It is to enter one's mind the room which is both the womb and
the tomb, to become innocent to everything except the motivation
of myth, the natural passion of the mind for meaning. It is to meditate
on the common human effort to comprehend the human condition.
- Maya Deren The Divine Horseman
A common misconception about Voudo
is that it and Roman Catholicism developed in syncretism in Haiti; each affecting
the other as they were adopted by the islands inhabitants. Leslie G. Desmangles,
in her book, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti,
suggests that synthesis would be a more apt description of the process. She
raises two points in particular to qualify this assertion. First and foremost
that oppression played a large part in the outward acceptance of the Catholic
traditions and hagiography. Secondly, she uses the death and dying rituals of
Vodou and contrasts them with the rites administered by the Church over the
dead.
One of the primary reasons for the survival of indigenous African traditions
in Haiti is to be found in the cimarron, a Spanish word denoting an animal
once domesticated, which has reverted back to a wild state (31). The maroon
population on Haiti swelled with the large?scale importation of slaves into
the Haitian economy to support the French plantations. The central mountains
provided an inaccessible location to escape to, and an excellent base of operations
to continue to raid and otherwise harry the plantations.
It was in these maroon enclaves that the first cultural synthesis began to take
place between the indigenous Amerindian populations and the escaped Africans.
It is remarked in an endnote that certain secret societies within Vodou follow
the poison path (192:8). It is likely that the first knowledge the Vodouisants
gained about the local fauna and flora, especially medicinal or magickal herbes
would have come from their interaction with the indigenous peoples.
Because of their inaccessibility, these enclaves provided not only an extraordinary
vantage to conduct raids, but also to inevitably stage a revolution. Likewise
they afforded the maroon population, especially those from Africa, the ability
to continue practicing their traditional religions. These continuations of ancestral
traditions, and the revolution for independence, are likely the most important
points in the development of Vodou, from out of the indigenous religious practices
of Africa. The maroon enclaves allowed those beliefs and practices to continue
unadulterated by Western influences, in the same way that the break with the
Roman Catholic Church after the revolution allowed those beliefs to find expression
in Vodou and concrete existence in Haitian culture.
What passes for syncretism in this situation was the way in which the Vodouisants
learned to cover their beliefs with a veneer of Catholicism. "Choked by oppression
the slaves were obliged to hide their secret adoration of obscure forces to
which they felt themselves tied by long ancestral traditions" (Jean Price?Mars
quoted in Desmangles; 11). No matter how much they wore the outward face of
Catholicism though, at their heart, these were very different belief systems.
To objectify that difference would be to say Vodou represents an immanent, and
Catholicism a transcendent belief system. Of course, that is all semantics,
as the early Church observers of Vodou remarked, "Vodou meetings or ceremonies
mix often the sacred things of our religion with the profane
objects of an idolatrous cult" (italics mine; Father Jean Baptiste Labat
cited in Desmangles; 26).
The ceremony attending death among Vodouisants serves to mark a difference between
religious belief and social convention and underscores the use of synthesis
over syncretism to describe the interaction of Vodou and Roman Catholicism.
The first person informed of a death in Haiti is the desounen, which means 'uprooting
the sound' who removes the tripartite spirits from the deceased (69). The activities
of the Roman Catholic Church in the preparation of the dead are limited to the
mass said for the dead on the day of the funeral and the mass of remembrance,
a year and a day later. It is only the oungan, or high priest, who is
responsible for the spirit's preservation after death and its continued interaction
with the ancestors and those descendants yet to be born. "No priest could reclaim
the awo-bon-ani from Ginen ... neither Vodou nor the gwobon-anj
could ever be the business of the Catholic priest" (77). In fact the remembrance
mass, even the funeral mass, are at times postponed or not performed due to
financial reasons, while the preparation of the body after death by the desounen,
and the reclamation of the spirit by the oungan are essential to the
dead and the living family members.
Works consulted
Courlander, H. The Drum and the Hoe; Life and Lore of the Haitian People.
Berkeley, CA; University of California Press, 1960.
Desmangles, L. G. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Sakolsly, R. & Koehnhne, J. Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout
Culture. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1993.