The popular religion of Haiti, also found in the West Indies and parts of South America. A blending of Roman Catholicism with W African religion, its followers attend both the church and the voodoo temple, where a voodoo priest or priestess leads a ritual invoking of the spirits of the voodoo world through magical diagrams, songs, and prayer. The spirits possess the members in trance.
Voodoo (Vodun or Vudun in Benin and Togo; also Vodou in Haiti) is a name attributed to a West African ancestral religious system of worship and ritual practices, where deities are born and honored, along with the veneration of ancient and recent ancestors who earlier served the same tutelary deities.
African origins
The cultural area of the Fon, Gun, Mina and Ewe peoples share common metaphysical conceptions around a dual cosmological divine principle Nana Buluku, the God-Creator, and the God-Actor(s) or Vodun(s), daughters and sons of the Creator's twin children Mawu (goddess of the moon) and Lisa (sun god).
The Pantheon of Voduns, though not complete, is quite large and complex.
West African Vodou, just as all indigenous African Religions, has its primary emphasis on the ancestors, with each family of spirits having its own specialized priest- and priestesshood which are often hereditary.
European colonialism, followed by totalitarian regimes in West Africa suppressed Vodun as well as other forms of the religion. However, because the Vodou deities are born to each African clan-group, and its clergy is central to maintaining the moral, social, and political order and ancestral foundation of its villagers, it proved to be impossible to eradicate the religion.
Both American and Caribbean variations of the religion center on ancestral spirits and two main pantheons of Lwas;
Word Origin, Usage
Voodoo (Vodun or Vudun in Benin and Togo;
In the text that accompanied the UCLA Fowler Museum's nationwide exhibition - Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou;
Author Robert Tallant suggests that the spelling v-o-o-d-o-o first appeared in print within the Times-Picayune newspaper, in reference to the infamous gri-gri case of the late nineteenth century.
In the book Spiritual Merchants, folklorist Carolyn Morrow Long attests that:
Until the early twentieth century the name was spelled "Voudou" by most Louisiana writers.
In her book The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau scholar Ina Fandrich concurs that "voodoo" is an "American spelling" (2003:257).
The majority of academic works published over the last five years have followed similar naming conventions: 1.) "Vodu" and "Vodun" are used to describe historic and contemporary Vodun religion as practiced in Africa; Ward, 2004)
The word Voodoo is used to describe the Afro-creole tradition of New Orleans, Vodou is used to describe the Haitian Vodou Tradition, while Vudon and Vodun and Vodoun are used to describe the deities honoured in the Brazilian Jeje (Ewe) nation of Candomble as well as West African Vodoun, and in the African diaspora. Voodoo or Hoodoo also refer to African-American folk spirituality of the southeastern USA, with roots in West African traditional or "folk" spirituality.
Its roots are varied and include the Fon, Mina, Kabye, Ewe, and Yoruba peoples of West Africa, from western Nigeria to eastern Ghana. The Kongo rites, also known in the north of Haiti as Lemba (originally practiced among the Bakongo) and is as widespread as the West African elements.
Until recently, many assumed that the mixture of such traditions with Catholicism occurred in the New World.
The Fon tradition in Cuba is known La Regla Arará.
Survival in the Southern US
The versions of Voodoo which survived in the Southeastern USA, were connected with Christian mysticism in the minds of rural African Americans. Segregation minimized the number of bi-lingual African Americans (those who spoke basilect and fluent acrolect), and at the same time minimized the number of whites who could translate basilect well enough to discover Voodoo in the spoken, sung, or written words of middle class, working class or working-poor African Americans. In isolated African American communities, such as the Georgia Sea Islands or in the Mississippi Delta, Voodoo lore could be freely referenced and practices, at least the more subtle ones, were more public.
Many popular songs of the Delta Blues tradition (circa 1900 to 1941) referenced voodoo or its derivitive Hoodoo explicitly.
Scholars debate the variations of Voodoo, how they have survived, how much they have changed, and to what extent Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular were used as covers to enable the survival of Voodoo.
However, in the United States the story may be a little different, depending upon which scholarship you read. Some scholars believe confusion about Voodoo in the USA arises because there is a widespread system of African American folk belief and practice known as Hudu or more popularly as hoodoo. The similarity of the words hoodoo and Voodoo notwithstanding, hoodoo may have tenuous connections to organized religion like Vodou, but hoodoo may be an integral part of the Vodoun religion in West Africa and arguably throughout all of Africa.
Today, possibly due to the suppression of the Voodoo and Hoodoo traditions and Vodoun religion in the United States, most hoodoo 'rootworkers' are members of African American Protestant churches, but when hoodoo is compared to some of the African religions in the diaspora, the closest parallel is Cuban Palo, a survival of Congo religious beliefs.
In summary, Haitian Vudou is derived from West African religious traditions and was retained in modified form by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean who were captive in a mostly Catholic population. However, in the USA the Vodoun religion is derived from largely the Ewe and other West and central African groups .
Myths and misconceptions
Public relations-wise, Vodou has come to be associated in the popular mind with such phenomena as "zombies" and "voodoo dolls."
The practice of sticking pins in dolls has history in European folk magic, but its exact origins are unclear. This practice is not unique to New Orleans voodoo, however, and has as much basis in European-based magical devices such as the poppet and the nkisi or bocio of West and Central Africa.
There is a practice in Haiti of nailing crude poppets with a discarded shoe on trees near the cemetery to act as messengers to the otherworld, which is very different in function from how poppets are portrayed as being used by voodoo worshippers in popular media and imagination, ie.
Although Voodoo is often associated with Satanism, Satan is purely an Abrahamic belief and has not been incorporated in Voodoo tradition.
Demographics
About 80% of the population of Benin, West Africa, about 4½ million people, practice Vodun. there may be perhaps another million among the Anlo-Ewe of Ghana (13% Anlo-Ewe and 38% indigenous beliefs overall out of a population of 20 million.)
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