Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 173

remote messages had become garbled and woven into the animism of the forests. Neighbouring tribes
left inevitable deposits of belief and practice, and it was already an amalgam of complexities that, as they
united and merged into a single faith, was exposed to its last great influence, the factor that was to provide
its final and definitive twist: the teaching of Christianity.
It was with reluctance that Louis XIII granted to the first colonists the right to make use of slave
labour. He did so, rather naïvely, because it was urged that slavery was the infallible and only means of
converting the Africans to the Christian faith. The colonists were able to satisfy their consciences with
the thought that the Hell in this world which was the corollary among their slaves of their own mount-
ing revenues was an apprenticeship for the Negroes' eternal felicity in the world to come. The work of
conversion would begin soon after the Negroes had landed from the slavers and the exciting new stories
were eagerly listened to, and gratefully incorporated into the fabric of the other new belief which was
being so rapidly built up out of more familiar material. Christianity won a special and privileged position,
and the observances of the Church became the overt and public side of the occult rites which they per-
formed in private. Missionaries had early misgivings about the profundity of their new conversions. Fath-
er Labat shakes his head over the task of the missionaries to Angola and the Congo. 'These Negroes,' he
sighs, 'have no scruple in imitating the Philistines. They couple the Ark of the Covenant with Dagon, and
secretly preserve all the superstitions of their ancient idolatrous cults with the ceremonies of the Christian
religion. One can judge what sort of Christianity is the result….' It was exactly the case of Haiti.
New religions pass through a bower-bird period when elements from any neighbouring faith are joy-
fully woven into the half-built nest. When the structure is complete, dogma and canon harden into ortho-
doxy. After this theological closing time, anyone welcoming late-comers or questioning the credentials
of earlier arrivals becomes guilty of schism or heresy. This hour with Voodoo (as the new religion, after
the Dahomeyan word Vodun , meaning 'spirits,' soon came to be called), has not yet struck. Possessing
no dogma at all, Voodoo is wonderfully clastic. It has a vast mythology, and a ritual which custom has
formalized, but as primitive Negro spiritual demands are uniquely magical and talismanic there was noth-
ing heterodox in the incorporation of vast lumps of Christian practice. Any saints who caught their fancy
were enlisted on sight, on the strength of the similarity of their external attributes with those of the great
Lwas. Only one of them seems to have attained the status of a Lwa on an equal footing with his African
colleagues: St. James the Major, who is, however, nearly always invoked in the company of the Ogoun
group of Lwas. I have been unable to discover why St. James occupies this exceptional position, unless
the military ring of his title rendered him especially welcome to the Lwas' warlike Valhalla. His vévér ,
his coat of arms in maize-flour, is a sword flanked by two banners, and Santiago! of course, was the
battle-cry of the Spanish conquistadors. [3]
With the principal actors of the Christian religion and an irregular battalion of the saints, many of the
prayers of the Church, and a few fragments of the liturgy have found their way into the Voodoo rites.
There the Christian contribution ends. But there were other elements in the new world suitable for in-
corporation. When the first Africans arrived, the Indian natives of Hispaniola, whose thinning ranks they
had been brought to supplement and finally to replace, were not yet extinct, and Dr. Louis Maximilian
maintains that the snake cult attached to the name of the Lwa Damballah may—though other authorit-
ies trace it to the serpent-worship which throve in the Dahomeyan town of Wydah—owe something to a
Carib or an Arawak cult of the feathered serpent similar to the Aztec worship of Quetzalcoatl or to the
Kukulkan of the Maya. Bits of European magic, of the Kabbalah, the topics of Hermes Trismegistus, the
Rosy Cross and Mesmerism, and all the French eighteenth-century fads, slipped into Voodoo. Pentacles