Imperiol Idols: French and United States Revenants in Haitian Vodou

Imperial Idols: French and UNITED STATES Revenants in Haitian VodouAuthor(s): Lauren DerbySource: History of Religions, Vol. 54, No. 4 (May 2015), pp. 394-422Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/680175 .

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IMPERIAL IDOLS :

FRENCH AND UNITED

STATES REVENANTS IN

HAIT IAN VODOU

Lauren Derby

A powerful sorcerer and clairvoyant who is said to have been the first person

to clamor for Haiti’s independence, runaway slave Francois Makandal ex-

pressed his wrath against the horrors of Saint Domingue slavery by ravaging

colonial society: assaulting people, refineries, and livestock and evading the

law for years before his final capture in 1758. Makandal commenced the

assault on French plantations through mass poisonings of the cattle and oxen

of French colons, until he was said to have eluded French troops by metamor-

phizing into a bird or an insect. This act became a social fact when it was can-

Ó 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2015/5404-0002$10.00

I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for a Burkhardt Fellowship, as wellas grants from International Studies, the Council on Research, the Department of History, and theCenter for the Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Latin AmericanStudies Association (LASA) for research and writing support. My comments on the baka arebased on a corpus of shape-shifter narratives collected in ten trips to Haiti and the DominicanRepublic from 2008 to 2013, as well as material collected by a group of students at the Universit�ed’�Etat d’Haıti on the Haitian earthquake in August 2011, in an oral history project funded by aLASA Special Projects Grant. Thanks to these students for their excellent research, and toWatsonDenis, Andrew Apter and Teresa Barnett for their participation in the project. I am grateful toKatherine Smith, Georges Ren�e, Rebecca Dirksen, and Kendy Verilus, who enabledmy fieldworkin Port-au-Prince in periodic visits around the Day of the Dead from 2008 to 2011; Martha EllenDavis, Abercio Alc�antara, and Irma Mora for support in B�anica, Elıas Pi~na, and Julio C�esar San-tana, who assistedwith fieldwork in Santo Domingo; Enrique Rivera, who contributed thematerialon spiritualism in NewYork; Katherine Smith, Winter Schneider, AndrewApter, Nile Green, Pat-rick Polk, Lisa McAlister, and Judith Bettelheim, for critical feedback, suggestions, and support;and Carlos A. Hern�andez, for computer assistance.



onized in countless Haitian paintings and popular stories, as well as the classic

novel about the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) by Alejo Carpentier, TheKingdom of this World.1 Nor wasMakandal the only Haitian antihero who nar-

rowly evaded authorities by changing form. When ruthless Tonton Macoute

Cl�ement Barbot was thrown in jail in 1963, he escaped prison by turning into a

dog, as have other prominent Haitian figures of resistance on the run, such as

the Caco patriots who eluded the US Marines by turning into feral beasts.2

Shape-shifting has thus been inscribed in the popular Haitian imagination as a

nationalist practice of resistance that has enabled Haitians to retain their sover-

eignty in the face of multiple international interventions.3 Scholars have taken

note of the role of Vodou during the revolution, yet few have considered the

impact of war and international intervention on Vodou itself. Nor have they

examined in depth the ways in which the magic used to resist foreign oppres-

sors may have been poached from an exogenous tool kit.4

Shape-shifting was but one of various techniques derived from sorcery that

became important weapons in the slaves’ arsenal during the revolutionary

war.Wanga, or protective devices, were threaded around the body as a means

of protective armor, and revolutionary commanders such as Georges (Jorge)

Biassou filled his battlefield tents with power objects such as magical points

( pwen), cats, and bones; sent troops into battle from nocturnal rituals; and

made death less worrisome to his troops with promises that their souls would

1Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, trans. Harriet de Onıs (New York: Farrar,

Straus & Giroux, 2006). Indeed, Makandal is such a powerful canonic figure that his name hasbeen adopted by some oungan (Vodou priests), such asWidner Dumay (personal communication,November 5, 2008).

2Interview with Yves Figaro, August 29, 2013. The term “Caco” is said to derive from the

name given to independence warriors for their elusive agility to disappear like birds (HoracePaul�eus-Sannon, Histoire du Toussaint-Louverture, vol. 3 (Port-au-Prince: H�eraux, 2003), 206 n15).

3Interview with Georges Ren�e, Port-au-Prince, November 2010. Popular heroes Charlemagne

Peralte in Haiti and Enrique Blanco in the Dominican Republic were said to be able to evade cap-ture by shape-shifting.

4For examples of scholars who have noted the influence of French demonology and magic on

Vodou, see Donald Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. DonaldCosentino (Los Angeles: FowlerMuseum of Cultural History, 1995), 25–55; Patrick Polk,HaitianVodou Flags (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); and Legrace Benson, “Vodou inHaitian Literature,” in Vodou in Haitian Literature and Culture, ed. Claudine Michel and PatrickBellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Works on Haitian Vodou includeLaennec Hurbon, Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (London: Abrams, 1994), Le barbare imaginaire(Paris: �Editions du Cerf, 1988), and Le dieu dans le vaudou Haïtien (Paris: Deschamps, 1987);Alfred M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Schocken, 1972); MayaDeren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: MacPherson, 1953); KarenMcCarthy Brown,Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1991); and Karen E. Richman,Migration and Vodou (Gainesville: University Press of Flor-ida, 2005).

395History of Religions



return to Africa.5 One battalion kept a white rooster mascot and was armed

with oxtails, which were said to turn bullets into dust.6 Other Atlantic slave

uprisings used similar protective magic. For example, Stephan Palmi�e has

explored the role of minkisi (power objects) in enabling military reconnais-

sance during the Cuban independence wars, just as Jo~ao Reis has discussed

how magical talismans were used to protect troops during a Muslim uprising

in nineteenth-century Bahia.7

Due to the fact that the bulk of revolutionary forces hailed from Central and

West Africa, many scholars have presumed that their sorcery (magi) tool kitwas entirely African derived, which presumes that slaves only drew upon past

knowledge to provide supernatural assistance in the field.8 Yet I am interested

in exploring here a different kind of logic—the domain of innovation—and in

particular the ways in which the aura of the Other was harnessed, for example,

on the battlefield to animate mystical warfare, and what happened to these

kinds of practices after the revolution. Mary Helms has discussed how “eso-

teric knowledge drawn from foreign sources has underwritten expressions of

power in many societies . . . including the acquisition and display of mystical

magical power.”9 Vodou also deploys sympathetic magic or mimesis in which

5George Eaton Simpson, “Haitian Magic,” Social Forces 19, no. 1 (1940): 98. For more on

Biassou’s life and political career, see Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions(Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2010).

6George Eaton Simpson, “The Belief System of HaitianVodun,” American Anthropologist 47,

no. 1 (1945): 36. This was also said of Charlemagne Peralte, who lead the Caco uprising againstthe USMarines in the 1920s.

7Stephan Palmi�e,Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-CubanModernity and Religion

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 186; Joao Jos�e Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: TheAfricanMuslimUprising in Bahia, 1835 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

8I use the term “sorcery” as a translation for the Krey�ol term for invisible forms of agency and

protection—maji—with the important admonition that these beliefs and practices have long beenused to denigrate Vodou, or local forms of “serving the spirits,” and have justified waves of perse-cution against it. M�etraux uses the term “sorcery” to refer to “any manipulation of occult forces,”but with the caveat that these are not seen necessarily as evil; for participants, the moral ascriptiondepends on the intent of the action. Evangelical Protestants conflate magic and Vodou as one,which enables them to cast it all as evil witchcraft (M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 266). On Evangeli-cal Protestantism in Haiti, see Paul Brodwin, Pentecostalism and the Production of Community inthe Haitian Diaspora (Milwaukee: University ofWisconsin, 2000). Kate Ramsey treats the antisu-perstition campaigns in her book The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2011); and persecution against anything associated with Haiti afterthe revolution is covered in Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collabo-ration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). “Sorcery”as a morally neutral term is used by Palmi�e (Wizards and Scientists) and by Roger Sansi and LuisNicolau Par�es, eds., Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).Many scholars take note of the fact that Vodou is syncretic (cf. Karen Richman, “Religion at theEpicenter: Agency and Affiliation in L�eogane after the Earthquake,” Studies in Religion/SciencesReligieuses 41, no. 2 [2012]: 148–65) and has incorporated elements drawn from Catholicism,Masonry, and other sources, but these traces have not receivedmuch sustained attention.

9Mary Helms,Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geographi-

cal Distance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 12, 16.

396 Imperial Idols



the power of the original is channeled by reproducing it.10 This essay analyzes

how foreign signs have been incorporated into sorcery practices in Haiti. This

topic is particularly perplexing in this context since, as the first country to

receive independence in Latin America and the only one to do so via a slave

rebel army, Haiti boasts a particularly fervent popular culture of nationalism.

