tradition
African diasporic religions
Carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people, disguised behind Catholic saints, credited with starting a revolution — and then turned into a Hollywood monster.
What it is
The religions formed in the Americas by enslaved West and Central Africans, from Yoruba, Fon, Kongo and other traditions, under conditions designed to destroy them.
The major traditions:
- Vodou in Haiti, chiefly of Fon and Kongo derivation
- Santería or Lucumí in Cuba, chiefly Yoruba
- Candomblé and Umbanda in Brazil
- Palo in Cuba, of Kongo derivation
- Obeah in the anglophone Caribbean
- Ifá, the Yoruba divination system, practised in West Africa and across the diaspora
They share a general structure: a remote high god; a body of powerful intermediary beings — Yoruba orisha, Haitian lwa — each with characteristic domains, colours, foods, rhythms and personalities; ancestors; divination; and possession, in which a spirit is understood to mount a practitioner and act through them.
These are closed, initiatory traditions. One does not self-initiate, and practitioners are consistently clear about it. Nothing here is instruction.
Where it came from
From the transatlantic slave trade. Africans carried their religions with them and reconstituted them in the Americas out of whatever remained, across languages and ethnic groups thrown together by the trade.
The Catholic syncretism was both camouflage and genuine fusion. Enslaved people were forcibly baptised and forbidden their own worship. Identifying orisha and lwa with Catholic saints allowed practice to continue in plain sight — Shango with Saint Barbara, Ogun with Saint James, Erzulie with the Virgin. Whether this began as concealment and became sincere, or was always both, is argued about within these traditions, and the answer varies by tradition and by practitioner.
Ifá deserves separate mention. Its 256 odu, each with a large corpus of associated verses held in memory by the babalawo, constitute one of the world's major divination systems, structurally related to the material discussed under geomancy — though the direction of historical influence is contested and should not be asserted casually. UNESCO has recognised the Ifá tradition on its intangible heritage list.
And Vodou is bound up with the Haitian Revolution. The ceremony at Bois Caïman in August 1791 is traditionally regarded as the revolution's beginning. The revolt that followed defeated Napoleon's army and produced, in 1804, the first state founded by formerly enslaved people.
France then demanded an indemnity — compensation to slaveholders for their lost property — which Haiti paid, with interest, into the twentieth century, at a cost that beggared the country. The demonisation of Vodou is not separable from the international response to a successful slave revolution.
How it is practised
Not described here. What is public: practice is communal, organised around houses or temples under initiated leadership; involves drumming, song and dance; and includes divination, offering and possession.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the popular image is a fabrication with a traceable origin. "Voodoo" as Hollywood presents it — pins in dolls, zombies, black magic, malevolence — is not Haitian Vodou.
The pin-stuck doll is largely European folk magic by way of New Orleans hoodoo, not Haitian practice. The zombie has a real referent in Haitian folk belief, distorted beyond recognition. And the pulp literature that fixed the image in American culture was produced substantially during the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, when depicting Haitians as savage practitioners of a barbaric cult was politically convenient. William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) and the films that followed did the work.
We can say the persecution is legal and current, not historical. These religions were criminalised across the Caribbean and Brazil for long periods. In Brazil, Candomblé and Umbanda terreiros have been subject to sustained attack — vandalism, arson and assault — by militant evangelical groups in recent years, documented by Brazilian human rights bodies and by the communities themselves.
We can say the law has sometimes protected them. In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah (1993), the United States Supreme Court struck down unanimously a set of city ordinances that had been drafted to prohibit Santería animal sacrifice while permitting other slaughter — a decision that remains a leading authority on religious targeting.
We can say the appropriation problem here is particular. Because these are initiatory traditions, people offering "voodoo" services, orisha readings or initiations without lineage are not simply borrowing — they are claiming a status conferred only by initiation, and taking money for it. Practitioners regard this as a considerably graver matter than aesthetic borrowing, and say so publicly.
We cannot describe practice, and would not.
Further reading
- Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991) — ethnography written in long relationship with its subject.
- Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938) — an anthropologist and novelist writing from inside fieldwork in Haiti and Jamaica.
- Wande Abimbola's writing on Ifá, by a scholar and practitioner.