Voodoo has got to rank right up there with the most misunderstood religions. If you see it in popular culture, chances are there's a witch summoning demons or conjuring zombies. The Devil probably works in there somewhere. The general perception of Voodoo is so cartoonishly negative, a jumble of witchcraft and satanism, it wasn't as shocking as it should have been when Christian television personality Pat Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on a curse against the Haitian people.
In January this year, Robertson took to the airwaves to explain the situation in Haiti this way:
"They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."
If anybody was to take Robertson's nonsense seriously, it would be because Haiti is so closely associated with Voodoo (about half the nation's 10 million people are said to be believers) and Voodoo, with its incantations and origins in animism, is closely associated with the occult.
Recently, the Voodoo community has held large public ceremonies to honour the hundreds of thousands of people killed in January’s earthquake. These ceremonies come as other relgious group's follow Robertson's bizarre logic and are blaming Voodoo's adherents for causing the earthquake.
"They say we're the ones who caused the earthquake. But we know ourselves that we didn't cause the quake, because it was a natural catastrophe," said Willer Jassaint, one of the priests, or houngans, leading the Voodoo ceremony.
Matters came to a head February 23, when a group of Protestant Evangelicals attacked a Cite Soleil Voodoo ceremony with a hail of rocks.
Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian Voodoo, said two days afterwards that a repeat of the violence would lead to "open war," with his followers told to meet aggression with aggression.
Scapegoating is not the only issue the Voodoo followers are having post-earthquake. There's also the potential zombie problem.
Dumping the dead in hurriedly excavated mass graves without proper rites is seen as desecration in a country where many believe in zombies -- dead bodies brought back to life by supernatural forces who could persecute the living.
I'm sure the Voodoo aficionados reading this are already laughing at the tiny mistake in the article. Haitians aren't afraid of a harmless old zombie. They're afraid of being turned into a zombie.
According to Voodoo, improperly buried bodies are at risk of being made into zombies. That's totally true. However, the Haitian zombie is not the bloodthirsty ghoul his Hollywood cousin is. If you've seen someone obliviously stumble down the street while staring at their iPhone you get a more accurate picture of the Haitian variety. The thing that will persecute the living is a soul that hasn't been released from the physical plane to Ginen, the mythical underwater homeland of the spirits. A zombie is a dead body without a soul. (It's all in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Voodoo, a book that actually exists.)
After death and before burial, Voodoo requires a ceremony be held where the body is prayed over so that its soul can be released. If it is not released, it remains in the physical plane, able to act on the living, and incredibly cranky.
According to Voodoo belief, a zombie is an enslaved dead body whose soul has been captured. The zombie is then generally used for slave labour and is completely without personality, entirely unlikely to ever yell "BRAINS!" To create a zombie, the magician creating it performs a ritual, then calls out the victim's name three times, which forces the victim to reply. Once he has replied, the victim is in the magician's thrall. An accepted method of zombie prevention is to tie the deceased's mouth shut so they can't reply.
Voodoo has its origins in the West African country of Benin, a neighbour of Nigeria, where it is an official religion practiced by more than four million people. And at the end of the day, Voodoo is a religion not a breed of sorcery. Their prayers are no more or no less spells than the incantations muttered by the devout in churches, mosques and synagogues around the globe.
National Geographic took a look at the origins and practices of the religion. A clip is below.
