Voodoo in Haiti

by Alfred Métraux

  A man who was dogged by persistent bad luck confessed to a friend that he would do anything under the sun to be rid of his poverty. His friend then took him to a house where he found himself among members of the ‘red sect’. These people must have made a pact with him for he managed to become rich. His wife, whom he had not kept informed of his dealings with the sorcerers, became anxious when night after night she saw him leaving the house and never getting back till the following morning, worn out. More and more anxious, she at last went to consult a priest who told her that her husband at night turned into a horse. Since she refused to believe him the priest gave her a ‘mounted’ whip and went with her to a crossroads at midnight. They did not have to wait long before they saw a carriage drawn by a horse. The woman, obedient to the instructions she had received, assaulted the animal’s head, giving it several good blows with the whip. The animal vanished and she found herself face to face with her husband standing between the shafts, entangled in harness. When he was free he went blind with rage, attacked the coachman (who was none other than his so-called friend) and killed him.

  WEREWOLVES

  At Port-au-Prince zobop are often called werewolves (loups-garous), but at Marbial the latter word is reserved exclusively for female vampires who make small children die by sucking their blood. The peasants seemed to me definite on this point: loups-garous are always female; the fact deserves a certain emphasis for we find the same belief established in different regions of West Africa. Loups-garous are also called ‘suckers’ (sucettes) or mauvais airs.

  The fear inspired by werewolves is as sharply felt among Protestants and Catholics as it is among Voodooists. At Marbial my friends gave me, in confidence, the names of all the werewolves in the district. These lists always agreed with each other, which suggests that there is more in this than superstition, a tale with which to frighten children. In 1948 several families lodged complaints with the Chef de Section against such and such a neighbour, accusing her of being the werewolf who had come to ‘drain’ (sécher) their sick children. I have also seen an enraged mother who had just lost her baby, insult the woman she suspected of having killed it. Apart from cases where fear or despair drives parents to take violent measures, women regarded as notorious werewolves are left alone. Their neighbours maintain perfectly normal and even cordial relations with them—though these, it may well be true, are no more than a blind. For wisdom counsels a double measure of consideration in dealing with such people, so that their malice may be vented on others.

  Only very rarely does a woman become a werewolf of her own accord. She nearly always acts in obedience to an impulse of which, to begin with, she remains unconscious. The occult power which enables her to journey through the air and abandon herself to cannibalism with impunity is often the result of a hereditary taint which has passed from mother to daughter. It can also be a sort of contagious illness which can be transmitted to anyone who, without knowing, wears a garment or jewel which has belonged to a werewolf.

  Certain loa—Ogu-jé-rouge in particular—can confer this baleful power as a form of punishment upon women who prove neglectful of their duties toward them. When a person has reason to feel threatened by such a curse she had better make the promised offerings and sacrifices quickly and put up an iron cross in front of her house.

  The state of werewolf, like that of zobop, often proceeds from the penalty-clause in a contract. In other words it is often the ‘pay off’ for the advantages derived from the acquisition of a ‘hot point’. The boko who ‘commits’ a woman to evil spirits gives her a ring or any other object which has first been ‘drugged’ (drogué). This talisman is a pledge of luck, but it also has the power of turning the bearer into a werewolf.

  In the early stages of their career werewolves commit their crimes without knowing it. Night excursions, cannibal meals are for beginners no more than nightmares which haunt their sleep. Then, gradually, the terrible truth dawns on them—but by now it is too late to stop: the taste for human flesh which these unfortunates have by then acquired, has become an uncontrollable vice.

  Like the zobop, werewolves try to get recruits. They lay ambushes for women, surprising them at night in remote spots and obliging them to take part in their sabbath. Whoever has fraternized with werewolves can never again live a normal life. He is bound to them with a complicity which, however involuntary, still alienates him forever from normal human feelings. Nevertheless a person does not become a werewolf overnight; a novice must learn the secrets of this wretched profession under the guidance of a veteran.

  A woman werewolf getting ready for a night outing first raises as many fingers as she expects to be hours absent from her house, or else she lights a candle marked with three notches. Unless she is back before the flame reaches the last notch her excursion may go ill. When she has taken these precautions she frees herself of her skin by rubbing her neck, wrists and ankles with a concoction of magic herbs. She hides her skin in a cool place—in a jar or near a pitcher—so that it will not shrink. Thus, stripped to the quick, the woman werewolf makes movements which have the effect of preparing her for the flight which she will shortly undertake. Flames spurt from her armpits and anus, turkey wings sprout from her back. She takes off through the thatch of her house; sheet-iron constitutes an impassable obstacle to were-wolves, not because it is made of metal but because it is fixed to the timbering with nails which have the magic virtue of ‘stopping’ sorcerers and sorceresses.

  Luminous trails—which nearly every peasant says he has seen at night—mark the werewolf’s track through the sky. These have some resemblance to comets and are called ‘werewolf clusters’ (nids de loups-garous). The days favoured by werewolves for their night excursions are the 7th, 13th and 17th of each month.