I focus my attention on two moments of cultural appropriation, or what

Eric Lott has termed “love and theft,” the first from the colonial period and

the second from the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.11 I first treat a

form of shape-shifting sorcery called the lougawou or baka, which is associ-ated with secret societies originating in West Africa but has important roots

in French agrarian folklore concerning animals and the demonic.12 I also ex-

plore the impact of modern occultism on Vodou and the adoption of USMar-

ines into the Vodou pantheon as fearsome lwa (spirits). These techniques of

occult practice have become important weapons of assault sorcery in contem-

porary Haiti, used for healing as well as predation, and I argue that they reveal

the importance of a “symbolic economy of alterity” to Haitian religious prac-

tice, one that diverges dramatically from the official story of national iden-

tity.13Witchcraft is a tool of power, one that flourishes in situations of inequal-

ity, and Haiti’s slave society and later its highly stratified post-independence

context provided just that.14

vodou right and left

The popular religion known as Haitian Vodou was forged in the mid–eigh-

teenth century at the peak of the sugar boom, when the colony had a slave

majority, most of which emanated from the Kongo region of Central Africa.15

10Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York:

Routledge, 1993); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American WorkingClass (New York: Oxford, 1993); Roger Sansi and Luis Nicolau Par�es, “Introduction: Sorcery inthe Black Atlantic,” in Sorcery in the Black Atlantic, 8. For another take on mimesis in HaitianVodou, see Karen Richman, “Innocent Imitations? Authenticity and Mimesis in Haitian VodouArt, Tourism, and Anthropology,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 2 (2008): 203–27.

11Lott, Love and Theft.

12I will refer to this as a lougawou when discussing the Haitian phenomenon and a “loup-

garou” in relation to its French cousin. It may well also be influenced by Taıno sorcery, a topicwhich I take up elsewhere.

13Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright, “Introduction,” in In Darkness and in Secrecy: The

Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2004), 11.

14Michael Heckenberger, “The Wars Within: XinguanoWitchcraft and Balance of Power,” in

Whitehead and Wright, In Darkness and in Secrecy, 184. Evans Pritchard distinguished sorceryfromwitchcraft on the grounds that sorcery workedwithmedicines and witchcraft worked throughhereditary powers, but that distinction is not operative in this context.

15Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles Francaise (XVII–XVIIIe si�ecles) (Fort-de-France:

Caron-Ozanne, 1975), 56.




But the bipartite symbolic divide between the everyday Rada healing deities

and the opposed occult powers of the Petwo spirits has lent itself to structural

analysis as in Karen Richman’s concept of the “dialectic of ginen and magik”

or Serge Larose’s diacritic of ancestral precedence versus pursuit of individ-

ual gain, or gift versus commodity, even if, as Richman has noted, the distinc-

tion is not at all absolute.16 The contrast is also very much one of ethics since

the Rada are seen as convivial and communitarian, while the Petwo are dan-

gerous and immoral in part because they are intended to produce individual

gain and thus violate the normative collectivist ethos.17 The contrast also per-

tains to public versus private since the Rada mysteries are openly displayed in

the altar, while, as the left hand of Vodou, the Petwo are often clandestine,

their rites and recipes kept private as occult knowledge that is passed along as

rumor, secrecy creating a veil of mystery and fear.18 Like symbiotic twins,

however, these two domains are conjoined; through sorcery illness can be sent

via a mo (spirit) to another, the cure for which would be found through seek-

ing healing and protection from themist�e (spirits).19

If the Rada are family gods, handed down by ones’ ancestors, the Petwo

are patently strangers and are empowered in particular by their association

with exotic technologies. The Petwo are foreign from their very foundation.

As KarenMcCarthy Brown put it, the Petwo lwa “embody the individualism,

effectivity, and power of foreigners,” or, as one Haitian informant put it, “a

pwen is a stranger from far away.”20 Their eponymous ancestor was Don

Pedro, a Spaniard; gunpowder is a central element in many rites, since it

reflects the hot power that is characteristically Petwo and one that as an import

is alien to Haiti. Other key export commodities such as spiced rum, coffee

grounds, and coins—products that linkedHaiti to theworld during the triangle

trade—are also characteristically Petwo.21 Even seemingly banal white bread

16Sincewithin families purchased spirits can be inherited; see Richman,Migration and Vodou,

chap. 6; and Serge Larose, “TheMeaning of Africa in HaitianVodou,” in Symbols and Sentiments,ed. I. M. Lewis (London: Academic, 1977), 85–115. Andrew Apter also has an argument aboutthis contrast; see “Herskovits’s Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora,” Dias-pora 1, no. 3 (1991): 235–60. But it must also be said that the rada/petwo contrastive terminologyis often not recognized outside of Port-au-Prince, that any lwa can come down “hot” or dangerous;also, there are other families of lwa besides these two groups.

17Deren says that the petwo’s “closeness to magic” has given it “a reputation for malevolence”

(Divine Horsemen, 61).18

This is exemplified in rumors, for example, that Petwo rites require human sacrifice. See JohnHouston Craig,Cannibal Cousins (NewYork:Minton, Balch, 1934), 140.

19Paul Farmer, “Sending Sickness: Sorcery, Politics, and Changing Concepts of AIDS in Rural

Haiti,”Medical Anthropology Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1990): 6–27, esp. 15.20

KarenMcCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting: Ogou in Haiti,”inAfrica’sOgun: OldWorld and New, ed. Sandra Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1989), 69; Richman,Migration and Vodou, 190.

21M�etraux,Voodoo inHaiti, 86.

398 Imperial Idols



in Haiti can be used in the Petwo rite of housing a zonbi (disembodied soul) if

entombed in a bottle (wheat, of course, has never been produced locally).22

haitian werewolves as assault sorcery

Shape-shifting, or the ability to transform into an animal, is classed by Hai-

tians within the left side of Haitian Vodou, since these abilities transcend the

healing arts, which are governed by the lwa found in the everyday Vodou

pantheon.23 These skills are classed within the domain ofmistik konesans, theKrey�ol term for the occult or the supernatural. Magi is agentive; it seeks toeffect a cure, make money, or gain a visa. Thus, it is a form of sorcery. Opac-

ity is a central feature of the arts of Vodou, and clairvoyance, the ability to

observe and engage the spirit world, is a skill obtained through devotional

practices or initiation. As Liza McAlister put it, the “unseen world of preda-

tory spiritual transactions” is commonly invoked to explain inequality and

other open secrets in Haiti.24

In the wake of Robert Farris Thompson’s pathbreaking research on Afri-

can diaspora art history, scholarship on Haitian religion has stressed African

contributions to the sacred arts. In Flash of the Spirit Thompson proposes that

Vodou is “Africa reblended. The encounter of the classical religions of

Kongo, Dahomey, andYorubaland gave rise to a creole religion,” but this reli-

gion in his view does not have a noticeable European component in the mix.

He proposes that the cool side of Vodou is derived from the Yoruba, and the

Petwo, or hot side, derives from Central African Kikongo practices, in partic-

ular the fabrication ofminkisi amulets, which are implanted with ritual medi-

cine, “being associated with the spiritual fire of charms for healing and attack-

ing evil forces.”25 The dark arts are thus presumed to emanate from the dark

continent. Some note that Haitian Vodou rites include Catholic liturgical

components from prayers to liturgy and that adepts believe one must be bap-

tized to be a Vodouisant, but the European contribution to Haitian sacred arts

22Simpson, “Haitian Magic,” 98. Richman discusses this in relation to the lwa blan or foreign

lwa; seeMigration and Vodou, 158–60.23

Interestingly the dexterity of Makandal as a sorcerer is emblematized by the fact that he losthis left arm in a machinery accident, the left being associated with the illicit; Michel Leiris, “TheSacred in Everyday Life,” in The College of Sociology, 1937–39, ed. Denis Hollier (Minneapolis:University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), 25.

24Elizabeth McAlister, “Haiti and the Unseen World,” in The Immanent Frame: Secularism,

Religion, and the Public Sphere, Social Science Research Council, January 31, 2010, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/01/31/haiti-and-the-unseen-world/.

25Robert Farris Thompson,Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy

(NewYork: Vintage, 1984), 164; Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun:West African Roots of Vodou,”in Cosentino, Sacred Arts, 61–87.




has not been sufficiently theorized.26 Yet what Stephen Palmi�e has termed

these “ghostly revenants from disavowed pasts” are often the most potent of

charm ingredients, as we shall see.27

The two central shape-shifters in Haiti are the baka and the lougawou,which are mystical forces that steal farm animals, harvests, and cash and can

kill through shape-shifting (dedoubleman in Krey�ol). Bakas are spirit crea-

tures created by sorcerers or hapless human victims who, via sorcery, are

turned into animals—dogs, cats, pigs, and goats—that amass wealth for their

owners (see fig. 1). They are hot spirits—mauvais esprits—that are difficult

FIG. 1.—Baka! Sculpture of a boy turning into a pig, by Andr�e Eug�ene, Port-au-Prince. Photo by the author, 2008.

26Exceptions are Terry Rey,Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti

(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999); LeGrace Benson, “How Houngans Use the Light fromDistant Stars,” in Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, ed. Claudine Michel andPatrick Bellegarde-Smith (NewYork: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006), 155–80.

27Palmi�e,Wizards and Scientists, 18.

