Haiti - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 163

stiffened by the separate use of poison. Father Cosme enlarged on the superstitions that maintain that men
with certain powers change themselves into snakes; on the Loups-Garous that fly at night in the form of
vampire bats and suck the blood of children; on men who reduce themselves to infinitesimal size and roll
about the countryside in calabashes. What sounded far more sinister were a number of mystico-criminal
secret societies of wizards, with nightmarish titles— les Mackanda , named after the poison campaign of
the Haitian hero; les Zobop , who were also robbers; the Mazanxa , the Caporelata and the Vlinbindingue .
These, he said, were the mysterious groups whose gods demand—instead of a cock, a pigeon, a goat, a
dog or a pig, as in the normal rites of Voodoo—the sacrifice of a cabrit sans cornes . This hornless goat,
of course, means a human being. Father Cosme, during his ministry in the remoter mornes , stated that
he had encountered two or three well-substantiated cases of the disappearance of children for these pur-
poses. One secret society had, for obscure reasons, compelled a woman to kill and eat her small infant,
and a man was at that moment, he continued, serving a sentence for ritual murder. [2]
'Please understand,' he said, raising a hand, 'that I do not mean that such things are common; or that
they have any but the remotest link with the normal practices of Voodoo; for they are extremely rare. But
they occur.
'Things have taken a turn for the worse recently, in the new government's decision to allow the free
practice of Voodoo. It is gaining ground and prestige daily. One wonders, sometimes, what good we are
doing here, and whether,' he said, with a sorry smile, 'Voodoo might eventually develop into a sort of
state religion. It is being given every possible encouragement. By some, because they really believe in it;
by others, who are atheists, anyway, out of Chauvinism, because it represents the national idea. Worst of
all, the practice of Voodoo is becoming rationalized, codified almost, by a certain school of writers.' He
referred to Mars, Herskovitz and Dorsainvil as if they were virtually the Seraphic Doctors of Voodooism.
'It is similar to a small movement which hopes to replace French, as the official language of the country,
by a phonetic Créole. They detest the whites and anything to do with us. La situation est odieuse….'
It was night when we said good-bye, and the air was beginning to throb with the sound of drums
from several different parts of the town, rising and falling and then ceasing altogether, and, after a few
moments, beginning again: a peculiar and disturbing sound. Father Cosme pointed to the direction from
which it came and, with his frosty smile, raised his shoulders in a faint gesture of resignation.
I would like to say at once that there are several points, as will appear in the following pages, in which
I am not in agreement with Father Cosme. But I have put down as much as I can remember of his conver-
sation in order to have the point of view of a priest vis-à-vis the extraordinary phenomenon of Voodoo.
He left the Republic soon after, and is now in charge of a large parish in the west of Senegal.
[1] Haiti is the old Arawak name for the island. The Spaniards at first called it Hispaniola (or Little Spain)
and the name is still valid for the whole of the island. It came to be called Santo Domingo, after the cap-
ital: a name that the French, when they settled in the West, gallicized into Sainte Domingue. To mark the
break with the colonial past, the victors of the Independence War returned to the primitive Arawak name.
The remainder is still called Santo Domingo or the Dominican Republic—not to be confused with the
British island of Dominica.
[2] I will say more of this subject in the next chapter.