POSSESSED!

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The initiates responded, swinging about the peristyle as one body linked in a single pulse. Each hounsis remained anonymous, focused inward toward the poteau mitan and the drums. Their dance was not a ritual of posed grace, of allegory; it was a frontal assault on the forces of nature. Physically, it was a dance of shoulders and arms, of feet flat on the ground repeating deceptively simple steps over and over. But it was also a dance of purpose and resolution, of solidarity and permanence.

For 40 minutes the dance went on, and then the maman broke--fled from the fixed rhythm of the other two drums, then rushed back with a highly syncopated, broken counterpoint. The effect was a moment of excruciating emptiness, of hopeless vulnerability. An initiate froze. The drum pounded relentlessly--deep, solid blows that seemed to strike the woman's spine. She cringed with each beat. Then, with one foot fixed to the earth like a root, she began to spin in a spasmodic pirouette, then hurtled about the peristyle, stumbling, flailing, grasping, thrashing the air with her arms, momentarily regain-ing her center only to be driven on by the incessant beat. And upon this wave of sound, the spirit arrived. The woman's violence ceased; slowly she lifted her face to the sky. She had been mounted by the Divine Horseman; she had become the spirit. The loa, the spirit invoked by the ceremony, had arrived.

The initiate, a diminutive woman, tore about the peristyle, lifting large men off the ground to swing them about as if they were children. She grabbed a glass and crunched it in her mouth, swallowing small bits and spitting the rest onto the ground. The mambo brought her a live dove; this the hounsis sacrificed by breaking its wings, then tearing its neck apart with her teeth. Soon two other hounsis were possessed, and for an extraordinary 30 minutes the peristyle was utter pandemonium. The mambo raced about, spraying libations of water and rum, directing the spirits with the sound of her rattle.

The rhythm changed and the spirits arrived again, this time riding a fire burning at the base of the poteau mitan. A hounsis was mounted violently--her entire body shaking, her muscles flexed--and a single spasm wriggled up her spine. She knelt before the fire, calling out in some ancient tongue. Then she stood up and began to whirl, describing smaller and smaller circles that carried her like a top around the poteau mitan and dropped her, still spinning, onto the fire. She remained there for an impossibly long time, and then in a single bound that sent embers and ash flying throughout the peristyle, she leapt away. Landing squarely on both feet, she stared back at the fire and screeched like a raven. Then she embraced the coals. She grabbed a burning stick with each hand, slapped them together, and released one. The other she began to lick, with broad lascivious strokes of her tongue, and then she ate the fire, taking a red hot coal the size of a small apple between her lips. Then once more she began to spin. She went around the poteau mitan three times until finally she collapsed into the arms of the mambo. The burning ember was still in her mouth.

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