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 Home  Basic Vodou Lessons  The Vodou Deep Dive, pt. 2

The Vodou Deep Dive, pt. 2

Posted on July 5, 2018

It can very easily be said, with full sincerity, that the history of Vodou is the history of Haiti,
and in turn, the history of Haiti is the history of North America as a whole.

We only really get partial information passed to us in this country’s school system, namely
choice little cleaned up pieces and factoids about how Europeans brought Africans as slaves
to Haiti, the slaves rebelled and killed the Europeans in the Haitian Rebellion, and that
somewhere along the way, Vodou happened. If you listen to the Pat Robertsons of the world,
it seems that a pact with the Devil wrought horror upon horror and keeps the Haitians
trapped in the poorest nation in the West, simultaneously existing to save and condemn.
Generally the speaker’s perspective is entirely Eurocentric; either it speaks of the duty
European descendants share in “saving” through Mission duty and charity, or it speaks
bitterly of what the Europeans “lost” to revolution and violence.

Either way, Vodou… just happened. Sometimes they’ll say the slaves’ African beliefs fueled
their rage and their revolt… but that just points in blanket-statement fashion to an entire
continent and pretends that not only were those primitive people easily snared and
harvested wholesale by roving bands of slavers, but also that they seemingly shared0 a single
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belief system across the entire landmass, and of course that belief system is so simple it’s
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 entirely encapsulated in the word “African”. Are you noticing a trend here? We do the same
with the “Native Americans” any time the question of smudging with Sage comes into
conversation… but anyway… that’s pretty much where the story closes. Haiti happened in a
paroxysm of bloody revolt, and Vodou… just happened.

For Part 2 of our Deep Dive, lets put aside the theoretical topics and philosophies of the
previous post for a moment and switch over to History; we’ll bounce back in the next post,
and we’ll piece together more as we look back and forth between the underpinnings and the
overview.

One of the fascinating aspects we find when we start honestly looking into Haitian Vodou’s
formative stages is an area of history that really isn’t concerned as much with Europeans;
sure they were involved, but we find a time when the vast majority of information flow was
between the indigenous Taino and Arawak peoples of the island/the surrounding territories
and the imported Africans, when the enslaving Europeans were a decided minority in this
part of the world. Sure, the Europeans set policy and seemed to direct affairs, but as we will
see they were largely more caught up in directing their affairs with their own people and
setting the stage with notions of caste based on European birth and purity of blood than they
were with controlling the lives of the people who were “underneath” them. Mainstream
Haitian history is still told from the perspective of the Europeans “in charge” or their
descendants, the political elite of the modern day nation, but as for the Vodou religion’s
foundations only shreds and filler came from the European model. Even religious elements
that may seem foreign to a romantic Africanized ideal, such as Catholicism and Islam, were
largely brought to the island by those in chains instead of those in charge.

Really, there are two distinct yet overlapping histories at play; one, the importation of
Africans as slaves serving European masters and forced into proximity with the islands native
inhabitants (more appropriately imported to replace the indigenous peoples who had first
been enslaved but who were powerless to resist imported European infections), and two, the
hidden processes by which different and wholly separate religions were combined in a way
that preserved the distinct pieces by creating a new system that was able to house them all.
To make sense of it all, though, we need to flesh out the first of these historical narratives in
order for the second to be able to reveal itself. On one level you have a physical history of a
nation taking shape, and then just beneath the surface you have a story of amazingly deep
seated spiritualities held by many people from disparate nations coming together and forging
themselves anew. We need to take a long and honest look at what happened on the surface
before we begin to see the currents that were moving underneath, and we need to widen our
scope beyond what the American school system passes to its students. Harkening back to
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our comments about McNuggets worth of information a few blog posts ago, we need to begin
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 teasing apart the narrative we’ve been handed in an effort to see the threads that have been
left out.

I assure you that the threads that were left out were neither accidentally forgotten nor left
out for being too complex. Politics is always at play, and when it comes to Haitian history,
both religious and chronological, much is left out for very specific reasons of Political Power
wanting the details forgotten.

