describing the personae of the spirits and many of
the rituals performed in their honor continued to
bear the mark of Africa. In time, however, many
of these were transformed to shape Haitian cul-
tural and religious life.
One such transformation is the assimilation of
Roman Catholic traditions in Vodou’s largely
African theology. During the 17th and 18th cen-
turies, the French colonial invaders regarded
Vodou as an aberration and worked unremit-
tingly to extricate it from colonial life. Zealous
French Catholic missionaries went to Saint
Domingue to convert the enslaved Africans to
Christianity in an effort to eradicate African reli-
gious practices from the colony. To achieve this
goal, they enacted a series of edicts that regulated
the religious lives of the inhabitants of all the
French colonies, including Louisiana. One such
edict, theCode Noirof 1685, made it illegal for
the enslaved Africans to practice their religion
and, under stiff penalties, ordered all French
colonists to have the Africans living on their plan-
tations converted to and baptized in the Catholic
faith within 8 days upon their arrival in the
colony. The Police Rulings of 1757 and 1777
controlled the enslaved Africans’ resort to items
that might have had ritualistic use. These rulings
also prohibited the enslaved Africans from
congregating in remote places, especially in the
absence of a Catholic priest or a civil servant.
The severity of these laws drove African reli-
gious practices underground. To prevent the
officious interference of the white owners in their
religious rituals, the Africans learned to mask their
African traditions with the veneer of the symbols
and rituals of the Catholic church. In effect, they
used the Catholic symbols as “white masks over
black faces,” veils behind which they could conceal
their African religious practices. In time, they suc-
ceeded in realizing a religious amalgam in which
they not only learned to integrate the Christian
symbols in their African rituals, but achieved a sys-
tem of correspondences between the African spir-
its and the Catholic saints. These correspondences
consisted of a system of reinterpretation by which
particular symbols associated with the saints in
Christian hagiology were made to correspond to
(or were transfigured into) similar symbols about
the spirits in African mythology. Thus, for
instance, Vodou’s Ezili, the beautiful Dahomean
water spirit, “becomes” the Virgin Mary because
of her beauty and because of her apparitions in
Catholic popular belief near bodies of water.
Likewise, Benin’s python spirit Damballa
“becomes” St. Patrick because of the triumph of
Patrick over the snakes of Ireland in Catholic
hagiology. Similarly, Legba or Elegua, the
guardian of the world’s destiny, the one who holds
the keys to the doors of the underworld,
“becomes” St. Peter, and so forth.
The encroachment of Vodou practices on
Catholicism has caused the Catholic church to
campaign vehemently against “fetishism”
throughout Haitian history. In 1896, 1913, and
again in 1941, the Catholic church, with the
assistance of the local police, conducted what it
called the “Anti-Superstitious Campaigns,” in
which it sought and burned Vodou temples and
ritual paraphernalia throughout the country.
Also, a catechism that was written by the
Catholic clergy in a question–answer format that
children and adults were made to memorize
circulated widely throughout the country. It
admonished Vodou by encouraging Haitians to
renounce their “superstitious” practices, to renew
their vows with the Christian church, to abandon
their services to the Vodou lwas, and to promise
to raise their children according to the teachings
of the Catholic church. More often than not, sup-
pression destroys what is benevolent and gentle,
but also inspires violent reactions from those
whose religious practices are endangered. The
threat of pending violence in the country made
Haitian president Elie Lescot order that the
campaign be stopped in 1942. These attempts to
eradicate Vodou have had little effect on Haitian
culture because many Haitians today practice the
two religions simultaneously and maintain their
allegiance to both. Indeed, they see little contra-
diction between the two religions.
Recent political developments in Haiti have
brought changes in the relationships of the two
faiths. Perhaps the most prominent of these is an
article in Haiti’s 1987 Constitution that guaran-
tees religious liberty to all citizens and accords
Vodou a status equal to that given to other faiths.
This new provision has allowed a new sense of
openness in the devotees’ religious expressions696 Vodou in Haiti