 |
|
The belief that Haitian vodou is a synthesis of Roman Catholicism and Vodou has been challenged by some investigators who suggest that the two religions have been juxtaposed but not united or fused. Thus, whereas some people assert that a large portion of the Haitian population is both Catholic and vodou, this should probably not be taken to mean that the two religions have been united into a single variant that we could call "Haitian Catholicism" or "Catholic Vodou," for example. Historically, it appears to be the case that the presence of images of Catholic saints in the Haitian drapo does not indicate the worship of those saints but rather signifies some transformation based on visual or iconographic similarity between the saint and a Haitian god. And due to the relative isolation of Haiti, most features of Haitian life seem to have remained highly resistant to western influences.
Agglomeration or the accumulation of varied traditions may be a metaphor for vodou spirituality: not only is there an endlessly vast number of vodou spirits, but the body of spirits includes and incorporates foreign deities, and creates new ones in response to cultural changes. The images of the gods change as well, corresponding to the fashions and trends of the day. Sen Jak, for instance, now appears to ride a helicopter, rather than a horse. He can also be seen at the fairground, riding a carousel:
The fusion between the sacred and profane
worlds which characterizes Haitian vodou is undoubtedly the most salient
connection or similarity between Haitian and African spiritualities, whereas
one of the most salient differences between vodou and Roman Catholicism
is the relationship which people have to the gods. The houngan, or
priest, is central to the community and the spiritual leader of the community;
but he does not exist to make the spirits accessible or inaccessible to
the people because everyone has access to the gods and everyone can receive
a spirit into his or her body, at which time that person and the god are
one and the same; further, the gods or loua are not worshipped-they are
called. This act of calling the gods generates the importance of movement,
of the body, and many of the visual characteristics of the drapos.
 |
Haiti's indigenous population was South American Indian; most fled or died after the Spanish arrived. African slaves were imported beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for about 300 years; they came from northwest, coastal and central Africa, representing a great many African cultures. Living in Haiti, what they preserved most of all was their nonmaterial culture: stories, religious ideas and practices, beliefs about life and death and social values.
With the French administration of Haiti, a great deal of the French style was adopted and blended with the African inheritance; this would be problematic after the Haitian revolution of independence (ca. 1780s) because conflict between the African heritage and the French heritage became the source of political conflict, even though the Haitian culture, by the end of the 18th century, was an amalgam of both.
Haiti remained in relative isolation from the rest of the Caribbean, because its independence came earlier, and from the rest of the world; traditional arts and techniques, mostly untouched by modern technology and culture, continued to dominate in a way that is not seen in other parts of the "New World."
At one point the Church tried to purge Vodou; it has been suggested that this led to the "double images" of loua seemingly disguised as saints on the drapo. But after the revolution, the role of Catholic clergy in Haiti become much less significant and so the relationship between Catholicism and Vodou changed as well. During this period, many African Haitians became landholders and rather than a plantation economy, a peasant economy became more significant. One implication of this change is that Vodou became important as a family religion focused on ancestors and the land. It also became a religion which was associated with the peasant population, a fact which would eventually make vodou a source of embarrassment to the urban and landholding class.
With the American occupation in the early 20th century, another change occurs-the occupation made the Haitian elite class aware of the cultural divide between Europe, the United States and Haiti; this increased the antagonism of officials and urban Haitians toward Vodou. On one level, it was thought that vodou could be studied as an ethnic curiosity but it also served as a sign of the differences between peasant and urban dwellers. Consequently, although many vodou practices would be suppressed and lost, "purified" versions of vodou would be cultivated as something that could be sold to foreigners, an exotic taste of authentic Haiti.
