American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (36 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
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Page 230
Perhaps my knowledge of the consequences of shirking back from the gods, once invoked, was what convinced me, even more than curiosity, that I could not refuse to participate in ebo, either here or in Atlanta. Since I had undertaken an intellectual bargain, so to speak, to ascribe to divination by asking to learn its ways, I could not back out later. I couldn't say I was interested in having my fortune read but not in giving something back to the keepers of fortune. Refusing ebo would be bad faith. And so, step by step, I bound myself to the logic of my oath.
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Outside the world of voudou, however, sacrifice is still largely perceived as evil and satanicthe work of madmen, not holy men. There always seem to be examples of some psychopath dismembering someone or something and calling it a sacrificial rite. Any strange cult killings are usually seen as fringe evidence that voudou is evil because voudou, too, uses sacrifice.
The discovery of a bloody drug cult operating in 1989 near Matamoros, Mexico, for example, spurred a widespread backlash against voudou. The leader, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, was a Cuban-American who had grown up in Miami and knew enough about santeria and palo to concoct his own coked-up versions. Apparently, his idea was that human sacrifice would protect his gang from getting caught. He stretched palo's use of a human bone in the nganga to the idea that you had to keep killing fresh victims to keep the pot working. That the theory bore as much relation to voudou or palo as Jonestown to Christianity was not only lost on Constanzo's gang of morons, but on most people who read about the gruesome killings or saw clips about them on TV.
That story was in the news much of the summer I was on the road, and those in the religion everywhere I went were intrigued by the investigation. But there was a marked difference between their reactions and those of nonvoudous. Among

 

Page 231
voudous, Matamoros coverage was a matter of information, not reproach. Nonvoudous, on the other hand, kept trying to draw me out, the supposition being that deep, deep down, weren't the killings in Matamoros, like the fictitious ones in movies such as
Angel Heart
or
True Believers,
what voudou was really about?
Wasn't voudou really about human sacrifice
?
Yes and no. In Yoruba tradition, human sacrificeas opposed to that of animals and fowlis a matter of historical evolution. For many centuries, voudous in Africa sacrificed humans to their gods, as did many religions, including Christianity, if you consider Jesus to have been sacrificed on the cross. But the practice, which had been almost exclusively limited to sacrifice of criminals and prisoners of warto state executions, in other wordsstopped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at least partly through pressure from European colonial governors who thought capital punishment should be reserved for themselves.
Yoruba legend accounts for the cessation in a different way. The story is that a famous Yoruba king was confronted with a demand from Ifa to sacrifice not criminals, but his own daughteras Abraham had been asked to sacrifice his son to prove his faith. The king anguished. He did not want to anger the gods, but he loved his daughter dearly. He consulted Ifa again, and from the reading concluded that perhaps he could substitute a warm-blooded mammal for his beloved child. It was worth a chance. The god accepted the offering and the piety of the king, and from that time, it has been considered acceptable in orisha voudou to offer mammals, not humans, as the highest type of blood sacrifice.
It is important to note, however, that the shift in attitude was about the kind of ebo, not the concept itself. Anyone considering following the path of the orisha must accept that. The Oba made that plain to me one afternoon in a singularly astringent analysis.

 

Page 232
''I didn't have a problem with Matamoros," the Oba had shrugged, lighting his pipe as we sat alone in the village bazaar. "Human sacrifice is a part of every culture. Americans still sacrifice humans when they execute somebody. They execute them not because they broke the laws of god or the cosmos, they broke the laws of America, laid down by some people who said this or that or the other. They bring in a preacher or a priest, then they get a ceremony going. And the priest reads some verses out of his Bible and he makes prayers, and then they execute the man."
He brushed away a mosquito. "That's really a ceremonial sacrifice. And this is essentially the same thing and the same reason that they did it in Africa. These were criminals who had been condemned to capital punishment. They held them, and once a year they'd execute them all at the same time. They also sacrificed prisoners of war, at an annual ceremony when they had to send people to the king's ancestors to be his bodyguards.
"But only a king could order a capital punishment, a capital sacrifice. And that was my argument with the people in Matamoros. They were not kings. So that was a criminal act, what they did. If a king had ordered it, or a government, then it's legal."
He looked at me to make sure I was following the point.
"Only the government has the right to kill people. The average individual cannot kill, but the government does or the governor does in the name of the people of the statethe same way it was in Africa. The king did it in the name of the government, of the people of the nation, for the welfare of the nation. That was the concept."
The Oba had obviously considered the question for so long, and in such detail, that he talked about human sacrifice as dispassionately as a scientist analyzing a laboratory theorem. I tried not to let my face show that I found the discussion unsettling, that in some way I was suspending the idea that we were talk-

 

