In October in the UK it is Black History Month, and of course October is ‘Month of Horror’ on this blog. It is a trope in horror media, and popular culture as a whole, that depicts Voodoo as a Satanic, blood-sacrifice, black magic cult based on purposeful and general misunderstandings of the religion. Born through religious syncretism among the African diaspora there are several closely aligned religions painted with this brush – Louisiana Voodoo, North American Hoodoo, Haitian Vodou, West African Vodun, Cuban Sanataria, and Brazilian Candomble to name a few. The purpose of this post is not to do mythbusting on these beliefs, although we will be doing some of that, but instead looking at how these misunderstandings came into being. The short answer is ‘anti-black racism’, and we will be looking at how the demonisation of Voodoo and Vodou (the two religions which I will be looking at the most) was part of a larger history of anti-black racism.
Religious Origins
The origins of Voodoo and Vodou are deeply connected with one of the most traumatic events of history – the Atlantic Slave Trade. Throughout its over 300 year existence well over 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas where they had to face brutal conditions if they survived the journey to start off with. Enslaved Africans came from various cultures, religions, and languages across West and Central Africa with many coming from Dahomey in what is now Benin. Despite families being torn apart and the high mortality rate enslaved Africans brought their culture and faith with them, including Vodun. Transported mainly to the Caribbean and Brazil Christian preachers were concerned with the souls of the enslaved, even if they were not concerned with their bodies, and tried to convert enslaved people to Christianity. In areas where indigenous communities had yet to be wiped out, like in Brazil and Venezuela, enslaved Africans came into contact with various indigenous beliefs. The amalgamation of Vodun, other African faiths, Christianity, and occasional indigenous beliefs came together to form different religions: Hoodoo in the US South, Voodoo in Louisiana, Vodou in Haiti, Santaria in Cuba etc.
It is during the enslavement of Africans that the first negative portrayals of Voodoo and associated faiths began to appear. As enslaved people had adapted Christianity and retained aspects of the cultures of their forebearers the practice of any non-Christian faith was seen as something to be distrusted. Connection to spirits and utilising knowledge of the land to heal, by placing emphasis on herb lore, for Catholic and Protestant slave owners it was seen as blasphemous and subversive to their own power. The last post on this blog was about the Salem Witch Trials which also highlighted this. One of the first people accused of witchcraft was Tituba with court records describing her as ‘a slave originating from the West Indies and probably practicing “hoodoo”‘ demonstrating this fear of the syncretic religions as representing Devil worship and witchcraft. I would recommend reading that post as I go into more detail about Tituba as court records described her as an ‘Indian’ but she is now represented as being Afro-Caribbean showing this gradual association with slavery with black people. Agency of enslaved peoples was a terrifying concept for enslavers, so the underground worship of spirits that sometimes used animal sacrifice and a detailed knowledge of the environment for herbs became a terrifying concept. In 1791 enslavers quaked in fear as their worst nightmares, and the dreams of enslaved peoples, came true.
The Haitian Revolution
In August 1791, seeing the events in the French Revolution and applying the logic of freedom to themselves, the ensalved people of Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti, rose up in the largest slave uprising since the Spartacus Uprising under the Romans. Haitian sociologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has described the Haitian Revolution as a ‘Non-Event‘ as part of a wider ‘Unthinkable History‘ as for white slavers it was unthinkable that supposed racially inferior people who lacked agency had the ability understand concepts of liberty, redefine it to include themselves, organise an uprising, and win. Over a period of a decade the Saint-Domingue slaves not only forced revolutionary France to abolish slavery but they won the colony’s independence as Haiti. This shattered the European view that Africans were inferior and threatened them economically as the successful Haitian Revolution could, and did, inspire slave revolts elsewhere. As a result, Europeans and the newly independent United States aimed to crush Haiti – in 1825 a resurgent France threatened to invade an already embargoed Haiti for compensation for the end of slavery which Haiti paid for with a loan from the United States and French banks which took until 1947 to pay off. In the words of African-American author Zora Neale Hurston:
For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. For three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant spilt blood and tears for blacks. So the Haitians got no answer to their prayers. Even when they had fought and driven out the white oppressors, oppression did not cease. They sought peace under kingdoms and other ruling names. They sought it in the high, cold, beautiful mountains of the island, and in the sudden small alluvial plains, but it eluded them and vanished from their hands.