400 Imperial Idols



to control and often entail a sacrifice; they can even turn on their owners. The

telltale sign of the baka is the anthropomorphism of the object—that the log,

rock, or dog is actually a person or a spirit that can metamorphize into a per-

son or an animal. These spirit demons can then be sent on mystical errands—

ekpedisyon—to steal, pillage, and harm others. They are said to be the product

of a devil pact (angajman) with a b�ok�o (sorcerer).28 My interviews suggest

that the baka is implicitly gendered male, since baka tales are often told by

men and form part of the genre of male travelers’ tales, while the lougawou isprototypically female, a version of the transatlantic blood-sucking witch phe-

nomenon that inverts the public motif of blood as a life-giving substance into

stories of secret malevolent deeds in which infants’ blood is sucked dry by

women transformed into poultry in flight.29

These stories are not dead folklore but rather popular beliefs that are very

much alive and have become increasingly important in Haiti in the aftermath

of the January 2010 earthquake, since the earthquake (and later the cholera

epidemic) were said by some to have been caused by a lougawou.30 In a

moment of extraordinary distress in which hundreds of thousands were killed

and half a million left homeless, people desperately wanted to find a moral in

the disaster, and some found solace in the millennialism of Evangelical Prot-

estant discourse. Their argument that the earthquake was punishment for the

satanic idolatry of Vodou, it seems, morphed into rumors that lougawou had

actually caused it.

These werewolves are no laughing matter.31 After the earthquake, in the

tent camps (where 1.3 million people resided until recently in Port-au-Prince),

women were accused of shape-shifting into black pigs or turkeys and snatch-

ing babies in the dark of night, resulting in vengeance killings in which some

men and women were stoned to death.32 These accusations have a history,

28For more on the angajman, see Deren,Divine Horsemen.

29Andrew Apter, “The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money, and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic

Perspective,” Journal of African-American History 98, no. 1 (2013): 72–98. For more on the gen-der of the baka/lougawou, see Lauren Derby, “La ciudad de los muertos: Los rumores como crea-dores de opini�on p�ublica en Puerto Principe, Haiti,” Istor: Revista de Historia Interncional 18, no.50 (2012): 37–55, and “Male Heroism, Demonic Pigs and Memories of Violence in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands,” UCLA Center for the Study of Women Update, May 10, 2010, 1–14. InCarriacou, the loup-garou (French spelling) is also a female entity; see M. G. Smith, Kinship andCommunity in Carriacou (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).

30Leslie G. Desmangles and ElizabethMcAlister, “Religion in Post-earthquake Haiti,” inHaiti

Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, ed. Martin Munroe (Kingston: Uni-versity ofWest Indies Press, 2010), 70–78; and Richman, “Religion at the Epicenter.”

31Julio Caro Baroja describes shape-shifting allegations as “comical” inWorld of the Witches

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 96.32

Blog entry titled “The Loup-Garou Problem in Haiti,” http://alcimines.livejournal.com/146454.html;MatthewBigg and JosephGuyler Delva, “Haiti Quakes Raises Fears of Child-EatingSpirits,” Reuters, January 27, 2010; Prabirghose, “The Child-Eaters of Haiti Create Scare,” contrib-




since claims that beef was actually human flesh landed several people in jail

on cannibalism charges in the 1870s.33 A form of assault sorcery, the bakathen is sent to secretly enact symbolic violence against others, which is mor-

ally reprehensible and thus must occur in the form of an authorless crime. In a

face-to-face context governed by rigid rules of deference and demeanor, the

baka enables the enactment of socially illegitimate acts such as revenge vio-

lence or theft. In a context of poverty and rigidly coded behavioral norms, it

also enables agency when no other outlets are available to redress harm or

acquire cash in times of extreme duress. Bakas are classed with greatly fearedsecret societies in Haiti, such as the Bizango (fig. 2), which are said to prowl

about as ferocious dogs, or the chanpw�el, or cochons sans poil (hairless pigs),which shed their skin at night and lurk around as bones.34

FIG. 2.—Akiki Baka’s temple proclaiming his Bizango powers. Photo by the author,

2008.

utor report, All Voices, January 29, 2010; Tamara Keith, “Port-au-Prince Journal: Lives Filled withFear,”NPR: Reporter’s Notebook, February 13, 2010; “Wolf-Men Lynched in Haiti’s Ruins,”ABCNews (ABC.net.au), January 28, 2010. Although the press reports did not pay attention to gender,in my interviews on the lougawou problem, as well as those collected by my students at the Uni-versit�e d’Etat d’Haıti in August 2011, the lougawou seems to have been gendered female.

33Ramsey, Spirits and the Law; Laennec Hurbon, Le barbare imaginaire (Paris: �Editions du

Cerf, 1988).34

Colin Dayan (Haiti, History and the Gods [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995])takes this skin shedding to be a comment on race and whitening.

402 Imperial Idols



It has been argued that these secret societies are Haitian variants of African

totemic communities, whose members, when spirit possessed, can become

lions or leopards.35 Indeed, as Allen Roberts has explained, among the Tabwa

of Central Africa, lions are “natural symbols” representing values that ideal

chieftains should embody, including bravery, hunting skills, and dominance,

and thus shape-shifting in this case is a form of intimate heroic identification

with the clan identity. The lion is a totem, and elders tell stories of lions

hatched from maggots that are sent out to hunt and protect community

fields.36 And in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, injuries sustained by large predators

were said to be the result of witches transformed into leopards. The lion was

not the only chosen animal emblem; there were also human-baboons and

human-alligators.37

While there certainly is a strong family resemblance between theseAfrican

phenomena and Haitian lycanthropy, there is also, however, a very significant

difference between a ferocious lion and a lowly pig, which must be accounted

for. Indeed, I have heard of baka sightings of pigs, turkeys, dogs, chicken,

horses, and cows. But the most common shape-shifter animals in Haiti are

dogs, cats, turkeys, and the beloved Creole pig, the backbone of rural Haitian

life and preferred food for the gods until their untimely slaughter (by USAID)

in 1979.38 Indeed, it could be argued that the class of animals found in Haitian

shape-shifter narratives—notwithstanding the fact that these are spirit demons

and not real ones—ismuchmore similar to the Europeanmodel of animal hus-

bandry than African chieftaincy. For British anthropologists Edmund Leach

and Mary Douglas, animals become symbolic because they are anomalous,

yet by contrast, the turkey and pig in Haiti are significant due to their everyday

subsistence importance for the family.39

35Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo (San Francisco: City Lights, 1985), 164; Erica Bour-

guignon, “The Persistence of Folk Belief: Some Notes on Cannibalism and Zombis in Haiti,”Journal of American Folklore 72, no. 283 (1959): 38.

36A. F. Roberts, “’Perfect’ Lions, ‘Perfect’ Leaders,” Journal des Africanistes 53, no. 1 (1983):

93–105, esp. 96.37

David Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 9.

38See Paul Farmer, “Swine Aid,” in The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis, ed. James Ridgeway

(Washington DC: Essential Books/Azul, 1994), 130–34; Lizabeth Paravisini Gebert, “Of CreolePigs and Other Vanishing Species: The Environmental Costs of Colonialism in the Caribbean”(paper presented at the Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism Mellon Seminar Series, UCLA,April 22, 2009).

39Edmund Leach, “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” in E. H. Lenneberg,NewDirections

in the Study of Language(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger:An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (NewYork: Routledge, 2005), 23–42.




european origins

Yet even if the baka draws upon a secret konesans (the Haitian term for “mys-

tical knowledge”) from Ginen (Africa) about powerful little black men who

reside in the forest, this imagery has clearly been nourished by European

imagery of evil.40 Elaine Breslaw has noted that the iconography of the singu-

lar figure of Mephistopheles armed with a pitchfork emerged only around the

time of transatlantic expansion; before Satan ruled supreme, there were smal-

ler demonic forces that were morally ambiguous, since “evil and the demonic

were seen as intrinsically linked to divinity itself,” as in miraculous virgins

inhabiting particular locales that attack men or appear in the shape of an ani-

mal, such as a bear or a ram.41 These lesser demonic figures were part of a

worldview that included invisible forces—some wondrous, some wicked—

that existed in a realm parallel to religion in what CottonMather termed “little

sorcerie.” They resided in what Jacques Le Goff has described as the place

between the divine and the diabolical supernatural that he calls the “marvel-

ous.”42 Carlo Ginzburg has described how various pre-Christian agrarian rites

such as beliefs in fairies and elves were distorted “in a diabolistic direction”

by the Inquisition, as they were transformed from freestanding minor entities

into the devil’s minions, with characteristic features such as nocturnal visits to

the realm of the dead either via metamorphosis into an animal or by riding

upon one.43 As he notes, the stereotype of the werewolf that devours sheep

and children arose from medieval versions that were innocent or even benefi-

cent.44 Interestingly, werewolves often appeared before Easter when Satan is

believed to be present, and a range of popular carnival performance traditions

in Latin America at that time represent the devil and beat him back.45 In the

40One possible source of the baka might have been slave lore about the mysterious little people

(pygmies) of the interior rain forests of Central Africa, who are called the Baka; see Luis Devin,La floresta ti ha: Storia di un’iniziazione (Rome: Castalvecchi, 2012), or his website pygmies.org.

41See Fernando Cervantes, Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 40, although he is describing Mesoamericannotions of divinity; Carlo Ginzburg,Ecstasies: Deciphering theWitches Sabbath (NewYork: Pan-theon, 1991), 73. The Dominican ciguapa is such an example; covered with hair, appearing ingroves, she is alluring but dangerous.

