New Orleans Voodoo Handbook

Product Information

Okanla, Karim. "Benin Marks Voodoo Day." BBC. 11/1/2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1756057.stm Cussans, John. "Voodoo Terror: (mis)Representations of Voodoo and Western Cultural Anxieties. http://www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org/Cussans.html According to local Haitian voodoo practitioners, all the Haitian politicians and influential people throughout their history were equally believers in voodoo as were the poor illiterate masses. The trend continues to this day. The sound of the pistol sent the mourners stampeding through the doors and diving out of windows, but the man who fired it, Robert Burns, stayed inside, and when two police officers showed up to arrest him, he promptly confessed. “I had to do it,” he said on the way to the police station, “and if I had to do it over, I’d do it again.” Burns was related to Ellington, and like a lot of people around that part of Alabama, he’d grown increasingly afraid of Maxwell.

One common saying is that Haitians are 70 percent Catholic, 30 percent Protestant, and 100 percent voodoo," said Lynne Warberg, a photographer who has documented Haitian voodoo for over a decade.It is said that the Loa sometimes communicate prophecies, advice, or warnings while the believer is possessed. Other messages are sent through the priest or priestess, or sometimes come later in dreams. United States Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook. Haiti. 1/18/2007. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ha.html Nobody dies at a funeral. The dead arrive that way, and the living are supposed to leave that way. But the Rev Willie Maxwell walked into a funeral that he never left. It was 18 June, 1977, and Maxwell, a rural preacher living just outside Alexander City, Alabama, was at the House of Hutchinson Funeral Home – not to conduct a service, but to attend one for his 16-year-old stepdaughter, who had been murdered the week before. It was a stifling day, and with only one storey in the funeral home, there was nowhere for the heat to rise. Ceiling fans shuffled air around the chapel, and ushers offered paper fans to each of the 300 mourners as they made their way to the pews. Up in front of them, Shirley Ann Ellington’s slight body rested in an open casket. It is an honor to be entered and "ridden" by a Loa, or spirit. In Haiti these rituals are commonplace: Voodoo is the dominant religion. But all of that was long in the past by the time Burns shot and killed Maxwell. At the time, Lee was living, as she had been for most of her adult life, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, hiding in plain sight so successfully that her building’s door buzzer could read “Lee-H” without causing anyone to ring it. Her novel had won the Pulitzer prize, sold millions of copies, and made her extravagantly wealthy, but success did not suit Lee. She lived as frugally as if she were still a starving artist, was allergic to the press and publicity, chafed at the ongoing interest in her private life, and struggled to live up to the critical and popular expectations for her work. In one forlorn letter, she told a friend that “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle” – the name she had gone by as a child, and that those closest to her still used.

The names of Catholic saints became the names of loa. In many cases, the loa's role reflected that of the corresponding saint. For example, Saint Peter holds the keys to the kingdom of Heaven and corresponds to the loa Papa Legba, who is the spirit world's gatekeeper [source: Dialogue Institute]. American Museum of Natural History: Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/vodou/An item called a pwen is filled with objects to attract a loa and gain some kind of influence over a person. A pwen can come in many forms, one of which happens to be a doll [source: Learn Religions].