***

It may seem ridiculously reductionist and will undoubtedly cause controversy for me to come
out and say this, but did you know that what we understand of the history of Haiti, and
through her the whole of the modern Western Hemisphere (including the history of our own
United States!), if looked at from the right angle, can fairly be said to have been caused by a
single small insect, today known more as a nuisance pest than the shaper of history itself?

Of course, I am speaking about the Mosquito.

You may laugh, but if you give me a moment or two to explain I am sure you will see
precisely what I mean (and why sometimes we need to look behind the words we see first in
the educational materials others hand us). If there’s any single lesson in building a formative
understanding of Vodou, it’s that things are not always as they first appear.

Modern/Western recording of Haitian history begins on a very important single date… the 5th
of December, in the year 1492. On this day, at a site at the western tip of the island’s
northwest peninsula (today the town of Môle-Saint-Nicolas), the first European to set foot on
the newly “discovered” land arrived. 

Before this date, different parts of the island were known alternately as Ayiti or Bohio by the
Taino people, an Amerindian culture and the island’s native population (some histories speak
of the island once being known as Kiskeya, sometimes also spelled as Quizquiea; once put
forth by the Spanish chronicler Pietro Martyr d’Anghiera as the local indigenous word for
“Mother of All Lands”, but modern scholarship has shown the word to not be sourced by the
language spoken by the island’s native inhabitants, indicating a later introduction rather than
an indigenous name). Ayiti, the Taino/Arawak word for “Mountainous Land” should be familiar
to the modern eye as the source word that became the name of the modern nation of Haiti.

Texts written by three of the early Spanish chroniclers (Bartolomé de las Casas, d’Angheria,
and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo) seemingly agree that the word Ayiti was in use as a place
descriptor by the Taino, but the writings of d’Angheria and modern research both  point
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the word referring only to the northeastern part of the modern Dominican Republic currently
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 named Los Haitises, and named Montes de Haiti in the earliest known and referenced map
of the island. We don’t actually know if the Taino had a single name for the entire landmass.

December 5th, 1492, when our written historical record of the island begins. We know much
less of the island’s history before this date than after; through careful study of the island’s
archaeological record, we’ve been able to discern several waves of migration originating from
the area of the Orinoco River delta bringing Arawak-language speaking people to the island.
Around 600 AD, the Taino people (an Arawak culture) migrated to the island, displacing a 
previous population group from an earlier wave of migration. Archaeologists believe the Taino
culture developed distinct from that of their ancestral language-group homeland cousins,
flowering in the Antilles. Though the modern Arawak people of the northern coastal plains
and rainforests of Guyana and Venezuela are directly linked by genes and culture, island
Taino belief held that they as a people emerged from caves found in a sacred mountain
located on Hispanola. 

Taino people were found in many places throughout the Caribbean basin beyond today’s
geographical-landmass-in-question, and their culture still has a lasting impact on our own;
their language would give us such words as Hurricane, Tobacco, Hammock, Canoe, Manatee…
many more words we take for granted come directly from Taino language. Vodou as well was
deeply informed and influenced by indegenous Taino spirituality and the Zemis, or spirits, of
their people; for now, though, lets focus on the Island and it’s practical/political history and
save the metaphysics for future.

