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If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one ... I am become Death, The destroyer of Worlds. Lines from the Bhagavad Gita, recalled by nuclear physicist, J Robert Oppenheimer, on July 16, 1945 at the detonation of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico
One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or
a rat in a trap. The English have loudly and
openly told the world that ski and dogs are unusable in these regions
and that fur clothes are rubish. We will see – we will see. So we arrived, and planted our flag at the
geographical South Pole. Thanks be to God! The land looks like a fairytale. Sir Raymond Priestley |
Erzulie Freda |
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Voudon
pilgrimage of Saut D'Eau, Haiti
Today, thousands of Voudon (Voodoo)
believers from Haiti
and abroad will make a pilgrimage to the sacred waters of Saut D'Eau, a
waterfall where Erzulie
Freda – the Voudon spirit of love, art, romance and sex – appeared
twice in the 19th Century.
Freda (her veve, or symbol, is pictured, below right) is a beautiful, wealthy white woman, a promiscuous love goddess-seductress, difficult and demanding, who loves luxurious items such as perfume, champagne and gold. She wears three wedding bands, one for each husband: Damballa, Agwe and Ogoun.
Her sister, the dark-skinned Erzulie Dantor, is
the spirit of motherly love, cognate of Saint
Barbara Africana in the Roman Catholic Church. Dantor is heterosexual
in the sense that she has a child, but she is also the patron loa, or
saint, of lesbians. Her Roman Catholic 
counterparts are the aspects
of Mary, Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Mount Carmel. When Erzulie Dantor appears at a ceremony via
possession, she speaks a stuttering monosyllable, "ke-ke-ke-ke-ke!".
Today, devotees will drench themselves in the waterfall sacred to Simbi, one of the three cosmic serpents of Haitian Voudon, the loa (or lwa, Voudon deity) who represents fresh waters and rainfall, and oversees the making of all charms, whether protective and destructive. (Simbi is also the collective name for a very diverse group of ancient ancestral spirits, who come from the Kikongo area of West Central Africa – Source.) He has been called the 'Voodoo Mercury' and may also be seen as a cognate of Thoth and Hermes. Simbi is considered by some to be "the quickening force" of Papa Legba, who symbolises the sun and is the essential centre of the Haitian belief system. Legba is the loa whose task it is to open the door to the other loa or spirits called in ritual. Simbi is symbolised by the water snake, his color is green, and his preferred sacrifice is a speckled rooster.
Origins of the religion
Where and how did Voudon originate? There are numerous
explanations, including one that proposes that the earliest slaves in the West Indies, Yoruba
people who had come from the West African regions of Dahomey, and parts of modern Togo,
Benin and Nigeria, brought with them a faith in a powerful fetish and
guardian spirit called Vodo.
Another possible derivation of the word comes from a
medieval evangelist named Peter Waldo, or Valdez,
who lived in Lyons in France at around the end of the eleventh century.
Valdez, appalled by the extravagant practices of the Church of his time,
saw it as his mission to re-establish the Church to its pristine state in
which followers of Christ sold their goods and gave the proceeds to the
poor, as exhorted by Jesus. Soon he was teaching a religion that included
esoteric and occult elements.
Valdez gained adherents who called themselves after their
leader. However, before long their name became corrupted and known as Waldenses, or Waldensians,
or, in French, Vaudois.
Naturally enough, the Roman Catholic Church vehemently
opposed the new sect and denounced it as satanic sorcery. In the name of
Jesus, they persecuted the Waldenses, finally massacring large numbers of
them in the 12th and 13th centuries. However, this
was not before the Waldenses had gained adherents in far-off regions of
France. It was one of the precursors of the Protestant
Reformation, and also experienced a revival in the sixteenth century.
In 1677
Spain ceded Haiti to France and soon Roman Catholic missionaries travelled
to the West Indian island to convert its people. Angered by their
religions, the priests identified them with the heretical sect of the
Waldenses and applied their name, in the Creole dialect, to those
Haitians. (Many Voudon priests were
martyred or imprisoned, their
shrines destroyed, because of the threat they posed to
Euro-Christian/Muslim colonialism.) Eventually 'Vaudois'
changed to become finally voodoo, the name that, with various spellings,
we know today.
Today, some 60 million people worldwide practise the old
religion, and similar religions such as Umbanda, Quimbanda, Santeria and
Candomble are widespread in South America and elsewhere. Voudon, like
these others, is often portrayed rather ignorantly in popular culture as
some kind of evil cult, a misperception which is quite far from the truth
and derives from historical colonialist dynamics.
Peter Waldo, or Valdez
Erzulie Freda banners
Erzulie Dantor magic
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