Hurston, Tell my Horse, 65
The next step in the demonisation of Vodou was the Haitian Revolution. In popular memory of the Haitian Revolution the uprising took place following a Vodou ceremony overseen by Dutty Boukman and Cecile Fatiman, a Vodou priest and priestess. It has been debated if this ceremony did actually serve as the catalyst for the revolution, but regardless, an event that so horrified white slavers being linked to an already distrusted faith reinforced Vodou as a subversive phenomenon. It did not matter that Haiti’s first constitution made Catholicism, not Vodou, as the official religion – Vodou was blamed for the rising instead of the brutality of slavery.
The United States encounters Voodoo
In 1803 the French Empire sold its territory on the American mainland to the United States after their initial faild attempt to retake Haiti. The economic centre of the purchased territory was New Orleans which already had an established enslaved population that was bolstered by white slavers fleeing from Saint-Domingue (sometimes bringing their ‘property’ with them). In New Orleans and Louisiana enslaved peoples still retained their culture, so here Vodou mixed with local diasporic beliefs eventually forming Voodoo. In New Orleans, being a city, the plantation economy that separated slaves from free blacks and poor whites could not as easily be maintained, so Voodoo spread across various communities. As early as 1820 the Louisiana Gazette reported the arrest of several people of colour and one white man for holding illicit nighttime meetings where ‘occult practices and the idolatrous worship of an African deity called Vadou‘. As you can see, this belief was poorly understood with ‘Vadou‘ being seen as the belief’s god and not the name of the religion itself. As slavery became the issue in the United States from the 1820s Voodoo was seen as evidence of black superstition and barbarism, thereby justifying black enslavement or the disenfranchisement of free African-Americans. We can see this is a July 1859 article in the New Orleans Daily Crescent reporting about Marie Laveau, a free woman who was a central figure in Louisiana Voodoo, in her trial for ‘disorder’:
Marie Clarisse Laveau, f.w.c., the notorious hag who reigns over the ignorant and superstitious as the Queen of the Voudous, was complained of
Long, ‘Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo’, 89
by her neighbor . . . [who] charged that Marie and her wenches were
continuously disturbing his peace and that of the neighborhood with
their . . . infernal singing and yelling. The police say . . . the noise was
the . . . hellish observance of the mysterious rites of Voudou. This is one of the worst forms of African paganism, and is believed in and practiced
by large numbers of negroes in this city, and by some white people. A
description of the orgies would never do to put in respectable print. Her
majesty, Queen Marie, was duly sent after.
All of this article shows the hysteria that white and wealthy Louisiana citizens viewed Voodoo with. Not only did it go against faith, ‘hellish observance‘, presenting African belief as inherently evil, ‘worst forms of African paganism‘, violating sexual norms, with a woman overseeing ‘orgies‘, and crossing racial lines, with black and white people attending. Voodoo was presented as a demonic and superstitious belief that proved black inferiority, but also transgressed middle class sensibilities by bringing in poor whites and giving agency to a woman. Danielle Boaz has discussed how the Civil War would serve to perpetuate racism via anti-Voodoo hysteria.
