A Fool In Haiti

This excerpt taken from the Strength Makes Them See site belonging to a friend of a friend and sums up the very basics of what anyone interested in Haitian Vodou should really know.

Vodou, which is the French way of spelling a word a people in West Africa (the Fon) spell Vodu, means “powers.” Like spirits or angels, unseen powers, the powers and principalities of Biblical fame. Vodou is not really a religion in and of itself (note 1). It is a set of ancestral and magical practices that started in West Africa and got carried across the ocean by African slaves. Vodou ended up in many places in the Caribbean and South and Central America and also ended up in North America; Vodou has many African AND Western Hemisphere “roots.”

But the roots that landed in Haiti did a curious thing. In order to survive, they gathered together, 21 different ethnic groups or “nations” in all…and merged with the Roman Catholicism of the French overlords, the indigenous practices of the Taino and Arawak natives on the island they called Ayiti, and various European folk practices.

This tree made from the seedlings of so many different people from so many different places grew up quickly, watered with the blood of revolution, and became a part of the Haitian way of life. It is said that Haiti is 90% Catholic, 10% Protestant, and 100% Vodou. This is not such an unreasonable belief.

That’s a million zillion miles away from the classic stories of voodoo zombies and sticking pins in dolls and crazy things you have seen coming out of Hollywood! When I delved deeper into researching Vodou, I found a beautiful, powerful and cohesive paradigm and system, where ancestors are honoured and communication with the spirit world is accessible to all. Whilst Haiti is fresh and in the news I would urge anyone out there to go an find out a bit more about it via autonomous and intelligent research. There is no shortage of resources on the web out there attempting to make information about Vodou more accessible and I would hope everyone out there would do at least a little reading before joining the mainstream media bandwagon of vilification. There really is a lot of beauty and wonder to be found within Vodou and i shall endeavour to share more as I discover it myself.