VOODOO

From Philosopedia

Woman in Benin during a Voodoo episode

Priest "blessing" followers with holy water

Contents 1 Vodoun's Mahu 2 Candomblé, Santeria, Wanga, Ouanga, Obeah 3 Research by Howard W. French 4 Anecdote by Warren Allen Smith 5 Dr. Louis P. Mars, Haiti's First Psychiatrist 6 Max Beauvoir, Voodoo's Pope

Vodoun's Mahu

VOODOO Vodoun or Vaudou, commonly called voodoo, refers to the Vodoun religious beliefs and practices which are West African in origin (In Ouidah, Benin, the center of the Vodoun religion, it is called vodoun) and are found in Haiti, where Voudou can be seen for example in the village of Soukre.

Since 1996, Voodoo has officially been a national religion of Benin, where more than 60% of the people are said to believe in it. According to The Economist (28 Jan - 3 Feb 2006),

• More than 60% of the people are said to believe in it. Slaves from this corner of Africa brought the religion to the New World, most notably to Haiti. Its tenets echo those of many African religions. There is a supreme god, Mahu, and a number of smaller gods or spirits, with whom humans can negotiated.

Mixed with Catholicism and West Indian influences, voodoo is based upon an animistic belief in Gran Met (God), Guine (ancestral Africa, particularly the area of Dahomey, now called Benin), and loa (spirits). The African spirits have been identified with certain Christian saints among practitioners who claim also to be Catholics. Houngans (sorcerers) are believed to be able to use for evil purposes a zombi or zombie (a person raised from the grave) - such an individual appears to resemble the so-called “walking dead” (and the term is also used to describe drugged individuals who appear not to be in command of their faculties).

However, such necromancy, or appeal to the spirits of the dead to reveal the future or influence the course of events, is claimed to be of a positive nature by its adherents. Outsiders, however, have the picture of a group of worshipers who speak of hounsies, who bite into a chicken’s neck as they dance to haunting drum beats, who stick pins in dolls in order to bring unhappiness to its enemies, and so forth. In the various voodooistic services, ecstatic trances and magical practices can be involved.

Candomblé, Santeria, Wanga, Ouanga, Obeah

Related movements are Candomblé, a voodooistic religion found in Brazil; Santeria, which is found in Cuba and in which Yoruba deities are identified with Roman Catholic saints; Wanga or Ouanga, sorcery or witchcraft with Angolan overtones; and Obeah, which is found throughout the West Indies, the Guianas, and the southeastern United States, in which sorcery and magic ritual are used.

Research by Howard W. French

Journalist Howard W. French has written extensively about Voodoo. In 1996 in Benin, he met Daagbo Hounon Houna, the Supreme Chief of the Grand Council of the Vodoun Religion of Benin, whose followers think of him as their Pope and throw themselves at his feet and kiss the sand before him. Vodoun, the leader laments, has been vilified like few other religions. Speaking in his native Fon language through a translator, he said:

• When the first Europeans walked on our soil, they began calling us fetishists. That was the first of many efforts by whites to introduce their beliefs and destroy our culture.

He explained that there is one god, Mawu (or Mahu), but countless names for this supreme deity’s manifestations—spirits like Gu, Legba, Damballa, and Hevioso. Vodoun, he added, has nothing to do with the common Western perception of sticking pins in dolls to persecute real or imagined enemies. “There are women who cannot conceive children, men who cannot find work, and elders who cannot find peace. Vodoun restores hope. It protects our land and brings the cool breeze.” French wrote, “To the charge that their ancestor [Viceroy Don Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian who allegedly came to Ouidah in 1754 to run a Portuguese slaving fort) was a principal actor in the deportation of many thousands of slaves, today’s de Souzas portray the first Viceroy as something of a humanist. ‘Our ancestor traded in slaves, but it isn’t fair just to stop there,’ said Marcellin Norberto de Souza, son of the sixth Viceroy, whose white mustache and hair offsetting his dark sin are characteristic of the deSouza clan. ‘He was in fact a very generous man living in what you might call a barbarous time.’ ” This, it was noted, was uttered at the very site where 1,500,000 million “pieces of ebony” were shipped off to the Western hemisphere.

Anecdote by Warren Allen Smith

Non-believers rarely observe authentic services “back in the bush,” although one skeptic - non-believer Warren Allen Smith - has gotten blood on his pants after a dancing worshiper bit into a live chicken’s neck, then veered backwards as if in a trance, knocking the accompanying musicians off a small Haitian stage while he sat disguised as a native.

