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Voodoo is a cluster of local
religions. It have its roots in Africa, but have evolved the last 500 years in
the Caribbean with a stronghold on Haiti as Vodou.
Haitian Vodou first took shape in the context of slavery. Once the religion of
the royal family in Dahomey, in West Africa, it was then transformed by the
slaves of the island of Haiti as a way of restoring a sense of identity and as a
force of liberation.
Anthropology also shows us that Haitian Vodou serves as a means of remembrance
and that it forms part of the patrimony of humanity since the nineteenth
century.
With its worship of spiritual entities or divinities representing the
different domains of nature (water, air, fire, etc.) and human activities, Vodou
was first practiced in the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, namely Dahomey or
present-day Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Guinea, and Ghana. In this area, society was,
up until the eighteenth century, largely organised around families, lineages,
villages, or ethnic groups. Each of these had their own divinities, referred to
as Vodoun, which, in the Fon language in Dahomey, represented an invisible
force, capable of manifesting itself in the bodies of certain individuals
through trance and possession.
My Icon: The Veve symbol for a necklace. |