In 1863 the Union army took New Orleans setting the stage for Reconstruction in the US South. Reconstruction aimed to rebuild the southern economy following the Civil War, move away from a slave-based economy, and to uplift the former enslaved peoples. However, the government was itself split over Reconstruction which made anti-black resistance from whites even more effective. Across the South while several key African-Americans managed to get into office, at the same time an incredibly violent white supremacist backlash emerged – it was during Reconstruction that the first Ku Klux Klan emerged. While whites were brutalising free black communities they were also issuing propaganda decrying the few African-Americans who had ‘a brief moment in the sun’, (in the words of William DuBois) as being violent, animal-like, and uncivilised. As argued by Boaz, in Louisiana Voodoo was again turned into barbaric, devil-worship as a way to attack African-Americans. From 1863 to 1900 ‘Vodou’ or ‘Voodoo’ was mentioned in papers every year, with non-Louisiana papers also running with these stories and distorting them further. A key part of slavery’s rhetoric to justify enslaving people was that without the paternal hand of the slaver former slaves would ‘revert’ back to ‘African barbarism’. The incredible violence involved in slavery was justified through the Bible – ‘spare the rod, spoil the child‘. Misunderstanding Voodoo practices as ‘superstition’ and ‘barbarism’ became a convenient tool to terrorise African-Americans and justify the emerging Jim Crow regime.
The United States invades Haiti: Vodou/Voodoo Re-enters the Spotlight
For decades the hysteria over Voodoo was largely limited to Louisiana, but that would change with the American invasion of Haiti in 1915. In the first two decades of the twentieth-century the United States wielded its might to protect its economic interests in Latin America and Asia. Haiti had been ground into the dirt by the crippling debt imposed on it by the United States and France sparking a series of coups and revolts by 1915. Fearing for its own economic interests, and to prevent the Germans from moving in, Woodrow Wilson (the infamously racist US president who openly lauded the KKK) ordered US troops to occupy Haiti. The occupation was brutal, troops only left in 1934, with racially motivated massacres being commonplace and slavery returning in the form of forced labour on infrastructure projects. While Haitian elites were Catholic many poor Haitians practiced Vodou or Vodou alongside Catholicism, and this brought US troops in contact with Vodou. We have an invading army fed upon decades of anti-black racism and strict Christianity occupying a primarily black country with people taking part in a religion that focused heavily on communication with spirits, nighttime dancing, and at times secrecy.
White troops brought stories back from Haiti on Vodou, and I mean stories very literally here – not understanding and looking down on Haitian culture meant that accounts were willfully misunderstood. The occasional animal sacrifice, something that only happens on a select few festivals, was turned into human or baby sacrifice. The Haitian people were supposed caught in violent orgies and spells cast by Vodou, or Voodoo according to the rhetoric, priests, where more were enslaved as zombies. We wrote about Vodou zombies before so I would recommend reading that post if you want more details. The American media were obsessed with these stories, after all it provided evidence for popular culture’s desire to depict African-Americans and Haitians as backwards, and in 1929 it became academically backed. American journalist William Seabrook published The Magic Island about Vodou in Haiti, and is famed for being the first major usage of ‘zombie’ in English. Most of Seabrook’s research came second-hand from US troops and gave a formal academic justification for Vodou being a superstitious and murderous cult that kept the Haitians down, and thereby justify US intervention in Haiti.
Voodoo Comes to the Movies
Voodoo/Vodou had appeared in cinema as early as 1913 and from this early time Voodoo had been presented as a religion based on devil-worship and human sacrifice. I would highly recommend Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire in general, but her chapter on early Voodoo depictions in cinema is very insightful. Here she draws a link between The Magic Island and the first major depiction of zombies in White Zombie (1932). Starring Dracula himself Bela Lugosi it depicts a white plantation owner (Lugosi) using zombies to enslave a blonde woman for his own sexual desires. While White Zombie features whites as the villains and a black actor in a minor but heroic role, as argued by Means it is Haiti itself, like the Congo in Heart of Darkness, that corrupts people into becoming evil. The 1934 movie Black Moon is more explicit in its racism with black Voodoo practicioners corrupting a white woman, reflecting the racist fear of black male sexuality and abducting white women, while non-practicioners are depicted as lazy unless forced to work. Voodoo was one method to reinforce black inferiority to whites with Voodoo turned into a belief that involved blood sacrifice to appeal to sexual vice.
