Page 22 - The Flickering Cauldron Magazine - June 2022

becomes an individual soul and Semekokato (biological representation) seeks a body to guard during life.’
Ancestors are held in high regard in Vodou, it is believed that the dead provide protection and guidance to the living if they are properly respected.
The Vodun, Vodou deities, are a family. Mawu-Lisa is the parent of all the other Vodun, all of whom serve specific functions. Vodou is centred on the concept of the balance of energies.
With the European slave trade controlled by the Spanish (Hispaniola) in 1492, more than fifteen thousand African slaves of different ethnic groups were taken to the island of Haiti. Each of these ethnic groups had their own language and sets of beliefs and this mixing of so many different ways led to the development of the Western incarnation of Vodou, known as Voodoo.
The Vodun of Africa evolved into the Iwa of the Haitian tradition. Unlike the Vodun, ‘the Iwa can be malevolent and meddlesome and have a place within the everyday lives of Vodouists. The Iwa can ‘mount’ or enter the body of a believer anytime and possess them, controlling their actions and leaving them with no memory of the experience afterwards.’
This reordering of the powers of the Vodun into those of the Iwa is thought to be a response to the attempts made by Spanish masters to convert slave to Catholicism, often forcing them to swear oaths against their traditional practices. Slaves went through unspeakable abuse at the hands of their masters, so the Iwa emerged as deities more involved in the lives of their followers.
Vodou was kept alive as a link to Africa and continued to be practiced in secret, but Haitian slaves realised that in order to preserve their culture in such an oppressive environment, they would need to be adaptable.
After France took control of the island, king Louis XIV issued the code Noir in 1685, ‘declaring it illegal for slaves to congregate in large numbers without the supervision of whites, in order to prevent the practice of traditional religions and possible insurrection,’ the Code Noir also made any religion, aside from Catholicism, illegal and considered to be Satanism.
So, Voodooists adapted their generation of the Iwa, by identifying them as synonymous with many of the Catholic saints.
Because of the abhorrent conditions that the people found themselves in, another tradition of Vodou emerged, the Petwo tradition. Here the Iwa were shown as more assertive and vengeful than the Iwa of the Rada tradition (West African). ‘The Petwo tradition was Kongo in origin and was a much more aggressive incarnation of Vodou, associated with the invocation of spirits and charms to both heal the sick and punish the wicked.’ This division points out the belief on the part of Vodou that energy itself is neutral, it is neither inherently good or evil and can be swayed in either direction, depending on the actions of the individual and the deity involved. ‘Petwo Vodou did not believe in a separate system of deities; they simply reinterpreted their personalities.’
The Petwo movement and the dances that were involved in the practice, are thought to have inspired the Haitian revolution and to have initiated the influx of Vodou into the United States as the ‘upheaval in Haiti led to a massive migration of emigrants to the Southern United States, in particular Louisiana, and led to an explosion of the Americanised form of the Vodou religion, which came to be known as ‘Voodoo’ in the United States.’
Vodou itself did not survive in its purest form in the United States. American Christianity had been dominated largely by the Protestant denominations, which did not condone the worship of idols and accepted only two of the seven Catholic sacraments. Acculturation and assimilation also played a role in the decline of Vodou practises. ‘The total number of slaves imported to the New World from the beginning of the slave trade until 1861 was 9,566,000 of which only 427,000 went to the English colonies in North America.... /.... the nations of South America and the Caribbean accounted for the majority of the remaining slave population.’
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