Vodou was created by individuals drawn from many different cultures.  It took on its characteristic shape over the course of several centuries. It has never been codified in writing, never possessed a national institutional structure - a priesthood, a national church, an orthodoxy, a seminary, a hymnal, a hierarchy, or a charter. It has no geographical center or mother church. Its practice seems to be highly variable locally.  So widely is it practiced that it is usually considered by the Haitians themselves to be the national religion (2).

  The masters, administrators, and missionaries misread the significance of the emergence of voodoo.  They ascribed any African beliefs or practices to superstition, idolatry, or Satanism.  Until the 18th century, the earliest descriptions of voodoo were dominated by stereotypes of a religion considered as snake-worshiping, diabolical, and barbarous. 
    Oppressed by a system of slavery intent on effacing their humanity, black people uprooted from Africa slowly evolved their own religion, based on the rites of voodoo.  It created a communal bond that served as the secret foundation for their various struggles for freedom. (4)

 

Baptism and  Dance of the Slaves
Rose-Marie Deruisseaux.
Detail. painting.

 

Punishment Inflicted on a Negro.
19th century. lithograph,
Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris

 
    Dances, songs, mythology, rituals, medicinal treatments, as well as the development of the Creole language and a family organization based on African kinship structures combined to forge new bonds between slaves who managed to run away.  In the community, the free revival of African traditions, carried a specific objective: the suppression of slavery.  Thus the runaway slave learned to employ all the resources of magic and sorcery, guided by the voodoo priests, who were skillful at making charms and utilizing poisonous plants and deadly potions.
    From 1750 to 1791, Saint-Domingue's slave masters lived in fear.  Many of their number had died of poisoning.  Despite the prohibition on the making and selling of suspicious drugs as well as on the practice of African magic, the unseen power of voodoo was so terrifying that it succeeded in attacking the very foundation of the slave system.  Free slaves known as Maroons, appeared on the colonial scene, known for their "magical" powers, and prophesied the extermination of the whites and the liberation of the slaves.
    One of the best known, in 1757, was Francois Makandal.  He sowed the seeds of fear among the planters and officials, not only by concocting poisons that killed slowly but also by obtaining talismans, called garde-corps, for rebellious slaves; the talismans were said to make them invulnerable to weapons and free them of all fear of white people.  Once the slave population learned of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.  They realized the moment was now or never to lead a final attack against slavery.  Maroon leaders gave the signal to revolt to all the Maroon camps, as well as to the slaves in the plantations.   (4)

    The accounts of planters and parish priests lead one to believe that a revolt was carefully planned in great secrecy.  A first meeting between the leaders of the Maroon camps led to a second, framed by a voodoo ceremony which took place on August 14, 1791.   From accounts that freely mix fact and legend it emerges that during this ceremony, called Bois-Caiman, the assembled slaves sealed a sacred pact, swearing to die rather than live under the foot of the colonial masters.  Participants shared the blood of a sacrificed black pig, while voodoo priests called for vengeance in the name of the god of the white people.  The insurrection began on August 22.  For two months, the rebellious slaves spread terror throughout the colony: Two hundred sugar plantations and 1800 coffee plantations went up in flames; some thousand white people were killed.  Independence was finally confirmed on January 1, 1804. (4)

 

 

 

Ceremony of Bois-Caiman
Dieudonne Cedor.
painting

 

 

 

 

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