Often you hear the phrase ‘well that was normal at the time‘ when discussing minority rights in the past, but this phrase is inaccurate and especially the case with Vodou/Voodoo. In 1938 African-American author and ethnologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote the influential Tell My Horse based on her research into Vodou and Obeah in Haiti and Jamaica. She discussed the history of slavery and the emergence of faith, and mythbusted many aspects of Vodou – animal sacrifice, nevermind human sacrifice, was rare; harmful magic was a major taboo; and Vodou revolved around connection to ancestors, not a cult of the dead. Similarly, anthropologist and UNESCO official Alfred Metraux in 1959 published his findings about Haitian Voodoo where he again pushed back against the stereotypes about Vodou. In both cases the authors had gotten involved and asked actual practicioners instead of being influenced by racist diatribes, but sadly this was not the case for popular culture.
To an extent even today Vodou and Voodoo are seen as something to be feared or not taken seriously in popular culture – New Orleans, for example, has used Voodoo in its tourism. The atrocities committed under the Duvalier regimes did not help Vodou’s image due to their association with the practice, but media portrayals have focused on Vodou and harkened back to older racial obsessions with the faith. For example, while researching for this post a video titled ‘Duvalier – Haiti’s Voodoo Dictator’ kept on popping up, but we would never write ‘Franco – Spain’s Catholic Dictator’ or ‘Modi – India’s Hindu Prime Minister’. Instead, Vodou is something exotic and obscene that can entice people. While the horror genre, from White Zombie to Child’s Play, has regularly used Voodoo as a prop it is not the only genre to do so. Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die (1954) featured James Bond against a Voodoo priest backed by the Soviet Union called Mr. Big – the book was so racist that its American release had to be edited to remove some of the constant use of racial slurs. Meanwhile, in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009) the villain is a New Orleans Voodoo priest who has ‘friends on the other side’ who drag him to effectively hell – this is on top of the movie being set in 1920s New Orleans so we have Disneyfied Jim Crow setting so there are no signs of racism (which also raises the question why it could not be set in the present day). Regardless of genre, Voodoo and Vodou could be an easy sinister cult and doing so continues the long trend of demonising black culture.
Conclusions
The demonisation of Voodoo and Vodou was just one part of a long history of demonisation of non-European and black cultures. A desire to depict African, Afro-Caribbean and African-Americans as inferior, whether that was wanting to depict them as barbaric or superstitious or easy to dupe, in order to retain white power structures meant that the syncretic religions were turned into devil worship in popular imagery. It has had many real-world consequences for Vodou and Voodoo practicioners – they were more likely to be subject to murder by US troops after 1915, after the fall of the Duvaliers Vodou practicioners were murdered, and following the 2010 Haitian Earthquake Christian elites in Haiti and their allies in the US blocked aid as they blamed the earthquake on God punishing Vodou practicioners. As always, subaltern practices earn the distrust and hatred of the elite.
Bibliography:
- Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1990)
- Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti, Trans. Hugo Charteris, (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1972)
- Robin Means Coleman, Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to the Present, Second Edition, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023)
- William Seabrook, The Magic Island, (New York, NY: Paragon House, 1989)
- Josh Toussaint-Strauss, ‘The Guardian, How “voodoo” became a metaphor for evil’, YouTube.com, (26/11/2020), [Accessed 15/10/2023]
- Danielle Boaz, Voodoo: The History of a Slur, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)
- Angelica Jade Bastien, ‘Why can’t black witches get some respect in popular culture?’, Vulture, (31/10/2017), [Accessed 20/10/2023]
- Carolyn Marrow Long, ‘Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo: Sin, Fraud, Entertainment and Religion’, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 6:1, (2002), 86-101
Thank you for reading. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.
Lewis Twiby's Past and Present 