42See Elaine G. Breslaw, Witches of the Atlantic World: A Historical Reader and Primary

Sourcebook (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 97; and the essay on wonders in Jac-ques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1988), 12.

43Ginzburg,Ecstasies, 97. See also Carlo Ginzburg,Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults

in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).44

Ginzburg,Ecstasies, 137, 154.45

I heard that the devil was present between Good Friday and Easter Sunday while attendingthe M�ascaras del Sur rites in B�anica, Elıas Pi~na (a town that for centuries was located in Haiti andis extremely bicultural), which take place on Good Friday, when groups dress as devils and beateach other with whips. This forms part of a pan–Latin American tradition based on Catholic litur-

404 Imperial Idols



ancient world, the wolf was associated with death, and traces of this exist in

Haiti as well, since Lenten performance genres, such as the sequined Rara

bands, appear not only during Holy Week but also at Vodou festivities on the

Day of the Dead.46 In Kongo nkisi (sing. of minkisi) power objects, dogs arethreshold creatures that guard the land of the dead.47

Given that France was an agrarian society in which small livestock hus-

bandry of poultry, pigs, and goats was a staple of rural life and where people

lived intimately with their animals, it should not be a surprise that black chick-

ens and cocks figure prominently in popular sixteenth-century French magic

and sorcery. Dead animal hearts were used in charms and amulets, and some of

the most common forms of magic were aimed at safeguarding barnyard live-

stock, which were the lifeline of the French peasantry.48 Indeed, the very term

“loup-garou” is of French origin, and the phantom lurks around the entire former

French empire fromNova Scotia toMartinique. In some versions the baka bearsa strong family resemblance to evil creatures in medieval France called dracs,which stole into locked houses at night to snatch babies.49 Indeed, Haitian

shape-shifter lore more closely resembles that of France than of West and Cen-

tral Africa, since these monsters present as the intermediate animals residing at

the interstices of pets and game and traversing the bounds between the human,

animal, and spirit world, thus moving between the patio and the bush (nanbwa). It is the domestic animals found around the homestead (frequently kept

gical dramas staged by Jesuits in the colonial period; see Richard C. Trexler, “We Think, TheyAct: Clerical Readings of Missionary Theater in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” in Steven L.Kaplan,Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century(NewYork: Mouton, 1984), 189–227; William Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Epi-sodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Elizabeth McAlister,“‘The Jew’ in the Haitian Imagination,” in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounterswith Judaism, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathanial Deutsch (New York: Oxford University Press,2008), 203–28; and Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1978), 80–81.

46Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).47

Wyatt MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the Bakongo: Minkisi from the Laman Collection(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4.

48 Le v�eritable dragon noir, ou les forces infernales soumises �a l’homme: �Evocations, charmeset contra-charmes, secrets merveilleux, la main du gloire, la poule noire (Paris: Niclaus, 1966).For an excellent study of the impact of French grimoires, with some discussion of their impact oncreole religions, see OwenDavies,Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (NewYork: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2009), 161–63.

49Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, 33. For more on French lycanthropy, see Caroline Oates,

“Metamorphosis and Lycanthropy in Franche-Comt�e, 1521–1643,” in Fragments for a History ofthe Human Body, pt. 1, ed.Michael Feher (Cambridge: Zone, 1989), 304–63. On French lougaroulore, see JayM. Smith,Monsters of the G�evaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 2011); and Gael Milin, Les chienes de Dieu: La repr�esentation du loup-garou en Occident (XI–XIX siecles), Cahiers de Bretagne Occidentale 13 (Brest: Centre deRecherche Bretonne et Celtique, Universit�e de Bretagne Occidentale, 1993).




by women) that are the most common objects of shape-shifting, not the grand,

ferocious game animals of the bush, as in Africa (which are hunted bymen).50

Notwithstanding the fact that Haitians themselves recognize Vodou to be

coterminous with Catholicism, the French contribution to baka lore might

surprise. Due to the close correspondence between the Aja-Fon deities of the

Bight of Benin and those in Haiti, some scholars have assumed that this cul-

ture area provided the base template of Haitian religiosity. In an alternate

view, David Geggus has proposed that perhaps it may have been due to the

more “structured pantheon of gods” combined with the prestige of the power-

ful African kingdoms that gave the Aja-Fon slaves cultural dominance, given

the overwhelming demographic preponderance of Bakongo slaves.51 Yet

these are conjectures that must be assessed with the caveat that, as Lorand

Matory has argued persuasively, claims about African purity are “always a

function of power, negotiation, and strategic re-creation.”52

Indeed, the very term “Vodou,” which eminent scholars Jean Price-Mars

and Suzanne Blier have attributed to the Fon of Benin, may well have derived

from the French term vaudois or vauderie. The Vaudois (also known as the

Waldenses) were a branch of Christian reformers that emerged in the twelfth

century. They challenged the medieval church through the practice of poverty

and simplicity and were declared heretics and persecuted severely. Interest-

ingly, the Vaudois were said to transform into wolves. As a result, the terms

vauderie and vaudois came to mean “heretic” during the French Inquisition

and had become the generic term of derision for “sorcery” or “witch” by the

sixteenth century.53 Kate Ramsey argues that the French origins of the term

50Leach, “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” 46. For an example of a French shape-shift-

ing pig, see “Le petit tourn�e en cochon,” in R�ecits et L�egendes de Normandie, ed. Ren�e LepelleyandMonique L�eon (Cond�e-sur-Noireaux: Centres d’�Etudes Normandes, 1985), 84–86. I base thisobservation onmy oral histories of shape-shifter narratives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

51DavidGeggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, Resistance,”

Jahrbuch f€ur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 28 (1991): 21–51.

52J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in

the Afro-Brazilian Candombl�e (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 70. Those whohave argued for a more complex model of cultural fusion include Palmi�e,Wizards and Scientists;Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1996); andMargarite Fern�andez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds., Sacred Posses-sions: Vodou, Santer�ıa, Obeah, and the Caribbean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,1997).

53William W. Newell, “Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti,” Journal of

American Folklore 1, no. 1 (1888): 16–30; Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parle l’oncle (Ottawa: Lem�eac,1973); Suzanne Blier, African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1995); Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 6; and F. A. S., H. Hale, andWalter Hough “Voo-dooism: Is It a Myth?,” News and Notes, American Anthropologist 1, no. 3 (1888): 288–96.Thanks to Ghislaine Lydon for bringing this article to my attention.

406 Imperial Idols



vaudoux had been “conclusively settled” until Jean Price-Mars proposed its

origins in Dahomey in the 1920s.54

Clearly, Haitian popular religious practice must have been saturated with

folk Catholicism brought by French indentured servants, seamen, and ple-

bians who came fromNormandy to seek their fortunes in Hispaniola from the

sixteenth century onward. The timing of the settlement of La Tortue island,

which was the location of the first French colony in what would become Saint

Domingue, assured that the motley crew of fortune seekers and ex-convicts

who settled there would have been familiar with the term vaudois, since many

were fleeing troubles with the law and landed on boats headed for Saint Dom-

ingue as indentured servants. The fact that the Capuchin and Jesuit missionar-

ies were the chief evangelists in Allada, Dahomey, and colonial Saint Domin-

gue may indicate that the word traveled by missionaries moving within the

French empire.55 Yet, while it may refer to a specific dance, the label Vodoutoday is most often used as a term for a bundle of practices that practitioners

themselves do not aggregate. Thus, its contemporary usage is more common

as either a scholarly gloss or an outsider’s label of opprobrium, for example,

by Evangelical Protestants as an epithet of condemnation. This fact thus ren-

ders it closer to its colonial usage as a term of non-Christian otherness (as in

Moreau de St. Mery’s classic text, s.v. “Vaudoux”), than to the original Fon

meaning of vodonu/vodu as priest, spirit medium, or power.56

the zonbi: of doubles and the dead

Spirit mediumship in Haiti has had several waves of inspiration from Europe

and the United States. “Animal magnetism” (also known as “mesmerism”)

took Paris and London by storm in the 1780s, expanding to Saint Domingue,

first among the elite scientific society Le Cercle des Philadelphes and eventu-

ally spreading like wildfire among planters and their slaves, whose ailments,

from gout to paralysis, were miraculously cured by baths in “magnetic tubs,”

54The Fon peoples of Dahomey, which today is the Republic of Benin. “Vaudoux” was the

term used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including in the classic text byMoreau de St.Mery, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaisede l’isle Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris: Dupont, 1797), 46; see Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 6;Price-Mars,Ainsi parle l’oncle.

55John Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,”

The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 267; Sue Peabody, ‘“A Dangerous Zeal”: Catholic Missions toSlaves in the French Antilles, 1635–1800,”FrenchHistorical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 53–90.

56“Cat�echisme Arda,” in Henri Labouret and Paul Rivet, La Royaume d’Arda et son �Evangeli-

sation au XVII Si�ecle (Paris: Institut D’Ethnologie, 1929); Moreau de St. Mery,Description topo-graphique; Thornton, “African Christianity,” 267; James H. Sweet, Domingos �Alvares, AfricanHealing, and the Intellectual History of the AtlanticWorld (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-lina Press, 2011), 17.




appointed with metal filings and rods, in which s�eances were conducted.57

Such forms of global occultism popularized encounters with and narratives

about the supernatural world, paving the way for the Fox sisters to dissemi-

nate knocking as a means of spirit communication in 1848 in New York.

