POSSESSED!

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For the nonbeliever there is something profoundly disturbing about spirit possession. Its power is raw, immediate, and undeniably real--devastating, in a way, to those of us who do not know our gods. To witness sane, respectable individuals experiencing direct rapport with the divine fills us with either fear--which finds its natural outlet in disbelief--or envy.

Most psychologists who have attempted to understand possession from a scientific perspective have fallen into the former category, and perhaps because of this they have come up with some bewildering conclusions, derived from unwarranted assumptions. Because the mystical frame of reference of the Vodounists involves issues that cannot be approached by their calculus--the existence or nonexistence of spirits, for example--psychologists dismiss as externalities the beliefs of the individual experiencing possession. To the believer, the dissociation of personality that characterizes possession is the hand of divine grace; to the psychologist it is but a symptom of an "overwhelming psychic disturbance."

Vodoun, in truth, is a complex, metaphysical worldview distilled from profound religious ideas that have their roots in Africa. The essence of the faith is a sacred cycle of life, death, and rebirth unique to the religion. The acolyte fears death not for its finality but as a crucial and vulnerable moment in which the spiritual and physical components separate. One aspect of the soul, the ti bon ange, or little good angel, goes beneath the Great Water. A year and a day after the death, in one of the most important of all Vodoun rites, the ti bon ange is ritualistically reclaimed and placed by the houngan in a govi, a small clay jar, which is stored in the temple's inner sanctuary. That soul, initially associated with a particular relative, in time becomes part of a vast pool of ancestral energy from which emerge the archetypes that are the loa, the 401 spirits of the Vodoun pantheon. To Haitians this reclamation of the dead is not an isolated sentimental act; on the contrary, it is as fundamental and inescapable as birth itself. One emerges from the womb an animal, the spiritual birth at initiation makes one human, but it is the final reemergence that marks one's birth as sacred essence.

To be sure, there are other less benign forces in Vodoun: the conjurers of dark magic, the manipulators of the hexing herbs. Yet to ask why there is sorcery in Vodoun is ultimately to ask why there is evil in the universe. The answer, if there is one, is the same as that given by Krishna to a disciple: "To thicken the plot." Indeed, nearly every religion has a notion of darkness and light. In Christianity there is the fallen archangel who is the devil, and the Christ child, the son of God. For Vodounists, sorcery is merely the manifestation of the dark side of the universe. Balancing those malevolent forces with the magical power of the positive is the very goal of the religion.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print