Voodoo in Haiti

by Alfred Métraux

  Illness figures in most of the conversion cases which I heard of. A few examples will suffice to underline this fact. When I knew Mme L she was a Catholic who secretly served the loa. She told me that a few years earlier she had lost four children straight off, one after the other. She was left with one daughter who soon, also, fell seriously ill. Her husband and she moved heaven and earth to save her, but the treatment prescribed by the hungan was as little use as its predecessors. From day to day the condition of the child deteriorated. In desperation the parents decided to turn Protestant. As a token of their determination they cut down the sacred trees which grew round their house, destroyed all their cult objects and got some Baptists they knew to come and sing songs round the little patient. Encouraged by a perceptible improvement in the child’s health they asked to be admitted to the Baptist community in Jacmel. They conducted themselves—even for quite a time—as good Protestants, but when they were sure their daughter was out of danger they decided to return to the fold of Catholicism so as to be able to serve the loa again. However, before taking this decision they had made their daughter promise always ‘to eat her bread’ with the Protestants. They explained to her that owing her life, as she did, to Protestantism she would be taking a great risk if she gave up the Baptist Church to deal with loa. The girl remained a Protestant and married a Catechist.

  Conversion can be an act of revolt or aggression against loa who have let you down. This is the burden of the following story told me by a Baptist peasant: ‘I had three children called Nereus, Ducius and Daniel. The first cried all night, screamed and struggled as though trying to escape from a supernatural being. Sometimes trembling all over, he shouted, “Leave me, leave me alone, leave me alone.”

  ‘I went to a hungan who was a friend of mine. He summoned loa so that I might question them and he told my fortune with cards. Thus I learned my son was being “ridden” by a werewolf. The hungan calmed my fears: he told me it was not serious and that he would give up his calling and throw away his “points” if he failed to cure my child. I sold two oxen to pay for the treatment. But Nereus died.

  ‘Ducius, my second son, suffered from a painful suppurating abscess. We didn’t know what to do. I went to see the hungan Makeli Desir because my wife had seen him in a dream. He had me celebrate a service to soothe the anger of Damballah-wèdo who, he assured me, was at the root of my son’s illness. I paid him generously from the revenues of my land. One morning at dawn I found my son dead.

  ‘Three weeks later—I’m damned if Daniel didn’t go down with raging fever. My wife says, “It’s possible that the sacrifice was not to Damballah’s taste.” I say: “What do you want me to do? I’ve sold all my cattle.” She implored me to go back to the hungan Makeli. On the way I was overtaken by a horseman who told me Daniel was dead.

  ‘When I got home I was seized with violent anger. I smashed the marassa dishes, tore up the pictures of the saints, and said, “No more loa for me, no more boko, it’s all rubbish.” Immediately after the funeral my wife and I became Protestant. I then had five more children and thanks be to Christ they are all alive.’

  The hostility of spirits often takes the form of persistent bad luck. In this eventuality too, conversion to Protestantism can also be the only way out. I was told of a hungan who became a Protestant because he could no longer satisfy the demands of his loa. They came in dreams and demanded offerings and sacrifices which ate up his revenues. Nevertheless, he managed to fob them off up to the moment when, following a bad run of business, he was ruined and incapable of satisfying his loa’s whims. Out of spite they made his children die. At a loss how to bring his run of misfortune to an end the hungan gave up his profession and became a Protestant. Judging from what I heard, this step did not bring him the change he hoped. His bad luck dogged him and at last drove him to suicide. The Voodooists, of course, concluded that in this case the loa had proved themselves stronger than Protestants.

  I have heard a peasant of Marbial admit, without a qualm, that he had been taken to the Baptist Church because he had lost—one after the other—his chickens, his pigs, his horses, and finally a son! He went to a hungan who began by getting quite a lot of money out of him on one pretext or another, but could give him no other advice than to offer a ‘grand service’ to the loa. The priest’s rapacity made the man sceptical. Rather than lose the little that remained to him he determined to turn Protestant. God certainly accepted him, for since then he has no longer been troubled by loa nor has he been dogged by bad luck. ‘If only I had thought of turning Protestant earlier,’ he said to me with a sigh, ‘by now I would have had enough money to buy land.’