Smith in the 1940s said that the island's only psychiatrist, Dr. Louis P. Mars, found false the reports in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse that there are Zombis in Haiti, people who have been called back from the dead":

• In her book, the author described the Felicia Felix Mentor incident as a typical case of a Zombi. Evidently she got her information from the simple village folk, whose minds were conditioned to believing the real existence of a superhuman phenomenon. Miss Hurston herself, unfortunately, did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of the case. Evidences from European and other cultures could be found, where whole communities have been aroused into a mass hysteria as a result of the unexpected appearance of queer persons. Such appearances very often rekindled the dying embers of archaic superstitious beliefs that were deeply rooted in the traditional culture of a people. Perhaps extension of the province of psychiatry from a study of the individual to a study of the collective behaviour of man may yet reveal to us some of the basic principles underlying the social problems of our time. Certainly, social psychiatry stands a good chance of exploding the Zombi-psychology of the untutored Haitian peasant, as well as any similar beliefs entertained in other cultures.

Smith, who occasionally edited Dr. Mars's college papers and who visited him in Haiti after he had become Haiti's Minister of Health, asked him if Christianity is "the white man's voodoo." Dr. Mars, amused, treated it as a rhetorical question, said that in his work he had to know what was behind all the religions, and said he was a member of none.

Dr. Mars supplied examples of problems involved with belief in the supernatural:

• In the remote areas of the country, the belief is prevalent that some rich peasants are fortunate in their undertakings because they are helped by mysterious beings who work on their farms; who go and steal money for them; who travel at a fantastic speed faster than automobiles, and who fly through the air as planes do. These are supposed to be former dead men and women who were brought back to life through the application of some potent drugs (Wanga).
• The Zombis are supposed to eat no salt. If they do, they become conscious of the state of their abnormal existence and are therefore likely to desert their masters. Originally these beliefs came from Africa.
• I have never met anyone in Haiti who was able to testify to me that he had seen a Zombi. However, I used to hear occasionally that a Zombi was living in a village. In two instances, I discovered afterwards that the hapless persons who were thought to be Zombis were, in fact, insane wanderers who could not identify themselves nor give any information with regard to their past life or their present condition.
• The unusual circumstances under which they appeared in the village, their queer behaviour and their unintelligible manner of speech, induced the people, whose minds were already conditioned to superstition, to believe that Zombis were in town.
• The following is an account of a specific case which illustrates the observation I have just made. Early in the morning of 24 October, 1936, in the village of Ennery located in the foothills of the Puylboreau mountains near Cap-Haitien, the entire population was aroused into a tumultuous and frenzied consternation when a woman appeared in the streets clad in ragged clothes. She was old, feeble, and stupefied. Her skin was pale and wrinkled and looked like the scales of a fish. From all appearances, she had been suffering from eye disease for a long time. Her eye-lashes had almost fallen out ;. she could not bear the glare of sunlight and, to protect her eyes, she had covered her face with a dark dirty rag. This added to the curiosity and superstitious awe of the people. A mass hysteria swept through the entire village. Crowds gathered around to see that strange woman. People began to ask questions, to cast suspicions, and to try to identify her with various people who were known to be dead long ago. One of the families living near Ennery, known as the Mentors, noticed that she bore a close resemblance to one of their members. From that day onward people began to call the strange woman by the name of Felicia Felix Mentor. The Mentors took her to their family home, fed her, and gave her comfortable quarters. She remained in the Mentor's home for a few days until the people removed her to a government hospital. She was in the hospital when, a few weeks after, I was sent from the Public Health Department to make an official study of the strange case which by that time was known all over Haiti. Felicia Felix Mentor, the alleged Zombi under discussion, was not able to give me any information about her name, her age, her birthplace, where she had been previously, where she, was going, and how she happened to be in the hospital. All her answers were unintelligible and irrelevant. Her occasional outbursts of laughter were devoid of emotion, and very frequently she spoke of herself in either the first or the third person without any sense of discrimination. She had lost all sense of time and was quite indifferent to the world of things around her. Her height was 5 feet 2 inches, and she weighed 90 pounds. She looked like a woman about 60 years old; but after being treated in the asylum for some time under my care, she rejuvenated and looked like a woman of 50. The evidence which induced the Mentors at first to believe that the strange woman was the member of their family who died long ago became untenable in the light of a scientific study of the case. At first they had based their belief on the fact that the woman was lame. Before the real Felicia Felix Mentor died, she was lame as a result of a fracture of her left leg. Her physical appearance and lameness in addition to the deep belief in the country that sometimes the dead come back to life, induced the Mentors to believe that the strange woman was indeed their late sister Felicia. I made an X-ray examination of both legs at the Central Hospital in Port-au-Prince. There was no evidence of a fracture and the lameness could therefore be attributed to muscular weakness due to undernourishment. This may be said to be the cause since, after she had a normal diet for two months, the lameness disappeared. She also gained weight. This is evidently a case of schizophrenia and gives us an idea of how cases of similar nature are likely to arouse mass hysteria in a culture where the common people do not usually understand the scientific basis of many natural events which occur in their daily, life.

