When the average person thinks of voodoo they associate it with voodoo dolls, black magic, zombies, and the evil witches they see on television. Very few people know and appreciate voodoo for the complex and intriguing religion that is, without associating it with something negative. Anthropologist Wade Davis once said that “voodoo is not some kind of black magic cult. It's the distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic era of slavery.” Most people don’t see it as a real or authentic religion at all, but the thing they don't tell you on television is that just like the infamous Marie Laveau from American Horror Story: Coven, Voodoo is real.
The word ‘Voodoo’ itself means ‘spirit’ in the local Fon language of modern day Benin. Though Voodoo originates in Haiti, its roots are set deep in the tribal religions of West Africa. It is said that Voodoo as we know it today evolved from the ancient traditions of ancestor worship and the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe; meaning that everything, material or living, has a soul. However, ancient voodoo and modern voodoo are very different because of the effects of the most dehumanizing institution known to mankind, slavery. During the slave trade of the 1700s, thousands of enslaved West Africans were shipped to Haiti to work on French plantations and forced to convert to Catholicism upon arrival. Europeans did this because they saw African people practicing their own religion as a threat, so if you were caught doing so you were whipped, tortured or murdered. In the wake of this brutality, Africans began to practice in private what colonizers thought was Catholicism, but was something entirely different.
Voodoo is a religion just like any other, and it teaches the worship of one God, Bondye, that is very similar to the God of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. People who practice voodoo, called voodooists, believe that there is a visible world and an invisible world that are intertwined, and that spirits of the invisible world watch over and inspire them. Through death can one transition from one world to the other, so the spirits that watch and guide them are their ancestors. Though voodoo has an ordained clergy of priests and priestesses for guidance, it is up to each individual person to be responsible for their own actions. Voodoo is even deeper than just a religion because of its cultural connection. Different variations of voodoo can be found being practiced in West Africa, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and in America, especially in Louisiana.
So if voodoo is a legitimate religion then why is it often seen as anything less? It takes one word to explain why voodoo has such a negative connotation and why the uninformed public thinks it’s some form of devil magic: racism. Enslaved Africans weren’t seen as fully human so their beliefs were chalked up to simple superstitions and their God and Spirit world was denounced as evil deities. Voodoo priests and priestesses also played a major part in the first and most successful overthrow of European colonizers by enslaved people, so this put fear in hearts of White colonizers. They feared that their slaves would hear of the Haitian Revolution’s success and try to implement it themselves. This caused American and European colonizers to associate voodoo with blood and violence, and later led to a taboo fascination with voodoo rather than an informed appreciation. Eventually, Hollywood would take hold of its ideals, mix it with Hoodoo traditions (also called root work, conjuring or folk magic) and inaccurately passed that off as what voodoo truly is.
The misrepresented of Voodoo is mostly because of the mystery surrounding it, which leads to people making up assumptions instead of doing a quick Google search. Maybe you don’t understand voodoo, and you’re wondering how voodoo hexes or spells work, but think about it this way: People who don’t practice Christianity don’t believe in or understand how miracles or blessings happen, but Christians do. It is understood within the Christian community that “prayers go up, and blessings come down.” The same could be said for the way that people view voodoo practices. In the age of endless knowledge and enlightenment, it’s about time we start treating all religions with equal respect. Voodoo is not some scary fake magic done simply for entertainment reasons, but a thousand year story of resilience, collectiveness and survival.