  Protestants who are ex-Voodooists are regarded as the sworn foes of their previous religion. Their intransigence towards it takes the form of obsessive scruples. But we may wonder whether the rigidity and intolerance of their attitude may not spring at heart from fear of back-sliding. Such a thing could be. A certain Prudence was seized during a Protestant service at Marbial with an attack of nerves which was noticeable for its phase of ‘possession’. He was quickly taken home where his condition was regarded as so serious that his son, who still practised Voodoo, was sent for. A hungan was called in and a propitiatory service organized. A few days later Prudence had quite recovered. He did not think it necessary to give up Protestantism, but every year he gave his son a sum of money with which to make offerings to the loa.

  A young woman, at the very moment she was being baptized, had an attack of possession which lasted a good quarter of an hour during which time she kept protesting against the commitment she was about to undertake.

  The loa, it is said, do not like people returning to them in a grudging spirit or with mental reservations. A Protestant woman who became a convert to please the man she was living with, returned to Catholicism and the service of loa when he died. She hoped her daughter would follow her example, but the girl wanted to remain a good Protestant. Finally, however, the girl gave in to her mother’s threats. A week later she was possessed by the god Ogu with such violence that she appeared to have lost her reason. She broke everything in reach, and called her mother a sorceress and werewolf. Certain words she let drop during this crisis suggested she was terrified of becoming a werewolf herself. It seemed that to punish her for her resistance the spirits were driving her to a criminal course which filled her with horror.

  Sometimes, too, those who become converts to find shelter from the loa are disappointed to discover that their new religion does not shield them from misfortune. They then regret their decision and try, at first secretly and then openly, to reingratiate themselves with the loa. A peasant woman who became a Baptist to please her husband told me that a few weeks later a whole series of catastrophes burst upon her household. ‘It was a veritable epidemic of troubles,’ she said, ‘our money affairs went badly, our holding produced practically nothing, our chickens fell ill, our cattle died one after the other, the least little wound we got turned septic and became infested with maggots. We became very poor and lost two children. It was all because we had abandoned the loa and because the loa had abandoned us.’ After this series of disasters the couple decided to go back to serving the loa. They went to the curé to forswear their Protestantism, received their certificate as rejectors and hurried off to offer sacrifices to their family loa. For ‘you must be a Catholic to serve the loa’...

  The same lack of sincerity seems to have characterized the conversion of the peasant who, in order to get ‘quick rich’, frequented boko and humfo. His dealings with sorcerers and wicked spirits received their punishment: his wife, whom he loved dearly, went mad. To cure her he got hold of a well-known hungan who ruined him with costly ceremonies without in return effecting the least improvement in her condition. Impoverished and desperate, our friend decided to convert to Protestantism, himself and all his family too. His wife recovered her sanity, but this miracle ‘made no difference to him, did not open his eyes to the error of his ways’. One day he was surprised in the
act of performing a ceremony for the spirits. He fell ill soon after and confessed on his death bed that he had never given up his cult of loa.

  It would be unjust to explain the success of Protestant sects entirely in terms of superstitious calculation. Other factors come into play, particularly in urban districts where Protestantism gets most of its recruits. I will mention a few in brief. The personal influence of certain missionaries is difficult to assess, but no one can question that the general service these men have rendered the rural population, in creating schools and taking pains with adult education, has often disposed people to Protestantism. Family solidarity and the influence of prominent people also play a part in many cases of conversion.

  We should not forget, while we are enumerating the motives for changes of religion, those trivial causes such as quarrels with cures or wounded susceptibilities—all of which have led several Marbial families to turn Protestant.