Dr. Louis P. Mars, Haiti's First Psychiatrist

Dr. Louis P. Mars was a Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine and of Social Psychology at the Institute of Ethnology, Port-au-Prince, in the Republic of Haiti

He was a member of the Societé Medico-Psychologique of Paris, a government Public Health Officer.

A foreign minister (1958 - 1959), he was invited by Eisenhower to the White House on 7 August 1958. He was the first Haitian physician to receive specialty training in psychiatry.

THE STORY OF ZOMBI IN HAITI By Louis P. Mars, M.D. 
From: Man: A Record of Anthropological Science,
Vol. XLV, no. 22. pp. 38-40. March-April, 1945.

The island of Haiti located in the Caribbean Sea attracts tourists for many reasons. Perhaps the beliefs and cultural institutions of the Haitian people are of greater interest to visitors than the charm of the physical aspects of the country. Tourists believe that they will be able to see Zombis roaming through the villages and watch the people perform superhuman feats during what are called the vodu dances.

Haiti has often been called the vodu or mysterious island. Many people believe that there are to' be found some unusual facts which modern science has not yet been able to explain: -for example, the phenomenon of magic and the existence of Zombis. In Dahomey', West Africa, the word vodu refers to both the worshipping of the spirits and the, spirits themselves. In Haiti, the term vodu has the same meaning. In worshipping the vodus the Haitian peasants pay their tribute to those supernatural beings who are the source of good and bad, life and death, disease and health. Those spirits live in the woods,. lakes, rivers, and every corner of the earth. They are the intermediaries between God and his creatures. God is too far away to take care of us ; he has therefore conferred power upon those spirits to guide us, to give us the spiritual assistance which we want in our every-day life.

Very often it is through the phenomenon - of possession that a spirit manifests itself to the devotees during the ceremonies held in the cult-house. Every peasant has a cult-house or an altar in his own home. The ceremonies are performed according to the religious needs of each follower. He consults a priest or houngan, paying a certain amount of money to the latter. The group is then gathered and the appropriate service takes place.

It is a very serious matter for the Haitian peasant, who sometimes spends more money in the worship of his gods than he does for the necessities of life.

The peasant himself distinguishes between vodu and Zombi. The term Zombi means different things (1) when a person who has never been possessed by a spirit, a vodu, dies, his soul cannot go to heaven; it wanders on the earth ; Heaven is not opened to this kind of soul; (2) when a farmer is successful in his business, that means he is thought to have many Zombis working for him.

As a government medical offlcer and psychiatrist, I have had occasion to handle many patients who, for some reason, were considered to be mysterious human beings. The theory on which the belief in Zombis is based is that some Haitian medicine-men (Nganga) have the power to bring dead and buried people back to life again. These resurrected human beings are the Zombis, the living dead. It is also believed that during the night some people have the power to fly through the air with a big red flame under their arms: these are the werewolves. In the vodu dances, the Haitian peasants become furious and are supposed to be possessed of spirits. When one falls into this state, the medicine-man is said to be able to predict the incidence of catastrophe, birth, or death ; to tell how a person can win immense fortunes; to describe what happens in his home when a man is away from his family, and many other things which a person may always have been eager to know. The medicine-man is also supposed to have power over fate and to avert any ill fortune that the future holds in store for a victim. Let me examine the assumption on which the belief is based.

In the remote areas of the country, the belief is prevalent that some rich peasants are fortunate in their undertakings because they are helped by mysterious beings who work on their farms; who go and steal money for them; who travel at a fantastic speed faster than automobiles, and who fly through the air as planes do. These are supposed to be former dead men and women who were brought back to life through the application of some potent drugs (Wanga).

The Zombis are supposed to eat no salt. If they do, they become conscious of the state of their abnormal existence and are therefore likely to desert their masters. Originally these beliefs came from Africa.