The Taino had divided the island into five semi-independent polities that later became
known as caciquedoms (though the word Cacique was a European imposition; the earliest
Spanish writers transliterated a Taino word for a feudal chiefdom as Cacicazgo, equating the
ruler of an area to the European feudal notion of a local King ruling over a single tribe’s
territory in a larger nation-state comprised of semi-autonomous kingdoms, such as those
seen throughout the history of Ireland. The word is Caciquat in French). The names we have
recorded for these five “states” are also Spanish transliterations of native names; Marién,
which occupied the northwest peninsula and most of what is now the Artibonite Valley,
Jaragua (also spelled Xaragua), which occupied the southwest peninsula, the majority of the
western coast, and easily half the southern coast, sharing it’s northern border with Marién
(these two chiefdoms occupied the territory that is now the modern nation of Haiti, though
the modern national border does not exactly match that of the tribal territories of the past),
Maguá, the northeastern coast and peninsula, Higüey roughly the southeastern peninsula,
and Maguana,  which occupied a small section of the island’s southern shore and a vast area
of its central territory.
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 On December 5th, 1492, everything changed… and Columbus claimed the island for Spain. He
named the island Hispana in Latin, and in Spanish, La Isla Española, the Spanish Island.
Bartolomé de las Casas simply called it Española, and from there it was only a short step to
d’Angheria, in his widely publicized writings about the discovery, calling it Hispanola, the
name it bears today. 

Nineteen days later, on Christmas day, while sailing east along the northern coast, the Santa
Maria ran aground, seriously wounding her hull just off the coast of the modern day Cap
Haitien. (Remember his three ships from grade school? The Niña, the Pinta, and of course the
aforementioned Santa Maria… Grade school teachers never manage to fill us in on the racy
details, like how the Pinta had been missing at this point for 6 weeks having been separated
from the other two vessels since the night of November the 21st, lost in the darkness while
sailing past the northern coast of what is now Cuba, leading Columbus in his paranoia to fear
that the ship’s captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had either landed in a secret location to begin
seeking the gold Columbus just knew to be there or taken the boat to race back to Spain
claiming the discovery for himself. Columbus, in his journals, was not a nice or a trusting
man. In mid-October the three ships had made landfall in a grouping of islands currently
believed to have been the Bahamas… but the week before, on the October 6th and 7th,
Columbus had been forced by a mutinying crew that he couldn’t control to ask Pinzón to
board the Santa Maria and discipline the men. Landfall was made at a site somewhere in the
southern Bahamas or Turks and Caicos that Columbus named Guanahani a week later, but
Columbus never forgave Pinzón for having better control of the sailors than he himself could
muster. I swear all those silly Columbus Day class reports and plays would have been more
fun if we’d all been given access to Columbus’ diaries when we were kids).

Anyway, when the Santa Maria ran aground, Columbus decided rather than try to repair the
ship, he would take her apart and build a small settlement with the wood from her hull. The
record tells that he and his crew were rescued from the damaged and sinking Santa Maria by
Guacanagarix, the cacique/chief of Marién (the state off the coast of which the Santa Maria
went down). Columbus negotiated a settlement deal with Guacanagarix to build the shelter
beside the caciques own village beside the present day Caracol Bay. It was named in honor of
the Christmas Day landing; La Navidad.

Having heard from Guacanagarix that there was gold to be found on the island (the record is
unclear on this point but it’s a safe assumption that the dignitaries from Marién that went to
rescue and aid Columbus would have done so dressed in their finery and emblems of state;
de las Casas describes the natives as beautiful, wearing little clothing but a significant
amount of pigment and ornament… much of it gold; the caciques themselves wore a heavy
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gold pendant of state called a guanin). Columbus instructed the 39 men who had been the
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Search the Santa Maria to stay behind in the new fortress and gather gold while he sailed
 back to Spain to announce the discovery/bring more workers. (Remember at this time that
the Pinta was still gone, Columbus afraid that Pinzón had either gone seeking riches on his
own or returned toward Spain to betray him). He wrote in his diary “I have ordered a tower
and fortress to be constructed, and a large cellar, not because I believe there is any necessity
on account of the natives. I am certain the people I have with me could subjugate all this
island … as the population are naked and without arms and very cowardly.”

The natives weren’t as cowardly as he suspected. He set sail on the 4th of January, leaving La
Navidad behind (and running into the missing Pinta on January 6th, when both ships set
course for Spain). When he returned, landing at La Navidad on the 27th of November, 1493,
the settlement had been destroyed, 11 corpses were found on the site, and neither
Guacanagarix nor any of his people could be found. Neighboring Taino told him the men left
behind had been killed for mistreating their people (though there are other sources that
make it sound like insubordination and rebellion rose in the encampment and the Spaniards
killed each other). The other caciques had wanted the Spaniards expelled; for cooperating
with them instead of the other chiefs, Guacanagarix had been stripped of his title and
banished to the mountains, where he later died.

