In a dark, airless temple decorated with paper flags and moldering food, voodoo houngan Adnor Adely takes on the look of one possessed.
His eyes shut tight. His shoulders hunch.
It is not only the rapture of the spirit world that energizes Adely. He is excited by April’s government decree giving the centuries-old practice of voodoo the status of an officially recognized religion. Voodoo priests — houngans — like him soon will be authorized to perform any civil service a Roman Catholic priest can, officiating at births, marriages and funerals.
“Voodoo has done everything for Haiti. It gave us our independence, while the imported religions held us by the throat,” says Adely.
“We owe this to Aristide. He can be considered the president of voodoo,” he says.
Legitimizing voodoo has strengthened Aristide’s image as a man of the people and probably has enhanced popular support for the rumored bid by the former Roman Catholic priest to amend the constitution so he can seek a third term as president.
Haiti is thought to be the first country to accord voodoo the same status as more structured religions. Voodoo is deeply intertwined in the two strands that have shaped Haiti: African slavery and French Christian colonization.
Practitioners meet to invoke spirits who give advice through the often frenzied voices of their worshipers. It is a religion based on prayer, music, dancing and sacrifice, often bloody.
Voodoo followers, thought to include about 80 percent of Haiti’s 8.1 million people, have been able to throw off the secrecy since Aristide’s proclamation that as an ancestral legacy, “voodoo is an essential part of national identity.”
Haiti’s Catholic clergy has reacted with alarm at the moves to empower voodoo practitioners to conduct rituals with legal significance, especially baptisms. The bishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Lafontant, issued a statement deeming the status accorded voodoo “excessive” and its application to civil ceremonies “an obvious mistake.”
The Roman Catholic Church has for years been losing its hold over Haitians in the face of Protestant and other missionaries who flood Haiti. None of the more established churches regard voodoo as a legitimate religion, but they have been more circumspect in their opposition. From the cultural perspective, academics believe that the move to bestow official sanction on voodoo is a rite of acceptance that should free Haitians to practice their beliefs without fear.
“The elite have always regarded voodoo as superstition, as a form of magic or mysticism,” says Jean Yves Blot, head of the National Bureau of Ethnology, a state academic office in the capital. But he regards it as the more natural faith of Haitians, as the European religions were imposed by colonial occupiers and fostered by missionaries. Slaves brought from Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries believed their spirit world followed them across the ocean.
“Voodoo was at the root of our independence and as such has an important place in our cultural identity,” says Blot, referring to the Bois Cayman ritual staged on the eve of the 1791 slave uprising. The ceremony that found its place in revolutionary lore was credited with inspiring the slaves to fight French forces and win Haiti’s independence.
The Los Angeles Times, is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