  There is an economic aspect, too, which is not without importance. The austere life of many Protestant families has resulted in a certain prosperity which many like to regard as no more than the reward of a just Providence. Their neighbours, who have remained faithful to the traditional way of life and are therefore less sober, less prudent, are sometimes tempted to believe that they have only to become Protestant to improve their lot. Furthermore the Protestant sects, in particular the Baptists, make fewer financial demands on their members than do Catholicism and Voodoo. Money is so short and rural economy so precarious that many peasants find themselves in difficulty when the time comes to pay the casuels (occasional fees), however small, or to offer a big manger to the family spirits. Life without the help of religion is as inconceivable for a Haitian peasant today as it would have been for a French peasant of the thirteenth century, and so the prospect of getting into God’s good books for a pittance has doubtless wrestled more than one conscience towards Protestantism. One Protestant woman who had listed all the spiritual satisfactions which she owed to her conversion, did not forget to mention the temporal advantages which it had also brought: ‘Protestants don’t have to spend much. On Sundays after the service you just give what you can—and that’s not very much. We have no ceremonies to pay for. If one of us falls ill the whole community bears the expense.’ This last phrase is an allusion to the esprit de corps which is characteristic of all religious minorities and which among Haitian Protestants takes an extreme form. From it springs a sense of security which appeals strongly to those who feel lonely or threatened.

  Certain Protestant sects—Pentecostists or Shakers—who cultivate religious enthusiasm to the point of mystical trance, exert a strong pull on many Voodooists who for one reason or another wish to become Protestants. In the gatherings of these bodies they find an atmosphere something like that of the Voodoo sanctuaries.

  A Pentecostal preacher describing his feelings when ‘the spirit was upon him’, listed to me exactly the same symptoms as those which I had heard from the mouths of people who have been possessed by loa. Between mystical trance and the classic ‘attack of loa’, the difference is probably slight. The fundamental attitude of the original religion clearly crops up again, in another key as it were, in the adopted religion. The same phenomenon occurred in the New World where the African slaves were converted to Protestantism. Undeniably the ecstasy which breaks out in the ceremonies of certain Protestant sects in the south of the United States reflects a survival, if not of rites, then at least of religious behaviour. In Haiti—to take but one example—the affinities of Shakers with Voodooists throw this phenomenon into relief.

  CONCLUSION

  The cults and practices described in this work are regarded by many Haitians as a scourge with which an unjust fate has been pleased to afflict their country. They are irritated—understandably—by the label ‘Voodoo-land’ which travel agencies have stuck on their home. Yet Haiti is far from being the only country in the New World where African cults continue to flourish. Today those cults still have millions of adepts in Cuba, Trinidad and above all in Brazil. Bahia, town of all Saints, is also the town of all West African gods. In Rio de Janeiro African cults are practised, in São Paulo and even in the depths of Brazil, in towns on the Amazon. Thus the labrys—the double-axe of Asia Minor and Crete, symbol of the thunder-god—having passed from the Mediterranean to Nigeria, draws closer year by year to the barrier of the Andes. From a scientific viewpoint a systematic comparison of Haitian Voodoo with the other black religions which have developed on American soil would be a work of enormous theoretical scope. But first and foremost it would reveal to us what have been the hardiest, most vigorous aspects of African religions, and the psychological patterns which have determined the borrowings from Catholicism. Whoever, for instance, has visited the sanctuaries of Haiti and Bahia can but have marvelled at the parallelism of cultural development in groups which, though common in origin, have been separated in space and time.