Throughout all of these changes, because
it was first the people's religion before it became all these other things,
politicians continually used vodou to claim power. We find drapos with
images of political leaders and altars with photographs of politicians
in the place of gods. Stories have been told of houngans who are really
political informers-on one hand, a testimonial to the power of the religion;
on the other, a reflection of life in a society where the ties between
religion and politics and the state are not proscribed. In Haiti, this
connection may have served to make vodou more resilient despite the large
changes experienced in the country; at the same time, it makes vodou into
a conservative force, one which makes the country resistant to social and
political change.
 |
The word vodoun (or vodou): can mean "spirit" or "deity" but it can also mean the activities and beliefs of the religious cults; it is a system of beliefs concerning the daily activities of life and life as spirituality; it concerns the relationships between the natural and supernatural worlds, between the living and the dead. The religion is in many respects a code for living in both worlds, and from this, it is sometimes considered analogous to an extended family of gods, ancestors, and humans (which explains the importance of the sacrificial hens: the hen symbolizes domesticity and family).
Cults are similar to clans or localities
within this larger extended family of the religion; each cult has its own
center, its own temple (hounfort or ounfo), priest (houngan),
ritual activities, and most important loa (or lwa) (spirits as well
as sorcerers, or "tricksters"). Loa refers to all the deities; it is not
just the name for one. Community
and family are perhaps the key to understanding the role of ritual and
ceremony in this culture, and the aesthetic of re-creation: every ceremony
serves to create a new "family."
Transformative practices can be either good or bad and still belong to the same religion as they do in Haitian vodou. These practices are called good or bad according to what they do to other people, meaning that this judgement is not made on the basis of who performs the act.
We observed earlier that the "democracy" of this religion means that everyone has access to the gods. This access refers to a belief in the possibility of a union between a human being and spirits-the ritual of possession. Possession, the moment when a god inhabits a person, is another connection between the African sources of vodou spirituality and Haitian vodou.
Possession is greater than the moment when a god inhabits a person. It is an act of making the god become present and it is a validation of the connection between this world and the next world, or between the community on earth and the gods. In Haitian vodou, possession is described as a horse (the human being) which is seized by a god and ridden; hence, the name of the movie, "Divine Horsemen"-but this is not to be taken as the god exerting dominance over the person; there is a type of equality in which each becomes the other because the loa cannot appear on earth without a person's body; the person who is possessed is playing a significant role in a collective and spiritual drama.
Lavilokan: the magic or mystical
world on the other side of the mirror; the world under the sea; both the
gods live there and the souls of the dead. Lavilokan "exists on the other
side of every reality" and in this sense, the gods are also on the other
side of every reality, of every person, as fantasy, desire, personal dreams
and the goal of spiritual transcendence. A "mediating space"? A secret
dream world? Even more than this: for the Haitians, it is the "other Africa,
spiritual Africa."
Erzilie Frieda (the blue border continues completely around this drapo; the image below is another Frieda drapo, with her symbols but not her face. Her staff here becomes a veve drawing, and the staff crossing through the heart becomes the cross which signifies the intersection of the spiritual and human worlds.
Erzulie Frieda, one of the manifestations of the female lwa named Erzulie, she is the urban and Creole incarnation of Erzilie. She enters a vodou ceremony exuding perfumed fragrance, with slices of cake, possibly weeping; she embodies the dream of wealth and wears fantastic costumes and jewels and expects precious gifts at her altar. She might also be seen as someone who mimes or mocks bourgeois accumulation and consumption, a goddess who is divine and manic. She is associated with the image of the Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Mary. Does Frieda weep for her lost homeland? But exult in the visual pleasures and fragrances of her new homeland?
Erzilie Danto: represented as
a black woman, with scars on her face: she is a warrior and she is Frieda's
rival; she is usually shown with her daughter Anais. She is a Petwo goddess-a
goddess of passion and emotion, a woman who will fight for what she wants
and who will fight to protect her family.
 |
 |
La Sirena: a mermaid spirit, associated with seduction and wealth; her entry is marked by the sound of the conch shell; her symbols are the comb and mirror. Water is central to vodou imagery, and La Sirena can be contacted through water. All the female deities are associated with water.
Danballa: the most powerful spirit; compared to a snake coiled around the world; his shape and movements reflect the movements of the sun and the rotation of the earth; eggs are his ritual food; because of the snakes, he is associated with St. Patrick who is believed to represent Danballa in human form. He is also associated with Moses, who, according to African stories of Moses, carried a serpent as his staff. Below he is shown with the face of Moses, a chromolithograph pasted on the flag.