Columbus created a new settlement to the east, naming it Nuevo Isabela in honor of the
Spanish queen, creating the first fully formal European planned settlement in the Americas.
The project was seemingly doomed from the start; swept by hurricanes in 1494 and 1495,
rising rebellion stirred by hunger and disease led to the town being abandoned in 1496, when
Bartholomew Columbus (the intrepid explorer’s younger brother) established the colony of
Santo Domingo at the mouth of the Ozama River.

During the settlement of Santo Domingo, Columbus began to tour the island to negotiate
treaties with the various caciques that remained. In a visit to the chiefdom of Jaragua, in the
southwest of the island, Columbus met with that territory’s co-rulers, a brother and sister
team named Behechío and Anacaona. Columbus successfully negotiated a tribute
arrangement for supplies of cotton and foodstuffs to be given to the Spanish towns.
According to de las Casas’ text Historia de las Indias, the meetings and negotiations were
friendly and the brother and sister team had been swayed towards welcoming Columbus and
his people. Some months later, when Columbus returned to collect the agreed upon tribute,
Anacaona even enjoyed a brief sail in his caravel in the Gulf of Gonâve.

Shortly afterwards, Behechío died, leaving Anacaona in sole control of Jaragua, and she
married Caonabo, the cacique of Maguana (the south coastal and central fiefdom located
just to the east of her own; unifying the two into the largest single polity on the island). The
Spaniards, fearful of the unified kingdoms, first built a settlement at Yaguana (present
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Léogâne, and Anacaona’s political capital), and then charged Caonabo with the destruction of
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 La Navidad and the conspiracy that led to the slaughter of the men left behind. He was
arrested, forced onto a ship to Spain, and lost at sea in a shipwreck.

His wife, however, now Queen of the largest combined territory on the island yet still friendly
to the Spanish, was brutally betrayed. During a festival at which she was being honored by
eighty four regional chieftans in 1503, by the order of the Spanish Governor Nicolas de
Ovando the encampment was set aflame. Anacaona’s escort of noblemen were shot, and she
herself was executed by hanging. Anacaona, “Golden Flower” in Taino, became a rallying
martyr for her people who rose against the Spanish in a series of increasingly violent but
ultimately doomed insurrections. In the murder of the queen, her entire court of advisors,
and the regional chiefs from the lands under her control, the Spanish conquest of the island
was near complete.

The Taino were dying in unprecedented numbers, both from being forced into work camps
and mines (which also drastically reduced the birth rate, a common effect in populations
encountering stress of that level) but also to an illness they had never been exposed to and
had no way of defending against.

Remember that mosquito?

Columbus, in his diaries from the very first voyage, spoke of several of his men having a
condition he referred to, in the language of his time, as Tertiary Fever (for its primary
symptom, a debilitating weakness and fever that would spike roughly every three days).
Today, we know Tertiary Fever as Malaria.

…and as we will explore in the next Deep History post, Malaria would come to shape the
whole of the Caribbean alongside another mosquito-bourne pathogen, Yellow Fever. The
native inhabitants of the New World had no resistances or previous exposures to the
diseases, yet through evolution and genetic adaptation in regions where the pathogenic
agents were endemic, West Africans were resistant. While Colonial-era explorers certainly did
not possess our modern knowledge of disease vectors, adaptations, and resistances, they
knew that a workforce that wouldnt be crippled by disease would be a better option than
ever-vanishing and dying Natives, setting the stage for industrial-scale forced human
transportation and labor and a West African Holocaust that would change the world.

Slavery.

…to be continued. 0
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  The Vodou Deep Dive, pt. 1 The Vodou Deep Dive, pt 3 

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