Denizard Hyppolyte L�on Rivail (alias Allan Kardec), a teacher from Lyons,

became fascinated by the relation between the spirit and the material world

and the phenomenon of “spirit tapping,” through which one could communi-

cate with the spirits. In the 1850s he became a key figure in canonizing Spiri-tisme and fashioning it into a modern religion through chapbooks such as Lemonde des espirits (1857); many of which are still in print and in active use

today throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.58 These forms of occult

communication found a ready home in Haiti given their family resemblance

to Neo-African approaches to mediumship and spirit communication; equally

important is the fact that they legitimated African-derived practices that had

long been treated with suspicion and contempt. The timing was right, too: the

concordat with Rome in 1860 ended Haitian isolationism, opening up Haiti to

new ideas.59

The vogue of popular occultism took Europe and the United States by

storm with the modern Spiritualist movement and made its way to Haiti as

flows of people and goods increased in the late nineteenth century. Under the

rubric of Theosophy, s�eances were conducted to contact and channel the spir-its of the beloved from the 1870s onward from Paris to New York, at a time

when Caribbean island nations such as Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican

Republic were opening up to extensive foreign investment in sugar and other

agroindustrial products that drew immigrants alongside investors from the

57James E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 179; Francois Regourd, “Mesmerism in Saint Dom-ingue: Occult Knowledge and Vodou on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” in Science andEmpire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge,2008), 311–32.

58Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany,

NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 79. Kardec had an enormous impact on Caribbean spirituality, although Iam not aware of work on his impact on Haiti, outside of brief mentions such as in Cosentino,“Imagine Heaven,” 43. For a discussion of his impact on Dominican popular religious practices,see Martha Ellen Davis, La otra ciencia: El vod�u como religion y medicina popular (SantoDomingo: Editora Universitaria, 1987), 59, 69; and, for Brazil, see Diane Brown, Umbanda: Reli-gion and Politics in Urban Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Espiritismo hasbecome a distinct branch of popular religion in Puerto Rico and Cuba, which is not the case forHaiti or the Dominican Republic; see Judith Bettelheim, “Caribbean Espiritismo (Spiritist) Altars,”Art Bulletin 87, no. 2 (2005): 312–30.

59Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” 53. David H. Brown uses the term “Neo-African” in Santer�ıa

Enthroned: Art, Ritual and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2003), 27.

408 Imperial Idols



United States and Europe.60 Tourism also expanded dramatically as marine

rule provided a mantel of security to visitors of all kinds, steamship travel

expanded, and prohibition provided an added incentive. For example, the

famous Irish clairvoyant and ghost hunter Elliott O’Donnell did a sojourn in

Cuba in 1876, where he may have penned the novel Ghostland and where his

descriptions of his own trance states must have found favor among locals long

familiar with African-derived spirit possession but eager to seek affirmation

from European authorities.61 And there was major movement of people be-

tween Cuba and Haiti at the turn of the twentieth century, as tens of thousands

of Haitians traveled to Cuba to cut cane onUS-owned sugar plantations, many

of whom returned after the sugar harvest.

There are clear indications that alongside a range of imported goods—

sewing machines, fabric, cooking oil, sardines, and biscuits—that were flood-

ing into Haiti, by the 1920s elements from global occult theologies such as

Spiritualism and Theosophy had been incorporated into the Haitian spiritual

repertoire, along with crystal balls, a key tool of the medium.62 Mixing ele-

ments of West Indian obeah, hoodoo, Christianity, and Theosophy, Spiritual-

ism had become wildly popular among African Americans in cities such as

NewYork, Chicago, and Baltimore in the nineteenth century, with events such

as the Afro-American Voodoo and Sorcerers Unity drawing large crowds.63

Clairvoyants and mediums did mail-order consultations and advertised in the

Black press. The Reverend Thomas Hall wrote a weekly column on mysticism

60For more on theosophy, see Faivre, Western Esotericism, and Antoine Faivre, Access to

Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Werner J. Hanegraaff,New Age ReligionandWestern Culture: Esotericism in theMirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and Jos-celyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). Many thanksto Peter Pels for recommending Hanegraaff,NewAge Religion, tome.

61Elliott O’Donnell,Ghostland, (London: Palmer, 1925). O’Donnell published more than fifty

books and became a popular radio personality under a pseudonym; he has been called the firstghost hunter, and he was certainly the first to chase spirit apparitions for a mass audience. Somesay hewas actually the penniless aristocrat Baron JosephHenry Louis de Palm; see Godwin, Theo-sophical Enlightenment, 207. He denied any relationship to Spiritualism or Theosophy, however.Astral doubling or projection was also a central concern of O’Donnell’s; see Chris Jensen Romer,“Elliott O’Donnell, 1872–1965: The First Great Ghost Hunter?,” Paranormal, September 19,2009.

62“Haiti: Nature des importations,” Le Matin, April 22, 1907; “Oculistes!” Le Matin, Decem-

ber 11, 1907.63

“Spiritualism is RunningWild Here in Baltimore,” Afro-American, January 17, 1925; “Voo-doo Doctor to Lecture,” Chicago Defender, October 23, 1915; in “Spiritualism Church of Re-demption of Souls,” Chicago Defender, June 26, 1915, it was reported that the “hall was crowdedto overflowing.” For more on Obeah, see Maarit Forde and Diana Paton, eds., Obeah andOther Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2014); and on its transnational circuits, see Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Mi-grants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2013).




and the psychic sciences in The Afro-American, serving the needs of his cli-

ents, who by day were taxi drivers, butlers, undertakers, and nurses and who

were willing to pay large sums for fortune-telling and cures.64 “Spiritual scien-

tist,” astrologist, and “greatest living palmist” Leo Osman must have had a

large client base, since he ran newspaper ads for his services, which included

training as a “Spiritual Medium,” telepathy, and clairvoyance; he held private

s�eances four days a week in Baltimore. These practices became linked to the

Caribbean via flows of people, as well as mail and the press. In 1916 Rose

Eudelle was arrested in St. Lucia, where authorities found fifty letters from cli-

ents as far afield as NewYork.65

However, the language of occultism heremelds seamlesslywith that of tra-

ditional Black Christianity, such as Thomas Hall’s invocation of “God is

Love,” the Holy Ghost, guilt and sin, spiritual salvation, and the use of prayer,

alongside spiritual purification in the form of “evolution and progression” in

the celestial order, and the channeling of “pure spirits;” it is thus an admixture

of the Old Testament and the modern science of mediumship. Hall defends

Spiritualism from its naysayers by comparing it to other inscrutable technolo-

gies that were scoffed at initially, such as laughing gas, radio, the telephone,

and the submarine.66 If the language of Spiritism in Haiti drew upon biblical

elements and was inspired by US currents, this may be due to the fact that

Arthur Holly’s father, James Arthur Holly, was born a slave in Maryland,

becoming a prominent black abolitionist and bishop who was the first Episco-

pal missionary to visit Haiti during the nineteenth-century African-American

settlement scheme that promoted black self-sufficiency and the civilizingmis-

sion.67

Casting Vodou spirit mediumship as a form of modern Spiritism fit

squarely within this project of racial uplift. Holly’s son, Arthur Holly, in his

64“To Answer Queries on Spiritualism,” Afro-American, June 27, 1925, 17; “Occultist Held

for Murder,” Afro-American, October 10, 1923, 1. Thanks to Enrique Rivera, who uncovered thismaterial.

65Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1925), 136.66

Thomas Hall, “Spiritualism,” Afro-American, July 18, 1925, 13, and “Spiritualism,” Afro-American, July 25, 1925, A3.

67Thelma Berlack-Boozer, “James Theodore Holly, Noted Prelate, Who Lived and Died in

Haiti, Once Preached in Westminster Abbey – Born in Maryland,” New York Amsterdam News,August 15, 1930. Dennis Hidalgo treats the US settlement in the DominicanRepublic in Searchingfor an American Dream: The Runaway Free Blacks Who Left for Hayti (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, forthcoming); Peter Haffner mentions Holly in “Inventing Haitian Art: How Visi-tors Shaped Cultural Production fromOccupation to Renaissance” (MA thesis, University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles, 2014). Thanks to Bobby Hill for clarifying Holly’s significance for me. Themovement is termed “Spiritualism” in the US context and “Spiritism” (spiritisme, espiritismo) inLatin America and the Caribbean.

