The purpose of this text is to try and have an influence on the way Caribbean culture is viewed…
I found Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola to be an innovative and intimate “ethnographic spiritual biography” exploring the lived realities, material and immaterial, of a Haitian Voudou priestess and her family in New York City from the late 1970’s through the 1980’s. (xiv) Brown’s approach is innovative because she treats her subjects’ as multivocal and fluid. Brown heeds her own advice and contrary to most ethnographic scholars before her, appropriately represents her own, albeit limited, voice, and positionality as similarly multiplicitous and in flux, reciprocally performing “meaningmaking” with Alourdes and family. Brown’s many voices aptly declare numerous interrelated aims, including “to describe as fully and accurately ... Alourdes’ daytoday practice of Haitian Vodou”, to “plant images of quotidian Vodou practice in the minds of thinking people, images that would linger and soften the formulaic association of Vodou with the superstitious and the satanic”, and to portray “Vodou embedded in the vicissitudes of particular lives.” (xv, xiv, 15)…
Important aspect of voodoo are singing and dancing. It is usually done to honor the “loas”. Another important aspect is the performance of animal sacrifices such as slaughtering a chicken or a goat. The blood of the sacrifice can be placed on a person, alter or even a space. Sacrifices may be done is a healing…
Voodoo is known by many different names and spellings. Vodun, Voodoo, Vodoun, Voudou, and Sevi Lwa was based around the god Vodun by people of West Africa Yoruba during the 18th and 19th Centuries. (Robinson. 2010.) These alternate spellings for Voodoo are gradually gaining popularity because of negative associations to the word Voodoo.…
Haitian Voodoo, or properly referred to as Vodou, is characterized by various ritual ceremonies, typically called a “Service to the Loa” often translated to “African Service”. Vodou is typically described as more than just a religion and instead more of an experience that connects the body and soul. The popularized concept of connecting a soul to a tangible object in the Vodou practice is derived from the Congolese tradition of Kanga in which a similar act is performed. Vodouisants believe there is an esoteric Supreme Creator by the name of Bondye. According to the religion Bondye arbitrate in the practices of man in this way they present their…
Kelly Hayes' Slave of the Saints introduced a new kind of worshipping along Afro-Brazilians, their urban community and marginalized society. The documentary illustrated Afro-Brazilian rituals of Pomba Gira and other possessing entities that not only speak through human beings such as Nazare but also depicts both the subordination and empowerment under traditional views of hypersexualized femininity that also links marginalized women to the spiritual life of feminine entities.…
Voodoo is a small-scaled religion that originated in the West Indies. Voodoo is an actual religion that people mislead for something scary. In the Americas and Caribbean Voodoo is thought to be a variety of African, Catholic, and Native American traditions with aged of millions of followers and believers today. The word Voodoo comes from the shortened word “Vodu” which means spirit or god. This religion had been put into categories of how people believed and their opinions. The main idea of Voodoo is that it is not a single person belief it is more a tribal and group religion. The religion maintains a certain structure in each area that it originates in. Voodoo is increasingly having people join their beliefs such as Americans, Africans, Europeans,…
In the old time the African people use some spells to take the sympathy of the bad spirits, so that they did not harm them. Now these spells are using to control the bad spirit. The practitioners of the voodoo magic can control the bad spirits and the souls to achieve their goal. The folk magic spells are the words which were used by the people…
In addition, the Vodou religion seen in Haiti was also influenced by the Yoruba culture in Western Nigeria, which is circled in green in figure 3. The Encyclopedia of Global Religion also states, “Haitian Vodou is a neo-African spiritual system, philosophical construct, and religion whose core resides largely in Dahomey (presently Benin) and in Yorubaland, in western Nigeria.”18 Not only is there evidence of Vodou traditions coming from other religions, but there is also evidence of them physically being circulated throughout the world, hundreds of miles in every direction away from where it is chiefly practiced in Haiti. According to Wexler’s comment in his interview with Bazile, “The bottles are for the Petro iwa. They came from Guinea- the Petro Iwa brought them from Guinea.”19 However, the Haitian Vodou and the Kongo culture share more than just traditions borrowed from other religions. There is evidence to suggest that the Vodou culture also borrowed traditions directly from the Kongo…
In the early eighteenth century the Spanish Catholic church allowed for the creation of societies called cabildos, modeled on religious guilds existing in Spain, which were primarily for African ethnicities and provided means for entertainment and reconstruction of many aspects of ethnic heritage. Yorùbá slaves practiced Yorùbá religious ceremonies in these cabildos, along with religious and secular traditions from other parts of Africa, combining and amalgamating their masters' pantheon of Catholic saints with their own pantheon of Orisha which is the Yorùbá word for god” (www.newworldencyclopedia.org). The Yorùbá religion is formed of a combination of various traditions; after the slave trade these traditions spread in various countries and Cuba was one of them. The Yoruba religion was adopt within the Cuban community and the religion of Santeria or La Regla Lucumí (Lukumí) was born. Santería practices, songs, dance, initiations, and rituals. Also, when reciting prayers of the religion, the sacred language of Lucumí is…
Voodoo started in the Africa and haiti then it spread to others countries and made versions of voodoo like the Louisiana voodoo(which is mostly mixed race)…
References: Galanti, G. (2012) “Cultural Diversity in Health Care” African American. Retrieved on January 27, 2013 from www.ggalanti.org…
Besides the parties, food, and beads that engulf mardi gras there’s another magical charm—voodoo. Chapter 5 introduces Seven Sisters a conjure woman that has spells that will get a girl to fall in love with you to getting back at your rival. With detailed instructions for a small amount a person can get be a spell caster. When exploring Mobile the aurora of the conjure woman can be felt and even seen. I have been to mardi gras and the streets—although filled with fun and drinks—have a mystic feeling. Traveling in downtown Mobile, I saw a building for a physic and card readings. A woman sat in a dark room and speak in a tone that made me certain she was doing the right thing. She read my palms and told me how my future would be if I continued the same lifestyle. Just like Seven Sisters, her readings were jam packed with information and as detailed as a travel brochure. Although I was not given the directions on how to get back at my rival; I was given the feeling that Carmer felt 82 years…
Voodoo is a religion rich in heritage and founded in faith and community. The religion has been villainized by western culture and has been wrongly portrayed as malignant and dangerous. The religion is not founded in any of the (known) "black magics" or fear popularized by Hollywood films, but rather it is based on balance and tradition. The religion is not something that should be encountered with inhibition or fear induced from childhood horror stories, but embraced for its strength and history.…
Wicca (IPA: /ˈwɪkə/) is a nature-based religion popularised in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant, who at the time called it Witchcraft and its adherents "the Wica".[1] He said that the religion, of which he was an initiate, was a modern survival of an old witchcraft religion which had existed in secret for hundreds of years, originating in the pre-Christian paganism of Europe.[1] The veracity of Gardner's statements cannot be independently proven, however, and it is possible that Wiccan theology began to be compiled no earlier than the 1920s.[2]…