  A Marbial peasant, ‘fort en Guinée’—that is to say a practiser of magic—said that he had seen a loup-garou at the very moment when it took off from the top of a big mapou. The vampire turned towards the four cardinal points and cried out ‘Pati fi, yalé pami mové liân’ (Let us be off girls, away among the liana of wickedness). The peasant lost no time in making a charme loup-garou, (an anti-werewolf spell) doubtless very powerful, since immediately afterwards one of his neighbours fell seriously ill. No longer afraid, he got together some friends and went to cut the mapou down. Just as he was about to deal the first blows the tree suddenly fell of its own accord, and at the same moment there was a loud scream. It was the werewolf woman—dying at the same time as her tree.

  A flesh and blood werewolf is much less to be feared than a ‘bad soul’ (mauvais nanm) or a ‘bad air’ (mauvais-air), these being the ghost of a loup-garou wandering about at night. Sometimes these spirits take on the forms of glow-worms in order to satisfy their thirst for human blood.

  Normally a werewolf never harms children of its own kin. But if no other prey is available, then it knows no scruple. Even less does it hesitate if it cherishes a secret grudge against the child’s mother or father. One of the laws of the supernatural world requires that no werewolf may ‘eat’ a baby unless its mother has expressly ‘given’ it. Such a gift is obtained by the following trick: having gone up close to the house where the child they want to ‘eat’ is sleeping they find out their chances of success by shuffling clover-leaves together like playing-cards. Success is certain if all the leaves fall shiny-side down but if only three fall thus it means there will be some snag and the attempt is usually abandoned. When the signs are favourable the werewolf first goes into the kitchen which, in the country, is a small shelter not far from the dwelling-place. From there she calls the child’s mother. The latter, half-asleep, hears her name and answers, ‘Yes.’ The werewolf then asks, ‘Will you give me your child?’ If then, drowsy and only half-awake, she still replies, ‘Yes’—then that’s that: the child is lost. Thus it is indeed the mother who opens the door to a werewolf’. The sorcerer can also appear in a dream to the mother and promise her a present in the same breath as mentioning the child’s name. To accept the gi
ft is tantamount to handing over the child.

  The soul which watches over the sleeper—the petit-bon-ange according to some, the gros-bon-ange according to others—should normally prevent the fatal ‘yes’ from being uttered, but its vigilance can fail, particularly if the woman it is protecting has omitted to ‘give her head something to eat’.

  To suck the little victim’s blood, a werewolf gets into the house in the form of a cockroach or some other insect, or slides a straw through the wattling so that it rests against the child’s cheek. Opinions differ as to how vampires operate. Some say they ‘drain’ a child gradually, returning each evening to drink its blood, others that they have only to take three drops of blood for the child to die of an illness, caused magically. Therefore, according to the last version, werewolves are not strictly speaking vampires but sorceresses practising enchantment. This view is sustained by the popular belief that a werewolf can kill a child by asking it to fetch a spill with which to light its pipe, or by offering it titbits.

  That is why children are warned against any woman who asks them for a spill with which to light a pipe or who gives them fruit or a bit of bread. No material link between child and werewolf must be allowed to occur. It is even said that a werewolf can kill a child just by stroking its hair.

  Illness caused by werewolves falls within the competence of hungan. Some people explain this category of sickness as genuine toxaemia brought about by poisonous substances such as the water with which a corpse has been washed. A small dose of this liquid brings on intestinal swelling or a mass of worms which devour the entrails.

  What motives drive loups-garous to feed on the blood of children? Peasants say that it starts as a perverted taste and grows into an insatiable yearning. When a werewolf has succeeded in killing a child he goes with his colleagues, digs it out of the cemetery and eats it, having first turned it into ‘cod, herring, goat’s meat or pork’. There are, however, cases when cannibalism is not the sole motive for these murders. A werewolf may avenge itself on a child for an insult suffered from its parents; others simply kill children out of jealousy.

  MAGIC TREATMENT AGAINST WEREWOLVES

  The peasants are not entirely helpless in face of their children’s danger from werewolves. Since the numerous available talismans are not always effective it is thought wise to immunize new-born babies by ‘spoiling their blood’. This is done as soon as possible; during pregnancy, the mother must drink bitter coffee laced with clairin and flavoured with three drops of petrol. Then she bathes in water infused with garlic, chives, thyme, nutmeg, bois-caca leaves (Capparis cynophlallophora), manioc mush, coffee and clairin. Some time after its birth the child is plunged into a similar bath. It is also given a tisane made of various herbs. For good measure of precaution clairin is burnt in a plate and the child passed through the resulting flames. The exorcizer who is ‘drugging’ it asks three times: ‘Who wants this little one?’ The mother replies, ‘I do.’ In these words she affirms her determination to resist any werewolf who may take advantage of her sleep to come and demand her child. Then the calabash used in the ablutions is buried open-side downwards. If a loup-garou turns up near the house and tries by deceitful utterances to obtain the mother’s consent to her own loss, the calabash must answer it. In some families the children’s blood is made bitter by feeding them with cockroaches—first trimmed of their legs and wings and fried in castor oil, syrup, nutmeg and garlic. Some children have blood that is naturally salty or bitter and these therefore have nothing to fear from werewolves. The werewolf who drinks ‘spoilt blood’ is seized with violent vomiting. She flees leaving a trail which leads to her house—and to her identification.