410 Imperial Idols



Les daïmons du culte voudo (1917), declared in his preface, “je suis esoter-

iste” (I am an esotericist), invoking a central term for the theosophical revival,

which cast itself as part of a long European tradition of White occultism. He

sought to challenge US Marine accounts that painted Haitian Vodou in lurid

terms stressing cannibalism and human sacrifice through a genealogy that

located it within a European trajectory of world religions commencing with

the Greeks. He sought to fit Vodou into a rubric of world religious correspon-

dences, which included the Bible.68 In his view, the Haitian lwa are just like

the signs of the zodiac: Haitian mediums channeled not souls of the dead, but

astral bodies. They are modern, not primitive, and are part of the heritage of

Christianity. Indeed, he goes so far as proposing that the true secret tradition

of African religions is the cabala, an argument that renders Vodou an esoteric

branch of Judaism, and Haitians one of the lost tribes of Israel. Many of these

ideas have been canonized in Milo Rigaud’s Secrets of Voodoo, a book that

many Haitian clairvoyants treat as a creole bible.69

If theMarines’ approach to Haitian religiosity was that of a satanic demon-

ology, Holly translated this into the daïmon, or Greek hero. Holly thus trans-posed a Central African belief in ancestral spirits into a Greek topos of souls

divinized or canonized by death, their gods not diabolical but rather “esprits

lumineux” (luminous spirits), while revising this African-derived faith as on

the road to progress.70 Deploying the key word of the theosophical revival, he

characterized himself as a Spiritist, a modern faith which he claimed was the

core secret of true Christianity. David Brown has discussed parallel efforts in

the early twentieth century to render African-derived ritual practice in Cuba a

religion through textualizing If�a oral tradition into pamphlets and thus fash-

ioning a bible, or foundational scripture.71 Not surprisingly, given the stress

upon rendering mediumship a modern science, Holly was a medical doctor, in

particular an eye, ear, and throat specialist.

Without denying its African roots, Holly declared Haitian religion to be a

spiritual science in the march of development, recasting it as a phenomenon

68Arthur Holly, Les daïmons du culte voudo (Port-au-Prince: Chenet, 1918), 39. Thanks to Pat-

rick Polk and Katherine Smith who brought Holly tomy attention.69

Rigaud shares with Holly the vision of Eqypt as a privileged place for all things divine, andhe cites the Egyptian ka/ba as the source of the baka. AsM. A. Atwood notes, Egypt has long beena “prime source and sanctuary of the hermetic art” (Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy [NewYork: Julian, 1960], xvi). Rigaud also finds a place for several key esoteric emblems within Hai-tian Vodou such as the Kabbalah, alchemy, and especially the astral forces that are a constantrefrain in his text (Secrets of Voodoo; see, e.g., 81, 92, 140). Because of the v�ev�e drawings in hisbook, it has been kept as a design reference for many dwapo artists including Yves Telmac andLafleur fils (personal observation, 2010).

70Holly, Les daïmons, iv, vi, 4.

71Brown, Santer�ıa Enthroned, 84.




in step with the model of progress envisioned by liberals at the time. In doing

so, he also revised Vodou spirits as returning to the land of the living in a

ranked hierarchy of seven stages, not dissimilar to the Hindu theory of rein-

carnation (India being the highest-ranking sacred place to many theoso-

phists).72 He also introduced the concept of the astral body. Recycled from

medieval alchemy, the astral body was a central preoccupation of Theosophy,

referring to the soul, or the “bodily counterpart of the dead;” in this view, the

spirit left material traces that could be read in the aura. In a view that reflected

the root metaphor of electrical current and the X ray, which were reframing

popular understandings of matter at that time, the astral body then links the

“nervous system to the cosmic reservoir of energy”; or, as A. E. Powell wrote

in 1925, the etheric double was its aura, or “electricity.”73 The astral plane is a

zone of existence parallel to the physical plane, but one step removed; it is the

site reached during astral projection and the first place the astral body arrives

after death.74

Today, the language of astral presence has made its way into Haitian popu-

lar religious practice as the evanescent spiritual energy that can be harnessed

and reined in to charge protective and proactive amulets and spells, such as

the pwen. As Katherine Smith recounts, prostitutes, for example, have zonbiastral inserted into their vaginas to attract clients and protect themselves from

AIDS.75 After an untimely death, there are reports of people seeking to bottle

up the residual zonbi astral before it escapes.76 Indeed, practices involving

harnessing and rerouting these circuits of spiritual power, such as sending the

zonbi astral on expeditions, or deploying them as a protective shield, are some

of the more common popular uses of the zonbi and are the most feared pre-

cisely because they are stealthy and clandestine (fig. 3).

72This idea of reincarnation as involving stages of spiritual progress has strong parallels to the

ideology of racewhitening, of course.73 Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Detroit: Gale, 1982), 100; A. E. Powell,

The Etheric Double: The Health Aura of Man (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House,1979), 3; David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge,MA:MIT Press, 1995).

74Nevill Drury,Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult (San Francisco: Harper &Row, 1985),

19. This doctrine of connectivity is well described by G. R. S. Mead; as he states, “the ground con-viction of astral religion held that there was a subtle organon of great nature, an interior economyof the world-soul”; see The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (London: Watkins,1919), 12.

75Katherine Smith, “Haiti Rising: Haiti in the Era of Vagabondaj” (PhD diss., University of

California, Los Angeles, 2010). For a discussion of the zonbi without the astral language (which Ibelieve is confined to the capital city of Port-au-Prince) see Serge Larose, “TheMeaning of Africain Haitian Vodou,” in Symbols and Sentiments, ed. I. M. Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977),85–115.

76Interviewwith Kendy Verilus, March 2010.

412 Imperial Idols



The Petwo practice which has become by far the most important sign of

Haitian barbarism to outsiders is the zonbi, which became an object of lurid

fascination for US Marines, during the occupation of 1915–34, who penned

sensationalist tales of zombie antics in their travel accounts, eventually spawn-

FIG. 3.—Zombis for sale in Elıas Pi~na, Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border.

Photo by the author, 2011.




ing the popular film and comic genre in the United States.77 The zonbi (spiritsof the recently deceased) are a powerful means of assault sorcery in which

anonymous spirits or mo are trapped and sent to harm others; they are used as

metaphysical magnets to attract business, or powerful shields against the

errant ways of malevolent spirits sent on ekpedisyon.78 Zonbi lore, however, isoral and not entirely standardized, and there are multiple versions of this phe-

nomenon; it often dovetails with ideas about interstitial spirits that have not

yet been completely dispatched to the other side.79 The larger context in which

the zonbi should be cast is the proximity of the dead in everyday life, which

many scholars have attributed to Kongo or Fon influence, and can be found in

Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well.80 But this has probably been rein-

forced by the cult of the saints which lay at the core of medieval Christianity,

and the corollary use of relics that have long enabled access to the powers of

the “saintly dead” and transformed the horror of death into hope.81

The Haitian zombie made its debut in the US imagination principally

through the 1931 book The Magic Island by W. B. Seabrook, a writer whose

sensationalistic travelogues of Africa and Haiti were exceedingly popular in

the United States.82 But the figure of the zonbi has a long prehistory. John

Thornton traces the Haitian zonbi to nzambi, the Kikongo term for deity.83

Yet in her reading of the first French colonial novel about Guadaloupe, Le

77Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 172; Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the

Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).This lurid genre continues today, as evidenced by Hamilton Morris, “I Walked with a Zombie:Travels among the Undead,”Harper’s Magazine 323 (November 2011): 52–61.

78The definition of zonbi is fromMcAlister, “‘The ‘Jew’ in the Haitian Imagination,” 98, 102.

The concept of assault sorcery is from Neil Whitehead, see his Dark Shamans: Kanaima and thePoetics of Violent Death (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5. His research treats Ama-zonian practices, whichmaywell indicate an Amerindian contribution to Caribbean sorcery.

79 Zonbi lore is oral and hence not standardized, and there are of coursemultiple versions of thisphenomena.

80Simon Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Congo Belief (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1993).81

Thomas Head, “The Cult of the Saints and Their Relics,” The Orb, http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/religion/hagiography/cult.htm; James Bentley, Restless Bones: The Story of Relics(London: Constable, 1985), 27.

82W. B. Seabrook, TheMagic Island (NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1931). They purported to be

travelogues but his wife reveals that he ate human flesh so as to write about African “cannibalism,”so these were highly embellished reports. The Magic Island cast such a pall over Haitian Vodouthat it spawned decades of countercriticism. I have no evidence that Seabrook was influenced bytheosophy, although given his social circles, years in France and proclivities it would not be a sur-prise if hewas; seeMarjorieWorthington, The StrangeWorld ofWillie Seabrook (NewYork: Har-court, Brace & World, 1966). Thanks to Patrick Polk for suggesting this text to me. For more onthe Marine travel account genre, see Renda, Taking Haiti. I alternate between the Haitian andEnglish spellings of zonbi and “zombie” depending on the version I am referring to.

83Thornton, “African Christianity,” 267. Although Neil Whitehead was developing an argu-

ment that the origins of the zombie lay in Taıno practices when he died (personal communication,2011).

414 Imperial Idols



Zombi de Grand Perou, Doris Garraway portrays this zonbi apparition as a

creole entity. In the story, a comtesse seeks to become invisible, turning into an

ass, pig, or sow so as to haunt the count, a version recalling the shape-shifting

of early modern demonology that derives from European codes of sorcery.84

Yet ironically, there is evidence that this particular narrative of the zonbias a body without a soul (rather than a soul without a body) may not derive

from Haitian lore but rather was a figment of the US Marines’ imagination.