Baron Samedi: chief of the Guede spirits (the spirits of the cemetery), he is seen wearing a hat with a skull and crossbones, and his body often takes the form of the cross-the intersection of the world of the spirits and the world of the living. A Bizango (a secret society) altar for Baron Samedi, with Sen Jak suspended from the ceiling and the Baron taking the form of the cross on the table:
Bosou: a powerful Petwo spirit who is shown as horned bull
The gods of Haitian Vodou can have many manifestations, and any vodoun initiate can be turned into a god after death; their origins are diverse: some are from Dahomey while others are from Kongo, or other regions in Africa. Although the loa can be grouped into families or tribes (Petwo gods are passionate and fight, the Rada gods are more tranquil, cool and collected), they wander from one family to another.
Women play important roles in these Caribbean religions-not only as priestesses but as the gender more likely to be possessed by the gods-and this has often become the pretext for western misrepresentations of these religious ceremonies as uncivilized sexual frenzies, and then this becomes the pretext for repression of these cultures.
Transformation and movement characterizes the religion in another way: as the gods wander from one family to another, they transform themselves as they perform particular services.
This endless transformation may be part of the nature of the religion in its origins:
the slaves were people who were forcibly relocated; the gods traveled to the new world and taught people how to live with their displacement. They would enter the head of a slave and encourage a thought of their origin; in addition, the gods lived underwater, in a "no place," and they traveled by water to reach their people. The gods ascend to reach the heads of their people and they descend to reach their home; both person and the land beneath the water are homes, in a sense, so ascending and descending are the same action. The cross symbolizes this movement in both directions just as it signifies the place where everything meets its opposite. The temple is a room for the loa to live in; the altars in these rooms appear to be yard sales or junk shops because they provide the loa with everything he or she needs as well as objects of devotion.
Many of the flags, especially the older
ones, have geometric patterned backgrounds, while the newer ones are more
elaborately designed with the patterns and accompanying symbols of the
gods. The geometric backgrounds may be representations of some of the simpler
veve patterns (symbolic
drawings which represent the act of callling on the gods-drawings which
seem to replicate the movement of people who are dancing the dance of possession),
and the floor patterns of many of the temples and churches used by the
Haitians.
 |
The borders of some of the drapos may
also represent the visual sense of military flags blowing behind a soldier
charging into battle, or the heads of devotees dancing at a ritual ceremony.
Vodou was always linked to the liberation movement so it is a religion
which always served revolutionary and political goals for the Haitians;
some of the patterns of Haitian drapo are actually very explicit re-creations
of French military patterns used by Napoleonic troops; the use of flags
by military regiments was continued by the Haitian military, often for
public holidays. The multiple meanings are part of the meaning which overall
suggests the union of interior temple settings, people, spiritual and human
worlds-a kaleidoscope of sacred space and ritual space in movement-to the
extent that Haitian ceremonies are choreographed rituals, the flags capture
that sense of choreography in their color and patterns and textured surfaces.
 |
The more recent flags are often covered with sequins which seem to infuse the flags with spirituality, evoking stained glass windows of churches, and the light of the gods, stars, the flames of candles decorating the altars.
This flag conveys the shimmering lights of the church, the regimented flags of the military, swinging arms of the bodies of people at a ceremony, and the flags which might be hanging along the edges of a larger altar:
The flags are danced in ceremonies which call the spirits, an act symbolized by the veve on the flags and images of saints symbolizing the gods. The sequins are used because "spirits love light" and they love light because the "spirit is light"; but they may also be a transformation of the Kongo tendency to cover the surface of the nkisi and fetish statues with nails and raffia.
The flags call the spirits and restrain
them, they protect the horse (the person who is possessed). The flags,
then, are active participants in the ceremony, acting as the summons to
the gods and as the protectors of the people who become the gods.
The shimmering sensation
of the flags, the imagery which appears to be a two-dimensional version
of the embodied act of calling on the gods, the recurring geometric patterns
forming the borders of these flags-the flag almost "becomes" the person
who is possessed by the god. More concretely than that, the flag becomes
an altar.
