint-Méry,{15} Description of the French part of Saint-Domingue, written in the last years of the colonial period, that a detailed description of Voodoo became available. Since it has often been quoted, I shall only touch on it here.
Having translated, very exactly, the word vaudou as ‘an all-powerful and supernatural being’, Moreau de Saint-Méry identifies it as ‘the snake under whose auspices gather all who share the faith’. The Voodoo—that is to say the snake—will not give of its power or make known its will, except through a high priest and priestess, known as ‘king and queen, master or mistress or even papa or maman’. In them we may recognize the hungan and the mambo, ‘leaders of the great Voodoo family’ which must pay them unlimited respect. It is they who decide whether the snake approves the admission of a candidate to the society, who set out his duties, the tasks he must fulfil; it is they who receive the tribute and presents which the god expects as his due. To disobey or resist them is to resist the god himself and run the risk of dire misfortune.
Voodoo gatherings take place secretly, at night, in ‘a cloistered place shut off from the eyes of the profane’. The priest and priestess take up their positions near an altar containing a snake in a cage. After various ceremonies and a long address from the ‘Voodoo king and queen’, all initiates approach, in order of seniority, and entreat the Voodoo, telling him what they most desire. The ‘queen’ gets on to the box in which lies the snake and—‘modern Pythoness—she is penetrated by the god; she writhes; her whole body is convulsed and the oracle speaks from her mouth’. The snake is then put back on the altar and everyone brings it an offering. A goat is sacrificed and the blood, collected in ajar, is used ‘to seal the lips of all present with a vow to suffer death rather than reveal anything, and even to inflict it on whoever might prove forgetful of such a momentous pledge’.
Then begins what is, strictly speaking, the danse vaudou. This is the moment when new initiates are received into the sect. Possessed by a spirit, the novices do not come out of their trance till a priest hits them ‘on the head with his hand, wooden spoon or, if he thinks necessary, ox-hide whip’.
The ceremony ends with a collective delirium which Saint-Méry believed to be the result of magnetic emanations. As proof he cites the paroxysms of Whites who had merely come as spectators. He gives quite a good description of the trance: ‘Some are subject to fainting fits, others to a sort of fury; but with all there is a nervous trembling which apparently cannot be controlled. They turn round and round. And while there are some who tear their clothes in this bacchanal and even bite their own flesh, others merely lose consciousness and falling down are carried into a neighbouring room where in the darkness a disgusting form of prostitution holds hideous sway.’
Analysed in the light of our present knowledge, the words of Moreau de Saint-Méry allow no room for doubt that there existed in Saint-Domingue, towards the end of the eighteenth century, rites and practices which have scarcely changed up to modern times. The authority of the priest, his dress, the importance of trance, signs drawn on the ground are familiar now as then. Moreau de Saint-Méry, however, was wrong in setting down this religion as a simple ophiolatry. Today also, the devotees of Voodoo worship Damballah-wèdo, the serpent-god, one of the divinities of the Dahomey mythology, but he is far from being the only great ‘Voodoo’. Moreau de Saint-Méry allowed himself to be influenced by the prejudice of his milieu and by the main anthropological theories of his time. Although it is not normal practice now to represent Damballah-wèdo by living serpents, it must have been otherwise in the time of Moreau de Saint-Méry since his contemporary Descourtilz{16} talks of having been taken to a gathering of slaves where he saw a snake worshipped in front of a huge mapou tree in which it was living.
Between prayers the priests served him victuals in the shape of meat, fish, calalu and particularly milk. Descourtilz tells how he sacrilegiously killed this snake without provoking much emotion among its worshippers. Moreau de Saint-Méry points out that the presence of living snakes in the old Voodoo temples was not surprising since many of the slaves came from Whydah where there was, and is still, a big temple of snakes. But this is as maybe, snake-worship died out in the nineteenth century during which there is no further mention of it.
The following passage from Saint-Méry{17} has posed a problem in the history of Voodoo which has never yet been resolved: ‘In 1768 a Negro of Le Petit-Goave, a Spaniard by birth, abused the credulity of the Negroes with superstitious tricks and gave them the idea of a dance, similar to the Voodoo dance, but more hectic in its movements. To give it an extra filip they added well crushed gunpowder to the rum which they drank while dancing. Sometimes this dance, called the Danse à Don Pèdre or The Don Pedro, inflicted fatal casualties on the Negroes; and sometimes the very spectators, electrified by the convulsive movements, shared the madness of the dancers, and drove them on, with their chanting and hurrying rhythm to a crisis which, to a certain extent, they shared. The Don Pedro was forbidden under threat of direst penalty—sometimes without avail.’
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nbsp; Now, as we shall see later, most Voodoo gods are divided into two groups: rada and petro. The origin of the word rada is easily found. It comes from the town Arada (in Dahomey)—a name which in the eighteenth century covered all Dahomeans.
On the other hand in the word petro we recognize the Pedro discussed above. Only a very naïve person could believe that the complicated liturgy, which is inseparable from the worship of the petro divinities, could have been introduced by one man, however inspired. Furthermore the petro rites as well as the petro music, although not Dahomean, are none the less African in origin. In contemporary Voodoo Dompèdre is a powerful god who is normally greeted by the detonation of gunpowder. And so it seems certain there must have once been a hungan whose impact was so profound that his name took the place of African ‘nations’ who today worship gods bearing his name, petro, and not theirs. But unless we can discover documents telling us about the rôle of this Don Pedro, his deification and powerful effect on Voodoo will remain a mystery.
Descourtilz,{18} who assembled his information at the beginning of the last century, also refers to ‘Dompète,’ describing him as the all-powerful chief of the teeming fanatics of Voodoo, a man who could reputedly ‘see with his own eyes everything that was happening—anywhere, no matter how far away or how secluded’. Clairvoyance is one of the usual attributes of a hungan.
We can see then that Voodoo, on the eve of the French Revolution, was an organized religion different from the Voodoo of today only in that it bore a much more African character. Were not many of its adherents men and women who had actually been born and bred in Africa? It was, of course, beginning to become Christianized but at this stage the ritual had not been invaded, as it is today, by the Catholic liturgy. The number of slaves from the markets of the Congo and Angola was still increasing and after 1785 arrivals from these regions exceeded the totals from Guinea. These newcomers introduced rites and divinities which were absorbed, for better or worse, in the system which the Guinea Blacks had recreated after their own fashion.