It is important not to confuse hungan and mambo with the ‘herb-doctors’ who treat people with infusions and ‘baths’ made of medicinal herbs, and who, apart from well-tried recipes, only know a few spells for special occasions.
Treatment of the sick provides the largest and surest source of revenue for a priest, but he also earns money foretelling the future. And then each ceremony brings in, for the priests who organize it, the sort of gain which is difficult to evaluate since even if no fees are collected, there are still various kinds of profit made on the ‘eatables’, the purchase of animals to be sacrificed and on all the different accessories which priests like to enumerate when they discuss a project with a client. In fact the whole humfo staff live for several days on offerings which have not been consumed or destroyed during a fête.
In addition, every initiation to the grade of kanzo earns a considerable sum for the hungan who conducts it, particularly if his humfo enjoys a great prestige.
Finally hungan earn a lot of money by selling ‘magic powders’ and other talismans, much in demand, for ensuring success in business or love affairs, or as protection against evil spells. They also make ‘guards’ which shelter children from the evil eye, and attacks by werewolves. Joseph Antoine, hungan and husband of Lorgina, did a big trade in ‘powders’. He got letters which he gave me to read. They were from foreigners, particularly white Americans, and they described ailments to him and asked for an adequate remedy, in return for cash down. Joe, who was illiterate, got friends to reply to each client. He enclosed a few pinches of one of his precious powders and charged as much as fifty dollars.
No doubt this analysis of a priest’s income is incomplete; but it gives some idea of the profession’s very solid advantages, and explains why it attracts so many ambitious people who have no means of improving their situation other than the exploitation of religion.
Dependence on an undependable clientèle makes hungan touchy and irritable. Competition being bitter, even the best are quick to criticize their colleagues and spread embarrassing stories about them. My friends never failed to insinuate that such and such a hungan ‘worked with both hands’ or made of ‘bad loa’. Whenever a client admitted he had been treated previously by another hungan, a very timely loa was called in to tell him the people who treated him before were not only ignorant and incompetent, but also had borne him a grudge and fostered his illness instead of curing it. One of the commonest ways for hungan to slander each other was to accuse a colleague of casting spells to destroy the good effects of his rivals’ treatments. There are even some hungan wicked enough to sow wanga (charms) round the humfo of a colleague who, unless he does something about it, will soon see all his cures brought to nothing. This at least is sometimes how the failure of an expensive treatment is explained away. A hungan knows by certain signs when his reputation is on the wane: the sick no longer come to be cured by him, his hunsi are undisciplined or desert him and finally, the last straw, initiates take back the ‘head pots’ (pots-tête) with which they entrusted him. The fame of a hungan is a fragile thing: it is at the mercy of rumour and gossip. Hence that thirst for advertisement, that boasting and skin-deep vanity which are to be found in even the most honest and sincere hungan and mambo.
There are men entitled pères-savane (bush-priests), but they are no part of the Voodoo hierarchy. On many occasions, none the less, their services are indispensable. They are, as we shall see, people who have succeeded in memorizing a great many prayers and songs in French and Latin, and who fulfil the rôle of curé whenever Catholic liturgy is incorporated into Voodoo ritual. To a certain extent they are representatives of the Catholic Church in the heart of paganism.
III.—THE SANCTUARIES
To understand the way ceremonies are conducted and religious ideas given material shape, we must first form an exact idea of the sanctuaries, where members of fraternities gather to worship, and where the faithful come separately to consult the hungan or mambo.
There is hardly any difference between the ‘houses of the mysteres’ and ordinary houses. A humfo is not a temple in the ordinary sense of the word, but a religious centre comparable in appearance to the old compound which formerly included the households of an extended family. The number, disposition and decoration of the houses which make up a Voodoo sanctuary depend in the first place on the private resources of the priest and priestess concerned, and to a lesser extent on their imagination, taste or the taste attributed to the spirits. There are poor humfo reduced to a little hut, others which look like a small village. At Port-au-Prince, where ground and construction is expensive, the space available to the gods is unavoidably cramped: often the humfo consists of no more than a covered area and a main building which shelters the loa and also the family of the hungan or mambo. On the other hand sometimes these town sanctuaries show a gimcrack luxury which is seldom seen in the country.