While the zonbi has long been a popular demonic host in Haiti, it is most com-

monly cast as part of a crowd of protean and hostile spirits that includes the

Bizango, the chanpw�el, the baka, and the galipote.85 As such, it forms part of

a larger community of what Todd Ochoa has called the “ambient dead,” a

community of souls that, unlike kin, are anonymous and unnamed. As he

states, “Kongo cosmology emphasizes the dead as an important force in the

world of the living, and its explanations situate the dead . . . as prolific and

excessive, much like the sea in its vastness.”86 The dead intervene in the lives

of the living as a “generative force,” which when harnessed to power objects

can make things happen; a zonbi is a particularly powerful mo that can be

used to charge a spell. Katherine Smith explains, “the zonbis are the dead in

extremis; they are a perversion of the working relationships with ancestors

that characterize most Vodou praxis.” As “deterritorialized proletariats,” they

often become the crux of devil pact narratives that enrich the individual at the

expense of the group.87

Haitian and USMarine versions of the zombie are generally quite distinct.

In Haitian zonbi lore, there exist popular narratives about the wealthy who

have invisible minions working for them—which explains their exorbitant

wealth—but these are rarely seen.88 By contrast, the US Marines visualized

the zombie as a living corpse, thus giving material weight and force to the

empty bodies robbed of their zombie astral, while the focus in Haitian popular

narratives is on recycling the life charge of volatile astral bodies.89 As Jane

Bennett puts it, this approach implies an acknowledgment of a “nonhuman,

84Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Dur-

ham,NC:DukeUniversity Press, 2005), chap. 3, esp. 189. Yet she also notes the influence of Cariband Africanmetamorphism on 182.

85Although the Sampw�el and Bizango are secret societies, outsiders often class them as dan-

gerous spirits that can transmogrify.86

Todd Ram�on Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 33.

87Smith, “Haiti Rising,” chap. 3. For a definition of devil-pact tales, see Michael Taussig, The

Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1980).

88I was told these stories about Richard Morse, owner of the Olaffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince,

for example, in October 2008 by an itinerant tour guide whom Imet at the hotel.89

This observation was first made byMayaDeren (Divine Horsemen, 42).




thingly power, the material agency of natural bodies and technological arti-

facts,” since the zombie astral can be used to power amulets that are more than

material things since they have a certain efficacy to make things happen on

their own.90 The two zombie versions contrast, since one emphasizes the idea

ofmatter as raw, brute, and inert, that is, the bodies left behind after their zom-

bie astral has been removed, while Haitian popular magic stresses the animat-

ing force at death and its ability to power spells and thus other bodies. In this

view,matter is animate and can be used as an “actant” to do things; it is a vehi-

cle for symbolic power.91 Both perspectives split life and matter, but the two

genres of folklore emphasize opposed components of the binary. The stress in

the US stories is on the inertness of the dead, a view that denies the vitality of

matter, while the Haitian stories presume the presence of nonhuman agency,

albeit that which can be deployed by human subjects.92

Today the term “astral” can be found elsewhere in the Caribbean as well. It

appears in urban religious practices in the Dominican Republic as a marker of

White middle-class respectability for those who participate in vod�u but wish

to do so under a veil of propriety.93 The term “astral” has also become a major

part of the Puerto Rican New Age practice astrologia vedica (Vedic astrol-

ogy), which is broadcast on television and is used, among other things, to fore-

see whether one’s children might become homosexual or to evaluate the fates

of potential political candidates for governor.94 Nor is Haiti alone in having

been deeply touched by theosophical ideas in the Americas. Indeed, the Mag-

netic-Spiritualist school that became popular in the 1920s drew upon the tech-

nology of magnetism as a means of healing, as diseased etheric matter was

removed with passes of the hands.95 It was founded by a Basque electrician,

becoming extremely popular in Mexico and Argentina on the presumption

that electricity was evidence of a universal life form that governed human

action. In fact, the notorious bandit hero of Nicaragua, Augusto Sandino, was

a devoted adept, as was Salvadoran dictator Maximiliano Hern�andez Martı-

nez.96 And just as electric cables were lighting up Boston and the particle

90Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2010), xiii, xvi.91

David R. Doris, Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-aesthetics, and the Strange Fateof Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 2011).

92Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii, viii, ix. As she notes, the term “actant” is from Bruno Latour,

and she draws inspiration fromDeleuze and Guattari’s concept of “material vitalism.”93

Interview with Andrew Apter and Julio C�esar Santana, at Don Julito’s Fiesta de Santo, VillaDuarte, Santo Domingo, 1990.

94See “Carta astral de Alejandro Garcıa Padilla,” Telemundopr.com, January 18, 2013; “Carta

astral revela si los hijos pudieron ser homosexuales,” PrimeraHora.com, September 7, 2012.95

Powell,Etheric Double, 75.96

TheMagnetic Spiritualist school was said to have been influenced by AllanKardec, althoughnot as uniquely as has often been portrayed. Interestingly, both Holly and Sandino were ardentMasons, and frequently reference Franco-Masonry in their writings. See John Brentlinger, The

416 Imperial Idols



nature of electromagnetic radiation was discovered, a branch of Theosophy

called electrical therapeutics was founded.97

Scholars have postulated that slavery provided a deep structure within Hai-

tian religious practice, a view that presumes a static view of history, and one

that ultimately denies any element of creole historicity.98 Certainly, decades

of war, intervention, and resultant contact must have left an imprint on popu-

lar religiosity, inspiring novel innovations in indigenous spiritual economies.

foreign powers

There are other European signs of distance and alterity that have been incorpo-

rated into the Vodou pantheon. For example, French mysteries or spirits that

declaim in French when they descend, as do the water spirits, including the

siren or mermaid, which exhibit the volatile Petwo temperament. Bawon

Samdi also speaks French andmight be foundwearing the attire of hisminions,

the gedes—a top hat, tails, cigar, and a walking stick—and the mist�e Made-

moiselle Charlotte is a French-speaking White woman.99 The popular Bosoutwa k�on descends in part from the Celtic mythology of a three-horned bull.100

Indeed, the Petwo class of spirits emerged as a border fetish at the very cross-

roads of Haiti’s articulations with the world since they draw upon distant signs

of Africa such as the Kongolese Lemba cult, as well as Europe.101 But that is

not all. Distance animated notions of power on both sides of the Atlantic. As in

Roger Sansi’s formulation, the Petwowere born of amoment of intense global-

ization, when Saint Domingue stoked the fire of the French colonial economy

through exports of sugar, coffee, and indigo produced by slaves, which ex-

plains their association with the aura of distance. This argument challenges the

view that Vodou is an “African atavism”; by contrast, the power of Vodou, like

the fetish, was born of and infused with the meanings of global contact.102

The meanings of distance has coursed through Vodou ritual in various

ways. When people are being called by the spirits to be initiated they are said

to be snatched away to the bottom of the river where they reside for years;

upon their return they exude spiritual authority derived from their otherworldy

voyaging. Command of European esoterica was also a source of mystical

Best of What We Are: Reflections on the Nicaraguan Revolution (Amherst: University of Massa-chusetts Press, 1995). Thanks to RaulMoreno for this insight about Hern�andezMartınez.

97Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 203.

98Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in

Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Dayan,Haiti, History and the Gods.99

Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo, 77.100

Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” 36.101

John Thornton,Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: UCLPress, 1999).102

Contrast with M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 54. Roger Sansi and Luis Pares, eds., Sorcery inthe Black Atlantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).




power, which was intriguing due to its occluded meaning. Saint Domingue

had a major presence of Franco-Masons in the 1780s—the largest temple out-

side France—and this secret society was a source of interest not only due to

its republicanism but also for its air of mystery, its attention to ritual, and its

esoteric emblems. It should not be a surprise that it inspired a sect of spirits

called the Congo-Masons or that the all-seeingMasonic eye is a frequent sym-

bol in Haitian religious art.103 Moreover, the wonder of concealed meanings

has also figured in religious talismans. AlfredM�etraux recounts that a Haitiancane cutter who worked in Cuba returned with a protective spirit called ti-nom that spoke Spanish and demanded Coca-Cola since it did not like Haitian

rum.104 This is striking, since as a rule, mange lwa or food offerings for the

gods are autochthonous products such as maize, eggs, chicken, and goat,

beloved creole products that slaves raised in the patio within the interstices of

slavery and that were staples of the subsistence economy (an exception is

Danbala, the snake god, whose v�ev�e is drawn in wheat flour).105 Not only is

the idea of travel a source of power, but it is also enabled via sorcery, since

lougawou are said to be able to fly, and today visa magic is one of the most

sought-after Petwo rites.106

Haiti has most frequently experienced globalization, however, through for-

eign intervention. Ideas about the world have been generated often in times of

war and thus have frequently been filtered through military idioms, of which

this country has had more than its fair share: the revolution lasted from 1791

to 1804, and the US Marines’ occupation there was the longest in the hemi-

sphere, lasting from 1915 to 1934 (not to mention US intervention in 1994–

97 and the UN troops presence from 2004 to the present).

