Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 170

and Herskovitz, is the greatest of the writers on the Haitian popular religion—almost, according to Father
Cosme, the Aquinas of Voodoo—describes it as 'a mystic state characterized by a delirium of theomanic
possession and splitting of the personality.' Dorsainvil is more prolix: 'It is a religious and racial psycho-
neurosis characterized by a splitting of the ego with functional alterations of sensibility and mobility, a
predominance of pythiatic symptoms.' Dr. Louis Mars succinctly refers to it as Emotivo-Kinetic Mysti-
cism. But these formulæ, invented especially to apply to this isolated phenomenon, define obscurity with
obscurity. Dr. Louis Mars, who has written an excellent clinical report on his observations of the crisis of
possession, is the most helpful writer on this particular problem. It is a phenomenon in which Haitian sci-
entists and ethnologists are passionately interested and the brief attempt at explanation which follows is
based on his essay, on the opinions of the other writers who have come to roughly the same conclusions,
on conversations with various Haitians, and on limited personal observation. I think their conclusions are
right, inasmuch as a foreigner who has witnessed this difficult phenomenon no more than a couple of
dozen times can be allowed an opinion.
Rhythm and the dance are probably the single most pressing need in the organism of the Negro in his
primitive state. They are an outlet without which his very life seems threatened. For thousands of years
his whole being has been conditioned by the beat of the drum, and experience has taught the drummers, in
a way that has become an instinctive tradition, which beat, speed, pitch and volume of the drums control
the motor and the sensitive centres in the dancer. African mysticism, as opposed to the Yoga of the Ori-
ent, the peyotl drug of the Mexican Indians and the solitary askesis of Europe and the Levant, is always
gregarious, always promoted and fostered by the closeness of co-religionaries undergoing the same ex-
perience; and always, as Dr. Mars would say, kinetic. [1] Every Haitian, through atavism, religious train-
ing and ambience from his earliest childhood, is spiritually geared for the event of incarnation; and he
knows that the moment of miracle occurs in the dark tonnelle , where the air is afloat with mysteries, and
where the drums are already violently reacting on his nerves and brain. He knows, too, that he is a vessel
that the Lwas may at any moment inhabit. And so, when he has been brought by the drums, the dance
and the divine presence to a state of hysteria and physical collapse, a dormant self-hypnosis, finding no
opposition, leaps to the surface of his brain, and takes control.
To understand this self-hypnosis, it must be remembered that the Lwas have undergone none of the
abstraction and sublimation that is the lot of most divinities. Haitians from childhood know the Lwas as
well as their own fathers or mothers, and they believe in them in a far more real, literal and immediate
way than is conceivable to all western believers except the most accomplished mystics. The Lwas are
coarse, vital, almost human figures of his own race; they eat, drink, dance, sleep and make love, and
every Haitian knows their habits, their clothes, their appearance and their tastes. He longs to be possessed
by them, and in the critical second when artificially created outside events and suggestion, auto-sugges-
tion and hypnotism—the hypnotism, of course, being the sum of his mental processes since childhood,
and his heredity—when all this has reduced him to a state of hysteria, his dream comes true. Under the
spell of this hypnosis, the immanent Lwa becomes the truth. All else vanishes, and the impotent host of
the Lwa knows what to do in the same way that the truth emerges unconsciously through drunkenness,
or on the tongue of a sleeping man, or as sleep-walkers unerringly guide themselves to the scene of some
hidden obsession of their waking hours, or as ghosts are said to haunt the scenes of their great joys or
sorrows. We shape our gods as we wish them to be, and if we think about them enough, they break and
enter.