The only feature of a humfo which makes it recognizable from the outside is the ‘peristyle’, a sort of shed, mainly covered over, where dances and ceremonies are held free from the vagaries of the weather.
The roof, either thatched or more often made of corrugated iron, is held up by brilliantly painted posts: one of them, in the middle, is called poteau-mitan (the centre post) and forms the pivot for ritual dances. During ceremonies it is the object of various attentions which attest its mainly sacred significance. In ritual its rôle is to act as ‘the passage for spirits’, that is to say as the ladder by which spirits come down into the peristyle when they are invoked. On one occasion Lorgina, angered by a hunsi who showed herself lacking in respect towards this post, cried out, ‘Don’t you realize there’s a spirit inside it?’ The Poteau-mitan is nearly always decorated with brightly-coloured spiral bands or with scattered bright spots on a uniform background. The general effect is entirely decorative and as far as I know has no symbolic meaning. The base of the post is usually embedded in a conical or cylindrical cement pediment which is used during services as a table for putting things down on.
Apart from the feasts, nothing except the drums hanging from hooks on the ceiling, or faded paper wreaths, would suggest that such a place is the scene of the most spectacular manifestations of Voodoo. The sick are sometimes housed there for treatment; also, sometimes, visitors from far away, or out-of-work hunsi dependent on the head of the society. There too the master of the humfo is pleased to receive friends and it is there that the members of the household hang about, iron clothes or shell peas. Nevertheless mambo and hungan keep their peristyles very clean and tidy. They never forget that for the faithful this building is so important in the cult that it has become the symbol of the humfo and that the word ‘peristyle’ has become synonymous with ‘sanctuary’. Some priests in Port-au-Prince, in search of modernity, have lit up their peristyles with luminous tubes, red and blue—the national colours of Haiti—and their dance floors are surrounded by rows of seats in tiers. This sort of innovation makes the sanctuaries look like theatres or palais de danse. In humfo where respect for tradition is still the first consideration, and where space allows, there is a special arched recess, specially reserved for the Petro loa and sometimes even a second recess for the Congo loa.
Usually the grand peristyle is adjacent to the building in which are situated the ‘chambers of the gods’. The room containing the patron spirits of the humfo opens directly on to one of its sides. The façade of the humfo, which forms the back of the peristyle, is decorated with paintings of Haiti’s national coat-of-arms, the emblems of the principal loa and other ornamental motifs. You may also see there, written out, the complete name of that particular ‘humfo society’. Near the door portraits of the President of the Republic and influential senators or deputies are pinned up. Such pictures prove the loyalty of the head of the temple who, threatened by regulations, tries to put himself under the temporal protection of the ‘grands nègres’.
The sanctuary proper which is sometimes referred to as the caye-mystères, sometimes as the bagi, badji
or sobadji, is a room backed by one or more stonework altars (pè) in the base of which are one or more arched niches. On the table of certain altars there are sinks prepared for the needs of aquatic spirits. When these spirits are the object of special veneration the water basins are built separately and big enough for a person to bathe in. In some humfo the altars are arranged in tiers which makes it easier to arrange things as well as to increase the number of holy objects displayed.
A bagi is a veritable junk shop: jars and jugs belonging to the spirits and the dead, platters sacred to twins, carrying-pots belonging to the hunsi, ‘thunder stones’ or stones swimming in oil belonging to the loa, playing cards, rattles, holy emblems beside bottles of wine and liqueur—all for the gods. Amid the jumble one or more lamps may cast a feeble light. Colour prints are pinned to the walls, the sword of Ogu is driven into the earth and near it, in some humfo, you see assein, the curious iron supports which may still be bought in the market of Abomey. The loa’s room is also a vestry where the mediums—the people who have been possessed—come to fetch the clothes and objects with which they must be equipped if they are to represent the god who dwells in them. The bag and hat of Zaka hang beside the crutches of Legba and the top-hat of Baron; clusters of hunsi necklaces festoon the govi or are hung by wires across the room.
