Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 175

punishers, consolers and advocates who give divine sanction to human frailties and aspirations, and daily
prove their love for their devotees by the miracle of incarnation. I have been able to count over seventy,
and there are many more of them, possibly a hundred and fifty or two hundred. They seem to be sub-
jected to the loosest sort of hierarchy. Papa Legba is always first to be invoked, as he is the protector of
cross-roads, journeys and beginnings, but the great Damballah has a position not far removed from that
of Zeus. Erzulie Fréda Dahomin is the third who appears with most frequency, and Ogoun Ferraille and
his warlike fellow Ogouns have a special prominence. The air is governed by Brisé, the wind by Aida
Ouèdo, the rainbow by Damballah la Flambeau and Agaou-Tonnerre; fire by Marinette-Bois-Chèche,
Lemba Zaou, Zaou-Pimba, Ogoun-z'yeux-Rouges and a number of Congolese immortals. The water falls
under the dominion of Agoué-Arroyo and his queen, Chorché, and his brothers. The earth is controlled by
a problematical Sainte Terre, Grand-Bois and Zaka. Guédé Nibou is the protector of flocks, Loko Atissou
of the hearth, and Lisa, with her obverse of Saint Clara, rules the moon. The sun is sometimes represented
by St. Nicholas, and Azès is the patron of blacksmiths; and so on. The proliferation of the Lwas is like
those Byzantine frescoes of the company of saints where haloes overlap in receding vistas like the scales
of a fish.
The Lwas invoked in the Petro rite are a gang of maleficent wretches whose worship consists of pro-
pitiation or of the supplication of their help for evil purposes. Petro is thus a first step to the practice of
Wanga or Black Magic. Many of these Petro gods are the cruel and ruthless obverses of the magnanim-
ous Lwas of the Rada and Congo rites. One of the most notable is Erzulie z'yeux Rouges or Marinette,
whose attributes lie half-way between those of Medusa and of a celestial executioner. The Mondongo
Lwas also form part of the Petro rite. They are the representatives of the Congolese race of the Mon-
dongos, who were notorious in colonial times for cannibalism. The official sacrifice of these Lwas has
now been reduced to the tamer fare of striped dogs, but they still have the reputation of being harsh and
gloomy brutes. Other Petro Lwas—Bakalou, Kitta, Zandor, etc.—also have a hateful renown.
There is no doubt that human sacrifice has, in the past, played a certain minor rôle in the rites of the
Petro Lwas. But, as Dr. Dorsainvil suggests, these ritual murders were the equivalent of Agamemnon's
sacrifice of Iphigenia to enlist the favour of the gods, or of Abraham's abortive immolation of Isaac to ap-
pease Jehovah. It is the expression of a psychological state fairly general in primitive humanity. And it is,
above all, a characteristic of primitive religions in which the gods may be unkind, harmful and wayward
powers which can only be appeased with human blood. So, though the offering may, in point of fact, be
eaten, such sacrifices must be absolved of the vulgarity of ordinary cannibalism.
This is a delicate theme. Ever since, in 1864, eight people were publicly executed for sacrificing and
eating a small girl called Claircine, the youthful Republic has had a bad time from foreign writers. This
reached such a pitch in the last century that Froude, disembarking for an hour or two in the Haitian port
of Jacmel, records, with an insincere coyness surprising in such a writer, that he hardly dared to glance
at the butchers' booths in the market for fear of the disquieting wares that might have been exposed for
sale. To me, ritual murder seems more remarkable by its scarcity than by its actual occurrences. A very
large number of the slaves originated in the Congo, and of these, many were drawn from the populous
Mondongo tribes. After the War of Independence, when repugnance to the defeated western ideas slowly
subsided, internal upsets of the state prolonged the illiteracy of the rural masses, and the peasant approach
to the teachings of the Church was a purely negative one. There was nothing to veto the prolongation of
the customs to which, in the happy freedom of Africa, they, or their fathers and grandfathers, had been
accustomed. Whether Mondongo anthropophagy was religious or merely gastronomic—Moreau de Saint