  III.—WHITE MAGIC

  A misfortune—unwonted illness, accident, ruin—is either a chastisement sent by the loa or the result of an act of sorcery. It is for the hungan to decide which. On his diagnosis the remedy will depend. The anger of spirits will yield to mangers and ‘services’, but harm brought about by magic is not so easily put right. The first thing to be done is to determine the nature of the spell and then to undo or impede its effect by appropriate countermeasures. A hungan’s greatest triumph is to discover in a patient’s house the actual charm which has caused the trouble. Thanks to information provided by their loa certain hungan—people say—manage to locate the exact place where a sorcerer has hidden his wanga. Mean tongues, it is true, allege that it is the hungan themselves who ‘plant’ the objects which they then pretend to discover.

  Divination in all its forms makes it possible if not actually to locate, at least to identify the sorcery, and often its author too. Voodoo medicine nearly always comprises preliminary divination as well as ‘treatment’ proper. Certain cures, stripped of their ritualistic apparatus, appear to us as a judicial combat between the good and the bad loa set on by a machinateur.

  There has grown up within the framework of Voodoo, a complete prophylaxy of which we shall here go into only a few representative aspects.

  EXTRACTION OF THE SOUL

  A person may obtain a certain immunity from sorcerers, and even from ordinary assassins, by having one of his two souls (the gros-bon-ange) withdrawn from his head. The details of this operation which I obtained from a hungan show a marked resemblance to those rites by which, during initiation, the soul of a novice is placed in a ‘head pot’. The priest puts a lock of hair from the top of his client’s head in a bottle along with nail-parings and tufts of hair taken from various parts of the body. Then, as in the ritual of the manger-tête, a package containing among other things bread and sweets soaked in white wine, must be clamped to his head. Also a white cockerel is cooked without any flavouring and eaten at a family meal, everyone taking the greatest care not to break any of its bones. These are gathered together after the meal and sewn into the pillow or buried under the bed of the person ‘drugged’.

  Protection of the soul is such sound policy that a mambo of Port-au-Prince had systematically withdrawn the gros-bon-ange from all her children. She had shown each of them the bottle containing his soul and said, ‘My son, the little fellow in there is your gros-bon-ange. I have put it there so that no living creature can harm you.’ One of her sons who was divorced lost no time in fetching from his conjugal dwelling the little trunk in which he kept his soul—in case his former wife should get hold of it.

  Another more serious danger is that the bottle may fall into the hands of some evil intentioned person. Such an event was the undoing of General Salnave. His rival, Boisrond Canal, who had confided his soul to a hungan, a friend of his, learnt as a result of someone’s indiscretion that Salnave had ‘banked’ his soul in the same sanctuary. He kept on at the hungan till, at last, the avaricious and faithless man gave in. Master of his enemy’s gros-bon-ange, Boisrond Canal had no difficulty in defeating him and then putting him to death.

  ‘RESTRAINING’ A BAD ‘LOA’

  People subject to attacks from a ‘wicked loa’ loosed on them by a sorcerer, get in touch with a hungan who tries to restrain (marrer or arrêter) their invisible executioner. A happy chance enabled Dr. Price Mars to be present at the ‘stopping’ of a loa,{94} a rite which usually takes place in the greatest secrecy. On this occasion the offenders were two loa of the petro family. They were represented by two bits of wood clumsily carved and enveloped in a piece of red stuff. The hungan recited a langage formula, chanted some liturgy and drove nails into each of the images. He took two strings, made sure they were strong, had them stretched out in the form of a cross by his attendants and then wound them round the images, taking care to tie numerous knots. Every time he pulled a knot tight, he sang:

  Mu pralé maré loa pétro

  Hi hi

  Jâ-Pétro, chèn ki chèn

  Li kasé li

  Ki diré kòd

  We are going to tie down the petro loa

  Hi hi

  Jean-Petro, chain which is a chain

  He has broken it

  As if it were a rope.

  Finally th
e hungan buried the images at the foot of the altar along with two crosses of iron and one of wood.

  TALISMANS AND AMULETS

  Amulets (gad) also offer a certain protection against sorcery and in general against all evil influences of a supernatural nature. The objects used to this end are only effective if they are ‘mounted’ or ‘drugged’. Lorimer Denis{95} gives us some information on how to make a ‘guard’ with an alligator’s tooth. The latter should be soaked in a bottle called a ‘guard’ or mavangou bottle which contains gunpowder or Shrove Tuesday ashes, feuilles trois-paroles (Allophyllus occidentalis), bile of bullock, goat, sow and boar, water from a forge, water from a tannery, red herring, blood of a virgin mouse (sic) and alligator flesh. This broth is called pot-pouri or migan. The efficacity of the amulet loses its power with time and it is important to feed it every year, that is to say soak it again in the same brew. In ‘the time of the bayonets’, officers and soldiers alike wore doctored scarves which protected them from sabre blows and bullets. The exploits of certain revolutionary leaders were put down not to their courage but to the efficacy of their gad and the blind faith they derived therefrom.