The loa worshipped are so numerous that it would be difficult, indeed impossible, to give each a special room in the humfo; such a privilege is often reserved for the patron spirit, but he too shares his altar with members of his family or other loa who by virtue of some affinity ‘go’ with him. Mambo Lorgina had only one bagi for all her loa except the Guédé who had a house to themselves at the opposite end of the peristyle. In the house of a leading hungan, of the Cul-de-Sac, the two halves of the same house were occupied respectively by Damballah-wédo on the one side, and by Ogu on the other. Yet Agwé, Zaka and Simbi each had their own dwelling. The room devoted to Ezili-Freda Dahomey was fitted up as a boudoir.
In many humfo there is a special part, the djévo, in which the future kanzo are confined during their initiation. A separate house is sometimes kept for the sick. The master of the humfo and his family often live under the same roof as the ‘mysteries’, but in separate rooms. In the towns a mambo with a certain amount of prestige will have a salon inside the humfo, where she can entertain visitors. Such rooms are furnished and decorated like any interior of the Haiti petite bourgeoisie.
Sacred objects are also to be found on the outskirts of the sanctuary: the pince (iron bar) of Criminel sticking up out of a brazier, a pool which may vary in size for Damballah, a large black cross often crowned with a bowler hat and clad in a frockcoat, which represents Baron-Samedi, or an imitation concrete tomb on which are placed offerings for the Guédé. Every humfo is encircled by ‘sacred trees’ (arbres-reposoirs) which may be recognized by the stone-work edging all round them, by the straw sacks (macoute) and by the strips of material and even skulls of animals hung up in their branches. Even when there is no barrier round the sacred precincts, the entrance is none the less called the ‘portal’. Guarded by the god Legba, this spot is invested with a religious significance which is expressed in details of ritual.
This brief sketch of a humfo incorporates the commonest characteristics of all sanctuaries and leaves out the many differences to be found among them. But the picture would be incomplete without mention of the cocks, hens, pigeons, and guinea-fowl which run about outside and which perch on the sacred trees. They are all waiting for the day of sacrifice, as are the goats whose bleating may be heard from a nearby enclosure. In many humfo the difference between sanctuary and farm is hard to discern since the hungan combines the functions of both farmer and priest.
3—THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD
I.—GODS AND SPIRITS IN HAITIAN VOODOO
To construct a Voodoo theology out of the infinitely varied, often contradictory and fragmentary notions of the supernatural world held by Voodoo adepts, is no easy task. The confusion which exists in this field is made worse by the absence of any attempt to reconcile the traditional African attitudes to gods and spirits with the teaching of the Catholic Church—a teaching which is nevertheless ‘accepted’ without reserve. God, Jesus Christ, the Virgin and the Saints are more or less relegated to the background of religious life while spirits, great and small, invade every ceremony and monopolize the attention of the faithful. Some of these are old gods of Africa who have kept their prestige, others have rather colourless personalities and merely deserve to be called spirits and demons. These supernatural beings, the worship of whom is the essential purpose of Voodoo, are called loa, ‘mysteries’, and in the north of Haiti ‘saints’ or ‘angels’. No one has ever listed all of them because, although it is easy to catalogue the ‘great loa of African Guinea’, it would be an endless task to do the same for all the minor local spirits. In fact new loa are always being created by popular faith and fantasy, while others are forgotten for want of devotees.
The loa are not the only supernatural powers which men must take into account. There are also the Twins, who are extremely powerful, and the Dead who insist upon sacrifices and offerings and exert direct influence on the fate of the living.
Adepts of Voodoo are not at all put out by the incompatibility of a complicated polytheism with belief in one supreme and all-powerful god. When asked about His power and the power of the Saints, they repeat what they have heard in church except, unlike Catholics and Protestants, they refuse to see the loa as ‘wicked angels’, damned for their revolt against God. ‘The loa,’ a Catholic Voodooist once explained to me, ‘are spirits, something like winds. They are like a man who, having received a good education in the town and learnt a trade there thanks to his father, then rebels against him. Even if this ungrateful son is finally driven out of the home, he still possesses much knowledge. Thus it is with the loa. God taught them what He taught the angels, but they revolted. Now when they enter into people, they ‘possess’ them just as the Holy Ghost enters into the curé when he sings Mass.’