Vodou is replete with martial referencing—from narratives that the saints

are engaged in pitched battles with evil, as the lwa fight the lougawou, whichmust be clubbed with a stick prepared with medicine, to military epithets in

rituals such as “chiefs.”107 Soldiers often seek out magical protection and are

frequently called by the lwa to be initiated.108 Some of the spirits act like

harshmilitary commanders who use tough love on their troops, such as Limba

who has been described as an “arbitrary prosecutor”; others are described

103See Cosentino, “Imagine Heaven,” 48–49, for references to Masonry. This is currently a

subject of research for Katherine Smith.104

M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 85.105

Odette M. Rigaud et al., “Feasting of the Gods in Haitian Vodu,” Primitive Man 19, nos. 1–2 (1946): 1–58, esp. 2; Richman,Vodou andMigration, 158–60.

106Donald Teitelbaum recounted to me the fear invoked by white powders discovered in Haitian

visa requests at the USEmbassy in Port-au-Prince (personal communication, Santo Domingo, 1988).107

On beating the lougawou, see Elsie Clews Parsons, “Spirit Cult in Hayti,” Journal de laSociete des Americanistes 20, no. 20 (1928): 166.

108Simpson, “HaitianMagic,” 95.

418 Imperial Idols



as “haughty and conciliatory” or grave, harsh, and menacing.109 Wanga, or“cursing charms,” were used as a form of anonymous crime to get back at

harsh masters during slavery and reemerged during the US occupation as a

means of retaliation against marines’ depredations, just as the Kongo peoples

used nkisi amulets as a form of spiritual warfare, a practice that most likely

spread during the period of extensive seventeenth-century warfare after the

Portuguese allied with the Imbangala mercenary bands.110 These objects

caused terror among US Marines in Haiti, who discovered talismans in the

trees, which they confiscated and inventoried in police raids.111 Additionally,

drapo (sequined banners) with sacred v�ev�e designs (of the lwa) are used to

summon the gods and were originally based onmilitary flags, and a pot drapo(flag bearer) accompanies any ceremony. The use of military banners in Haiti

has its counterpart in coastal Africa, where ceremonial flags representingmar-

tial prowess and political authority were in general use by the 1600s, inspired

in part by European ships with flags on display.112

It should not come as a surprise that from the slave trade onward, foreign

military insignia inspired fear and awe. This can be seen in rumors in West

Africa during the slave trade that slave blood would be used to imprint naval

flags, or the terrifying zanj (lwa) apparitions ofWhite soldiers who live under

the water and can bring illness if one does not become their servant.113 Fear of

nautical dangers was eventually channeled into deities associated with over-

seas maritime powers, such as water spirits like Agwe Tawoyo, who has light

skin and green eyes and wears a naval officer’s uniform replete with white

gloves and helmet.114 Of course, military regalia need not necessarily invoke

Europe, since, as John Thornton reminds us, slaves emanating from bothWest

and Central Africa who were taken as war captives were frequently already

soldiers before their arrival in the newworld. Yet the white gloves of this mili-

tary regalia clearly betray their European origins. Moreover, during the 1920s

US occupation the figure of the US Marine in his khaki uniform was also

incorporated into the pantheon of Vodou deities as a form of Ogou, the Yor-

109Simpson, “Belief System,” 49, 51.

110Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the

Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 3;Wyatt MacGaffey, “Fetishism Revisited: Kongo ‘Nkisi’ in Sociological Perspective,” Africa:Journal of the International Institute 47, no. 2 (1977): 176, 181.

111Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 161.

112Patrick Arthur Polk,Haitian Vodou Flags (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011),

8; and Tina Girouard, Sequin Artists of Haiti (Port-au-Prince: Haiti Arts, 1994).113

John Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” WilliamandMary Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2003): 273–94; Simpson, “HaitianMagic, 96.

114M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 102. For more on transatlantic maritime spirits, see Henry John

Drewal, Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).




uba-derived deity of warfare, iron, and hunting—this notwithstanding the fact

that Ogou in popular memory is recalled as a god of defiance against the

French, as in the story in which Dessalines cut out the white strip from the

French flag while possessed by the warrior figure Ogou.115 Sandra Barnes

explains that, “in the minds of followers, Ogun conventionally presents two

images. The one is a terrifying specter: a violent warrior, fully armed and

laden with frightening charms and medicines to kill his foes. The other is

society’s ideal male: a leader known for his sexual prowess, who nurtures,

protects, and relentlessly pursues truth, equity and justice. Clearly this African

figure fits the destroyer/creator archetype.”116

We have at least one account of how a naval officer was reborn as a Vodou

deity. A fisherman discovered a stone with two shells attached to it, which an

oungan (Vodou priest) informed him was inhabited by a new spirit called

Captain D�eba, which needed to be fed. When he died and his daughter Mari-

line inherited it, she claimed it had the personality and appearance of a US

Navy officer. When it possessed her she wore a peaked cap, rowed, and sang

sea shanties in English. The spirit demanded to be fed with whiskey, oatmeal,

bacon, and jam—all imported products that were marine provisions. What is

most striking, however, is that her relationship with this spirit commenced

after she was spurned by her lover, who was a quartermaster on a war ship

and had mistreated her and even stolen her savings. She was too poor to pro-

vide a yearly feast for the spirit in 1943, but he told her in a dream that that

was not a problem because he was too busy to visit Haiti anyway due to the

war.117 The naval officer was reincarnated as a water deity. Nor was this a

unique case. In 2008, at a ceremony for the gede spirits, which are propitiatedon the Day of the Dead, I witnessed our hostess become possessed by Ogou

Feray. She appeared in the khaki uniform of a US Marine, complete with

epaulets and the flat-brimmed hat. Her procession was accompanied by a

brass band, led by a bugle, that played USMarine tunes.118

conclusion

In a ferociously nationalist context such as Haiti, which has a protracted history

of international aggression, these forms of adoption of the foreign, even within

the spirit domain, are, needless to say, a bit perplexing. To return to the particu-

115Brutus, quoted by Dayan,Haiti, History and the Gods, 52.

116Barnes, Africa’s Ogun, 2.

117Alfred M�etraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 85; Rigaud,

“Feasting,” 6.118

Special thanks to Katherine Smith, who invited me to the ceremony in Petionville at thehome of Widner Dumay, whose ritual name is Darati Mackandal and who is a serviteur of Dam-ballah.

420 Imperial Idols



larly surprising case of Mariline, her channeling of rage and disappointment

with her marine lover into a ludic engagement with a naval spirit is a novel take

on the dangerous maritime spirits that date from the early modern period; it

also has a therapeutic dimension particular to her own personal history. As in

Ren�e Girard’s formulation, at times it seems that mimetic desire can result in

one actually wishing to adopt the monstrous double.119 The relationship with

one’s spirit in possession might be understood as a form of allegory. As Janice

Boddy states, “allegory is an elaborate, protractedmetaphor where relationship

between lines of thought is supported at both levels of meaning and whose

truth resides in their conjunction,” which in the case of Petwo sorcery is the

melding together of water and fire spirits, family and foreigners, insiders and

outsiders, domains that are opposed and should remain apart.120 Another fea-

ture of possession is that it enables the expression of counterhegemonic desire.

In official ideology, adopting the subject position of a powerful and undermin-

ing oppressor or engaging in assault sorcery is morally reprehensible. Yet as

Freudwould contend, even illicit desires for revenge or poaching on the techni-

ques of the powerful must eventually find a way out, and shape-shifting and

spirit possession enable a vehicle for one to playfully engage with morally

inadmissible behavior, such as being the agent of violence. It is also a potent

reminder that “the same power that liberates also corrupts and inevitably turns

in on itself,” a message that is inadmissible to the nationalist narrative of Haiti

for which the revolution is an untouchable social good—one that cannot have

been betrayed by the failures of postrevolutionary leadership.121

Michael Taussig would term these appropriations of French werewolves

and US Marines a kind of sympathetic magic or mimesis. As he says, “the

wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the

original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that char-

acter and that power.”122 As in the Panamanian cura healing figurines, which

have included a statue of General MacArthur, becoming a USMarine or wild

animal via trance offers a form of sympathetic magic that seeks to channel the

sheer force of foreign military power or animal ferocity.123 These behaviors

affirm the martial ethos of Haitian national identity as a renegade nation that

119Ren�e Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 1977),

164–65.120

Janice Boddy,Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Z~ar Cult in Northern Sudan(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 339; McCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remem-bering,” 67, 69.

121McCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remembering,” 70.

122Taussig,Mimesis and Alterity, xiii.

123Ibid., 10–11. I treat animal nicknaming practices in an earlier essay; see Lauren Derby,

“Trujillo, the Goat: Of Beasts,Men and Politics in theDominican Republic,” inCentering Animalsin Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2013), 302–28.




forged its identity against the world through the barrel of a gun, even if such

maji is considered antisocial and divisive and thus must be censored. This is

the impure secret at the heart of the sovereign in Haiti, the conjuncture of

“sacred/accursed. Holy/polluted. Power born in transgression.”124 No wonder

the mystical sign, or v�ev�e—drawn in a ceremony for Ogou Feray—is an

abstraction of the Haitian coat of arms.125

University of California, Los Angeles

124Michael T. Taussig, TheMagic of the State (NewYork: Routledge, 1989), 9, 126.

125McCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remembering,” 71.

422 Imperial Idols



Imperiol Idols: French and United States Revenants in Haitian Vodou

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