For many in the West, Voodoo invokes images of animal sacrifices, magical dolls, and chanted spells. But Voodoo as practiced in Haiti and by the black diaspora in the United States,
South America and Africa is a religion based on ancestral spirits and patron saints. Worshippers are dressed in white as they sacrifice goats and cows and smear themselves with the blood. Then, they dance in a sacred pool to bring forth loa – spirits that help to run the universe and can grant blessings.
Haitian Vodou is an African diasporic religion that developed in Haiti between the 16th and 19th centuries. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa and Roman Catholicism. Vodou focuses on the veneration of deities known as lwa (or loa).
They often identify these both as Yoruba gods and Roman Catholic saints. Various myths and stories are told about this lwa, which are regarded as subservient to a transcendent creator deity, Bondyé. An initiatory tradition, Vodouists usually meet in ounfò, temples run by priests known as oungans or priestesses known as manbos, to venerate the lwa.
A central ritual involves practitioners drumming, singing, and dancing to encourage a lwa to possess (“ride”) one of their members. They believe that through this possessed individual, they can communicate directly with a lwa. Offerings to the lwa include fruit and the blood of sacrificed animals.
They utilize several forms of divination to decipher messages from the lwa. Healing rituals and preparing herbal remedies, amulets, and charms, also play a prominent role. Vodou developed among Afro-Haitian communities amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries.
It arose through the blending of the traditional religions brought to the island of Hispaniola by enslaved West Africans, many of them Yoruba or Fon, and the Roman Catholic teachings of the French colonialists who controlled the island. They involved many Vodouists in the Haitian Revolution which overthrew the French colonial government, abolished slavery, and established modern Haiti.
The Roman Catholic Church left for several decades following the Revolution, allowing Vodou to become Haiti’s dominant religion. In the 20th century, growing emigration spread Vodou elsewhere in the Americas.
The late 20th century saw growing links between Vodou and related traditions in West Africa and the Americas, such as Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé. Every summer, those who believe in voodoo take a pilgrimage to holy waterfalls for a ritual for the goddess of love.
The event concludes with naked bathing in the waterfalls and, for the devout, s*x in the mud and blood of sacrificed animals. Most voodoo festivals coincide with Christian celebrations because former slaves were banned from practicing the religion;ding the holir celebrations on the same day as their Catholic masters was a good way of disguising what they were doing.
While Roman Catholicism is still the official religion of Haiti, the vast majority of Haitians are also thought to practice some form of voodoo.
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