To those who argue that the loa are merely vulgar ‘satans’, Voodooists reply they could not be that, since the ‘Great Master’ created them to be of use to mankind. Is there not daily proof of their benevolence and compassion? Certainly there are spirits who are willing to assist villains and who are feared for their violence and cruelty, but these should be called diab (devils). Decent people have nothing to do with them and if they fall under their power they try to appease them before sinking to crime. No more than man does God approve the activities of the bad loa, the ‘bought loa’, whom sorcerers use for their shady machinations.
The word ‘God’ is always on the lips of the Haitians but it would be unwise to conclude that they feared Him or even gave Him much thought. ‘Le Bon Dieu’ is a Deus otiosus, if He is anything. He conjures up no precise image and He is too far away for there to be much point in addressing Him. ‘He’s a nice easy-going papa who wouldn’t dream of getting angry or frightening people. With Him it will be easy to come to some arrangement when you have to give an account of your life. There’s no point therefore in serving Him too seriously.’ (Mgr Robert.)
In Voodoo the idea of God seems to get mixed up with the idea of a vague and impersonal power, superior to that of the loa. It would seem to be something like what we understand, in present-day usage, by the word ‘fate’ or ‘nature’. Common illnesses, too usual to be the work of bad spirits or sorcerers, and which we would call ‘natural’, in Haiti are called ‘illnesses of God’. Meteorological phenomena and cataclysms which occur without seeming to be the work of loa, are also attributed to the ‘Good God’. Whenever a man of the people talks of some plan for the future, no matter how simple, he adds prudently ‘Si Dieu vlé’ (God willing), less to entrust the matter to God’s will, than to exorcize bad luck.
Too often the words ‘God is good’, ending the account of some misfortune, have seemed the proof of the Haitian peasant’s eternal optimism, when in fact they merely express
ed his fatalism under the heel of a crushing destiny.
The word loa is usually translated as ‘god’ but ‘spirit’ or better, literally, ‘genius’, gives a more precise indication of the nature of these supernatural beings. Here we will keep the title ‘god’ for those ancient African divinities who, although fallen from their first glory, have still kept enough prestige and rank to ensure them a privileged place among the countless multitude of loa. Lesser ‘mysteries’ we shall call ‘spirits’. The word ‘god’ usually evokes feelings which will not suit certain evil spirits or still less the merely snooping and comic ones whose sole function is to cheer up ceremonies. Between such minor spirits, with their often picturesque names—Ti-pété, Ti-wawé, Cinq-jours-malheureux—and the grand loa of ‘African Guinea’, there is such a huge gulf that one is tempted to talk in terms of an aristocracy and a prôletariat of gods. To the former would belong the loa of African origin venerated in all sanctuaries, and to the second the greater part of the ‘Creole’ gods, called ‘Creole’ because aboriginal and of recent ‘birth’. Among these there are a great many ancestors and also many hungan and mambo, promoted to the rank of loa after their death. This, as we have already seen, was what happened to the celebrated Don Pedro who not only became a loa but also split, as did the African gods, into several different divinities.
The Voodoo pantheon is always enriching itself with new ‘mysteries’. Some are revealed and imposed upon members of a cult-group when a devotee is suddenly possessed by an unknown god, who introduces himself, states his name and demands worship. Others owe their existence to a dream. A man visited by a spirit in a dream, hastens to make it the object of a cult. If he is an influential and well-known hungan this will not be difficult. Sometimes a woman introduces the spirits of her maiden home, her habitation, into her husband’s family. One of my informants in Marbial, Janvier, who had been a cane-cutter in Cuba, brought with him from that island an invisible protector who in spite of his very Creole name, Ti-nom (Little Man) was nevertheless a Spanish loa belonging, for some unknown reason, to the Nago group of loa. Every year Janvier offered him fruit, eggs, oil and kola{49} for unlike most Nago, the loa Ti-nom did not like rum. Janvier used to fall into a trance and begin singing and talking in Spanish. Sometimes his spirit deigned to speak in Creole. Many loa of equally humble beginnings have been promoted from family level to regional level—and even to national level.
Voodoo in Haiti Page 8