Page 233
ing about killing people. But he saw my thoughts. Re-lighting his pipe, he tried to account for my lack of serenity.
"The idea of death in Africa is not the same thanatophobia that Westerners have," he said. "Remember, Western ideas of death have come mainly from Judaism, which is mainly: once you dead, you done. Christianity tried to alter that a little bit by adopting the ancient Egyptian idea of resurrection, but you still never returned. In the African system, if you killed a person, after twenty years or so they're back again, and so death is never as final in the African mind as it is here. That's why Africans for the most part don't have a big thing about dying. They know they're going to come back anyway."
I accepted thatthe sociology and mythology of it. But there was still another aspect: the bottom line. All philosophical issues aside, did sacrifice really work? Could a serious person believe it? Dr. Epega, author of
Ifa: The Ancient Wisdom
, was a very serious person, and he believed sacrifice could affect fate. The late Lydia Cabrera, the respected Cuban scholar whose path-breaking study of palo mayombe,
El Monte
, is considered the definitive reference on the Kongo practice, believed in the powers of sacrifice. All manner of serious people believed so.
I just didn't know if I didtruly.
In addition to honoring or placating the orisha, blood sacrifice is considered to have the real-life property of matter-energy-matter transformation. That's how it's supposed to work. You pray, something happens. Mind and spirit become manifest in matter. I have never been comfortable with this idea. It seems like alchemy, or, at best, unverifiable mythologysnake stories. But mind-matter conversion is central to voudou, and perhaps to all religion.
In Christianity, in Islam, in Judaism, in Buddhism, we seek to transfer power from God to ourselves (or our purposes) through focusing energies on thought-wavesbetter known as

 

Page 234
prayers. We believebelief being the key principlethat our prayers will be relayed to God, who will transform them into the desired action or material effect. It is common in all these religions to supplement the prayer with candles, statues or texts as focal objects of concentration.
Voudou's use of charms, shrines and so on are no different, but to that is added what the other religions have largely abandoned, except symbolically: the necessity of living focal objects. In that sense voudou is truly pagan, which is to say nonChristian. But does that render the system rationally invalid? If scientific philosophy can accomodate Christian Creationism, for example, is there some reason it can't accommodate the feeding of the gods?
Not to the Oba of Oyotunji, and he was a serious person, too. "Actually what we're doing is activating fire energy," he said of the voudou version of transubstantiation. "You don't have to use animals. You can use plants. But blood is much more active and energetic. Any physicist can explain that to youblood is a much more dynamic energy than, say, sap.
"When we do ebo, during the ceremony we sing, 'May this blood change into money.' What we're doing is asking that this blood which we're sacrificing activate and change so that it brings money to this person. The reason we smear the blood all over them is to activate their fire energies.
"But you've already got the energy in you," he said. "You're born with all the energies of the cosmos. The day you took your first breath you got it in you, to greater or lesser degrees. If it's weak in one area you can do things to make it stronger. One thing is you might take a piece of iron and hang it around your neck like a chain or put it around your leg."
I remembered the piece of chain I carried in my pocket, bought from a voudou priest here three years ago. He had said it would give me strength, and suggested I wear it on my ankle.

 

Page 235
But he never told me exactly why, and I had found it more convenient to keep in my pocket. I showed it to the Oba.
"That's good," he said, examining it professionally, "but you can get even more strength from that piece of iron if you go to a priest every week and let him put blood on the iron. The blood activates the metal and brings out the iron energy that is already in you. That blood is what is going to strengthen you and that is why you keep going back to the priest. Same way you keep going back and forth to a doctor when you use up your pillsyou go and get some more."
"Voudou is physics," the Oba smiled. "That's what it really is. Because you're working with energies. A priest is working with energies. He's saying that everything has got energy in it. Your fingernail and your hair has got energy. And they see a voudou priest making a little ball with these things and grinding them up into a powder." The Oba's hands spread upward and his voice rose in mock horror. "Wooooo!" he exclaimed. ''That's evil, because they can't understand it."
His voice dropped back to a normal, even a serious pitch. "But the point is the man is working with
physics
. Scientists have now discovered that every single follicle of your hair has got your DNA in it. And you can find a criminal by getting one hair. And you can break it down and it's got a DNA, an energy, unique to that individual. If you wanted to clone somebody, you could get the DNA from his fingernail or his hair, and that's physics."
He chuckled and got up to leave. "To the Yoruba that's old hat. They also know that everything you touch, you leave your energy on it. Humans have a terrible electrical force. There are plants like thatif you touch them they will close up and die. But the Africans discovered that first. They discovered the human aura."
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Page 236
Esu/Elegba altar, inside the royal compound, Oyotunji village.
Esu/Elegba altar. Feathers, palm oil, blood, honey and other elements denote
recent sacrifices. Pumpkin is for Oshun; old sewing machine and other iron
pieces are for Ogun.

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