Voodoo, Vodun & Hoodoo Walk into a Bar…
So, what is voodoo? Most know what a voodoo doll is or have seen the movies and TV shows popularizing zombies. But those sensationalized snippets from a larger religious practice barely scratch the surface. It’s a bit like trying to understand Roman Catholicism from watching The Exorcist. Or learning about Islam by watching Disney’s Alladin.
Start with the word “Voodoo,” which is an anglicized version of Vodun, derived from the Fon and Ewe languages spoken in West Africa. Roughly translated, it means “spirit” or “divine being.” Voodoo, Vodun, and Voudon are basically alternate spellings referring to the same religion–though the term “Hoodoo” has a somewhat different origin. Coined by Zora Neal Hurston, an African American writer and anthropologist, “Hoodoo” refers to the unique practice of New Orleans voodoo.
The enslaved carried traditional African religious practice with them across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships. Once the enslaved arrived in the Americas, their traditional religious beliefs became intertwined with Christianity, most notably Roman Catholicism, foisted upon them by French colonists.
Essentially, three African streams feed the voodoo tradition. From the Fon and Ewe of Dahomey came the vodun themselves and the ritual architecture built around them. From the Yoruba, further east, came the orisha and sophisticated systems of divination. From Congo, in Central Africa, came ancestor veneration, ideas about the boundary between the living and the dead, and the minkisi –consecrated objects charged with spiritual power, the direct ancestors of what Louisiana Hoodoo practitioners would call gris-gris.
As with Middle Eastern religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these African systems share a basic form: a creator god exists but is remote and not directly petitioned. Between that god and humanity stands a crowded population of spirits, each with a personality, preferences, colors, foods, and songs. The faithful approach these intermediaries through prayers, offerings, drumming, and dance. The dead remain a potent force and are owed attention from the living. Contrary to popular claims, voodoo is not a species of witchcraft, or a “dark art,” but a complete religion with a cosmology, ethics, initiation, and a governing priesthood.
Zora Neal Hurston introduced voodoo to a broader American audience in her book, Tell My Horse (1938), an ethnographic study that covers Haiti and Jamaica. Neal received support from the Guggenheim Foundation to do fieldwork in those island nations during 1936–37. The book’s title comes from the possession idiom: the lwa (the spirit) mounts a devotee, who becomes the spirit’s horse, and Papa Guédé speaks through them, like a spiritualist medium, prefacing his remarks with “tell my horse.”
Hurston’s book includes her well-known photograph of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a female patient in a Gonaïves hospital who was said to have died decades earlier–making it the first published photo of a purported zombie. The image did much to launch the zombie sub-genre. During her field work in Haiti, Hurston also wrote her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the span of about seven weeks. Putting most novelists to shame!
Hurston distinguished herself from others writing about voodoo by treating voodoo as a unique religion with an internal logic rather than as a set of superstitious beliefs or a “magical” practice. She also insisted on viewing “Hoodoo” as a distinctly American form of voodoo, separating it from other forms of vodun as one might separate Baptists from Catholics in the Christian community. And while controversial in the anthropological community, Hurston also chose to engage in voodoo rituals herself. She was initiated as a member and directly participated in voodoo ceremonies rather than merely observing them from the outside.
Hurston noted that the Atlantic slave trade had concentrated captives from Benin and Congo in the French Caribbean, particularly in Saint-Domingue. There, the Code Noir mandated Roman Catholic baptism and forbade African worship, so the religious practice Africans carried with them was forced underground and gradually acquired certain Roman Catholic twists, such as saints standing in for the lwa, and the use of holy water, candles, and novenas. Although some of the adopted practices amounted to camouflage, much of it was sincere synthesis, and created a new religious form.
Louisiana’s own African population arrived in phases, heavily Senegambian during the early French period, with substantial Congo influence thereafter, but the decisive event was the Haitian Revolution. Between 1809 and 1810, roughly ten thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue, expelled from Cuba, landed in New Orleans. Voodoo came with them. The city’s population nearly doubled, and its Afro-Creole culture was reinforced at precisely the moment American rule arrived to threaten it.
New Orleans Voodoo organized itself around individual practitioners, queens, doctors, laborers, rather than around temples and congregations, and it leaned toward healing, protection, charms, and case-by-case problem-solving. Sunday gatherings at Congo Square, where enslaved and free Black people were permitted to drum, dance, and trade, sustained a public African ritual life that existed almost nowhere else in the United States.
A body of folk magic developed alongside the more traditional voodoo practice and spread across the wider Black South. The Voodoo doll, featured in my novel, comes from this Hoodoo tradition and owes its widespread fame to Hurston probably more than any other writer or anthropologist.
The Secte Rouge, which plays a critical role in my novel, emerged in Haiti as an anti-colonialist vigilante group dedicated to expelling European colonizers. While it relied on violence and intimidation, it’s unclear whether claims of cannibalism and human sacrifice were factual, or merely folk tales designed to frighten. Like many underground organizations with violent origins, it evolved into a criminal enterprise engaging in everything from drug running to murder-for-hire.
Although I take numerous liberties with the presentation of voodoo in my book, it should be remembered that voodoo is a religion that helped the oppressed cope with inhuman treatment. It gave hope to people whose lives seemed hopeless. Just as a story about exorcism should not define Catholicism, nor should a story involving “left-hand magic” define voodoo. It’s only one aspect of a fascinating system of belief that served as an anchor for its practitioners during troubled times.