Bottles
are another significant form of visual expression in vodou, and they, even
more closely, have their origins in Kongo arts, especially in Kongo pakets.
 |
 |
 |
The wanga is a magical object, in this case a "wrapped" bottle with scissors and mirrors. Wrapping on the bottle enhances the sense of secrecy in this case, because whatever is contained within it cannot be seen. The secret is not the question of whether there is something inside; the secret is only that we can't see it.
Magnets at the top of the bottle give it weight, and in this case, the weight of elemental forces.
The scissors: 1) they cut things; they
are tools and they are sharp and they can inflict pain
2) they are anthropomorphic-they seem
to have legs and arms especially when they are spread open.
Mirrors: reflect and refract surfaces; they are circular, the geometric form used to represent the cosmos; these mirrors are tied with thread which prevents them from serving the role of reflecting the person staring at the bottle, but as reflective surfaces they signify water, and water is a sacred symbol in vodou because the spirits live in the world beneath the water, the spiritual Africa.
The colors of this particular bottle: white, red, and black: are central symbolic colors to Kongo religions and to Haiti--they signify the Petwo gods, the hot gods, and more: white symbolizes reason and truth, health and clarity of vision; white also stands for the land of the dead; black symbolizes guilt and evil and social disorder, rebellion and the intent to kill; red: sexual desire, magical power, and compromise. On one level, the colors appear to symbolize different modes of thinking and acting; on another level, they are part of the cosmology: black, or the world of the living, and white, the world of the dead, with the red standing for the sun which orbits between black and white. The position of the scissor fits with this cosmological symbolism of the colors, since the body standing with arms spread out in Kongo symbolism signifies the soul in orbit and it also signifies the person contained within the community. (Go back to the flag for Erzilie Danto, and look at the small circles with crosses of diamonds. Imagine the circle and cross as a diagram of a person spinning in orbit, and the series of circles around the edge of the flag as various points in the person's journey around the cosmos.)
The sorcerer who made the bottle, before
giving it to the person he made it for, performed a ceremony which involved
scraping some bone fragments from skulls, mixing them with alcohol and
perfume and leaves, burning the mixture, singing and chanting, and pouring
it into the bottle. The bottle, containing fragments of a skull, contained
death or spirits, but heated up, and heat brings life to death. The bottle
is a Haitian version of the Kongo nkisi, many of which also contain mirrors
in their stomach, eyes in their "souls." The skulls, representing the spirits
of a dead person, can also be thought of as zombi, and zombi can be thought
of as vengeful sprits or protective spirits.
Why has Vodou been resilient: why has it survived in a changing world? Although Vodou loa are identified with particular Catholic saints, vodou did not survive because of this connection. It survived because the population in Haiti, after the French were expelled, was almost completely of African descent; it survived because Catholicism, unlike Protestantism, encourages or allows the type of synthetic unities seen in vodou between the loa and the saints; it also survived because many Haitian political leaders had close ties to Vodou, in some cases claiming to be houngans; it survived, rather than Christianity, because it is a more comprehensive system of social, spiritual, and cultural life, more family-centered than Christianity, more oriented towards divergent aspects of life and divergent forms of celebration. It survived because of politics: the connection between politics and religion connection can be very strong, providing religion with the sanction of politics and politics with the morality of religion. But even that doesn't really explain the survival and resiliency of vodou.
Vodou is a religion about family and community, a family and community for people who have throughout their history been forced to leave their homes and create new communities. These new communities may be represented more fully by ritual practices than by place or blood ties between people.
For more images, connect to: Haitian
Images and Their "Relatives"
Sources:
Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds. Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean. Rutgers UP: 1997.
Harold Courlander and Remy Bastien. Religion and Politics and Haiti. Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, Wash. D.C., 1966.
Donald J. Cosentino, ed. The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. UCLA Fowler Museum, 1995.
Written materials and slides from
the Tarble Arts Center exhibition: The Sacred Arts of Haiti, fall 1998.