  Compared to the candomblés of Bahia and the sanctuaries of Havana, the humfo of Port-au-Prince cut a sorry figure. The great poverty of the Haitian peasant has naturally affected his religion. He cannot devote as much money to his cult as his Cuban or Brazilian brothers. A Voodoo ceremony, at even the best humfo, cannot compare with a service celebrated in even the poorer quarters of Bahia. Moreover the African cults of Brazil and Cuba are much nearer their African source than those of Haiti. This is not surprising since slaves from the Coast were imported to these two countries right up to the second half of the nineteenth century. The last Africans to be taken to Haiti were the Dahomeans of the police-force of King Christophe, a hundred and fifty years ago. Therefore, compared to the other religions (candomblés and santeria) Voodoo seems a decadent and rather bastardized African religion, but one which shows the origins of various different African elements all integrated in a new religion. By comparative research we could trace the contribution to Voodoo of the Fon, the Ewe, the Yoruba, the Congo tribes and doubtless many other ethnic groups. Such a work could only be undertaken by a scholar who was familiar not only with the other modern African religions, but also with the historic sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with descriptions of the Africa from which the ancestors of present-day Haitians were uprooted. The main concern of such a work would be to show us the changes in the various conceptions of the gods and the evolutions of ritual; and in so doing the inquiry would save itself from being a mere display of erudition.

  The comparison of Voodoo with the African religions from which it sprang, does not fall within the scope of the present work. A few examples will serve to throw into relief the kind of transformation which has occurred in the personalities and attributes of those gods who have been incorporated in Voodoo. Roger Bastide{104} has already told us of the vicissitudes of Legba (or Exu) in Brazil. Let us see what this same Legba has become in Haiti. In Fon mythology Legba, as interpreter to the gods, fulfils a function of primordial importance in the whole system of religion. He alone can deliver the messages of the gods in human language and interpret their will. He is also the god of destiny, he who presides over divination with palm-nuts or shells. As intermediary between human beings and the divine pantheon he is honoured first at every ceremony and receives the first offerings. He is also a phallic god, represented in front of every house by a little mound of earth out of which sprouts a phallus made of iron or wood. Out of this most potent of gods the Voodooists have made an impotent old man who walks on crutches. Recalling vaguely his rôle as divine messenger they have made a sort of doorman out of him, the supernatural guardian of the ‘barriers’ who must be invoked first of all loa. He has also remained the guardian of houses and to an even greater extent of roads, paths and crossroads. Since any intersection of ways is a hot-spot for magic, Legba-carrefour has become an important magician and presides over the ceremonies of sorcerers. Legba has lost much of his majesty but in exchange he has acquired new functions. As Roger Bastide deftly points out ‘there has taken place a prolongation and intensification and not a
diminution of an African trait’.

  In Haiti, Damballah-wèdo is a benevolent snake spirit who haunts the springs and climbs on trees, whereas in Dahomey he is described by the clergy as one of the many manifestations of Dā, who is less a divine person than a force. Dā ‘controls all life and motion’. While Mawu, the supreme god, is Thought, Dā is Life. He manifests himself ‘in the world in a number of ways; it is said that there are many Dā, or rather manifestations of Dā, but the chief of them is Dā Ayido Hwedo (in Haiti Damballah-aida-wèdo), most commonly seen as the rainbow’. He is a being with a dual nature, both male and female. Coiled in a spiral round the earth, he sustains the world and prevents its disintegration. As he revolves around the earth, he sets in motion the heavenly bodies. Because his nature is motion, he is also water. ‘He may still be recognized today in standing pools which recall the memory of the primordial waters: he is seen cleaving the waters like a flash of light.’ Dā is the creator of mountains and also the excreter of metals. In the latter capacity, he partakes of the nature of the sun. Dā was born long before the other vodû.{105}

  This brief and sketchy aperçu of the metaphysical speculations which the notion of Dā has provoked, put alongside the ideas which Haitian Voodooists have of Damballah-wèdo and Aida-wèdo, gives us the measure of the degradation suffered by the religions imported from West Africa to Haiti.

  In Dahomey, however, there exist profound differences between the conception held by priests of a divinity and the practice and belief of the profane. It is this latter, popular religion which perpetuated itself among the descendants of the slaves. The priests who were among the captives sold in the West Indian markets could not set up as teachers of theology. Life in plantations was obviously not conducive to metaphysical speculations. Amazing it is to find in Voodoo even those vestiges of Dahomean cults which there are.