Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 176

Méry hints that it was the latter—atavistic beliefs certainly spiritualized and elevated it. Instances, with
the infiltration of western prejudices, became steadily rarer, and authorities are today agreed that human
sacrifice, in Voodoo, does not exist.
Whether ritual murder exists outside Voodoo is another matter. Many Haitians affirm that it is still
practised, extremely rarely, in remoter districts, by the nightmarish secret societies of wizards and nec-
romancers of which Father Cosme had spoken—the Vlinbnidingues, the Zobops, the Mazanxas and the
rest—in which the Wangaters, the Mauvais Mounes and the Werewolves invoke the Petro gods, who still
secretly demand, and here receive, their ancient offering of a hornless goat.
It is maintained that Black Magic, or Wanga, stands in the same relationship to Voodoo as the Black
Arts to mediæval Christianity. In practice the chasm is bridged by the fact that there is no prejudice
against 'working with both hands': combining the duties of a Houngan of the rites of Voodoo with the
less reputable office of a Bokor, or practitioner of Wanga. Many clients of the Bokors are members of
higher social strata than the run of Voodoo adepts, usually women in search of charms or love potions or
revenge, who would no sooner resort to a tonnelle than many European consultants of fortune-tellers or
mediums would dream of going to church.
African animism subsists in the attribution of souls and divine powers to inanimate objects, to plants,
stones, rocks, trees, caves or drums, which are known as the Resting-Places, the reposoirs , of the Lwas.
It was the unifying force of Voodoo, far more than the advent of New Ideas from Europe, that impelled
the slaves at the time of the French Revolution to revolt. The new ideas merely provided the opportunity
and implanted in their opponents the mood of doubt. The first chain-breakers—Mackandal the poisoner
and Boukman, whose terrible jacquerie struck the first overt blow—were both Voodoo initiates, and the
Haitians were carried to victory by the inspiration of their equatorial numina, for, like Castor and Pollux
at Lake Regillus, the Lwas appeared on the battlefield and participated in the rout of the whites. Now the
heroes of the war are themselves triumphant denizens of the Voodoo pantheon, worshipped in the Petro
rites with fanfares and drums and with the explosion of gunpowder and the clashing of sabres. Mackan-
dal and Boukman, and the cocked-hatted colossi of Toussaint l'Ouverture, Pétion, Rigaud and, above all,
the Emperor Dessalines, have undergone canonization or apotheosis. This, for Haitians, is the sovereign
importance of Voodoo: the memory and the worship of their great ancestors and heroes and a melancholy
and triumphant nostalgia for their lost home in the forests of Africa—the remote and legendary green
kingdoms of Nan Guinan .
The organism of a Voodoo adept is divided into three parts: the body; the p'tit bon ange , or tutelary spirit;
and the gwos bon ange , or soul. When the body sleeps, the gwos bon ange roams the ether, dances with
gods and devils, and visits the ghosts of his ancestors and only returns to his tabernacle at the moment
of waking. The strange dreams that it brings back form, in the brain of its owner, a life that has as much
importance and reality as that of the hours of waking. The adventures of the soul, should its owner pass
through the preliminary stages of initiation, are very complex. At one arcanum, at the moment of becom-
ing a hounci-canzo, it is confined by proxy in an earthenware pot de tête , and kept in the houmfor. This
captivity or dedication is symbolized by placing in the head-pot tufts of hair from the scalp, armpits and
pubic region of the candidate, alongside his nail parings, and the beak, blood and fluff of the bird which
was sacrificed to mark the occasion. The soul is equipped with a personal Lwa, which has to be replaced
by a similar ceremony after death. This is performed by the Houngan sitting astride the corpse under a
sheet, or—though it was long forbidden by the police—astride his grave after dark. After this rite, which