I have never met anyone in Haiti who was able to testify to me that he had seen a Zombi. However, I used to hear occasionally that a Zombi was living in a village. In two instances, I discovered afterwards that the hapless persons who were thought to be Zombis were, in fact, insane wanderers who could not identify themselves nor give any information with regard to their past life or their present condition. The unusual circumstances under which they appeared in the village, their queer behaviour and their unintelligible manner of speech, induced the people, whose minds were already conditioned to superstition, to believe that Zombis were in town.

The following is an account of a specific case which illustrates the observation I have just made.

Early in the morning of 24 October, 1936, in the village of Ennery located in the foothills of the Puylboreau mountains near Cap-Haitien, the entire population was aroused into a tumultuous and frenzied consternation when a woman appeared in the streets clad in ragged clothes. She was old, feeble, and stupefied. Her skin was pale and wrinkled and looked like the scales of a fish. From all appearances, she had been suffering from eye disease for a long time. Her eye-lashes had almost fallen out; she could not bear the glare of sunlight and, to protect her eyes, she had covered her face with a dark dirty rag. This added to the curiosity and superstitious awe of the people. A mass hysteria swept through the entire village. Crowds gathered around to see that strange woman. People began to ask questions, to cast suspicions, and to try to identify her with various people who were known to be dead long ago.

One of the families living near Ennery, known as the Mentors, noticed that she bore a close resemblance to one of their members. From that day onward people began to call the strange woman by the name of Felicia Felix Mentor. The Mentors took her to their family home, fed her, and gave her comfortable quarters. She remained in the Mentor's home for a few days until the people removed her to a government hospital. She was in the hospital when, a few weeks after, I was sent from the Public Health Department to make an official study of the strange case which by that time was known all over Haiti.

Felicia Felix Mentor, the alleged Zombi under discussion, was not able to give me any information about her name, her age, her birthplace, where she had been previously, where she, was going, and how she happened to be in the hospital. All her answers were unintelligible and irrelevant. Her occasional outbursts of laughter were devoid of emotion, and very frequently she spoke of herself in either the first or the third person without any sense of discrimination. She had lost all sense of time and was quite indifferent to the world of things around her.

Her height was 5 feet 2 inches, and she weighed 90 pounds. She looked like a woman about 60 years old; but after being treated in the asylum for some time under my care, she rejuvenated and looked like a woman of 50.

The evidence which induced the Mentors at first to believe that the strange woman was the member of their family who died long ago became untenable in the light of a scientific study of the case. At first they had based their belief on the fact that the woman was lame. Before the real Felicia Felix Mentor died, she was lame as a result of a fracture of her left leg. Her physical appearance and lameness in addition to the deep belief in the country that sometimes the dead come back to life, induced the Mentors to believe that the strange woman was indeed their late sister Felicia.

I made an X-ray examination of both legs at the Central Hospital in Port-au-Prince. There was no evidence of a fracture and the lameness could therefore be attributed to muscular weakness due to undernourishment. This may be said to be the cause since, after she had a normal diet for two months, the lameness disappeared. She also gained weight.

This is evidently a case of schizophrenia and gives us an idea of how cases of similar nature are likely to arouse mass hysteria in a culture where the common people do not usually understand the scientific basis of many natural events which occur in their daily, life.

The case under discussion was reported by Miss Zora Neale Hurston in her book Tell My Horse, in which she stated emphatically, "I know that there are Zombis in Haiti. People have been called back. from the dead." This American writer stated specifically that she came back from Haiti with no doubt in regard to popular belief of the Zombi pseudo-science.

In her book, the author described the Felicia Felix Mentor incident as a typical case of a Zombi. Evidently she got her information from the simple village folk, whose minds were conditioned to believing the real existence of a superhuman phenomenon. Miss Hurston herself, unfortunately, did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of the case.

Evidences from European and other cultures could be found, where whole communities have been aroused into a mass hysteria as a result of the unexpected appearance of queer persons. Such appearances very often rekindled the dying embers of archaic superstitious beliefs that were deeply rooted in the traditional culture of a people.

Perhaps extension of the province of psychiatry from a study of the individual to a study of the collective behaviour of man may yet reveal to us some of the basic principles underlying the social problems of our time. Certainly, social psychiatry stands a good chance of exploding the Zombi-psychology of the untutored Haitian peasant, as well as any similar beliefs entertained in other cultures.

Max Beauvoir, Voodoo's Pope

In 2008, Voodoo priests (houngans) came together in Port-au-Prince and formed a national federation, choosing Max Beauvoir as their spokesperson. See his web site.

{CE; Howard W. French, The New York Times, 10 March 1996; WAS}