The term Voodoo is the most popular name for a religion developed in Haiti that is a combination of the religion of the West African Yoruba people and their Roman Catholic slave owners. Although it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the African elements may go back as far as five or six thousand years. Practitioners often use the Creole spellings "Vodou" or "Vodun" to distinguish the religion from the popular misconceptions of "voodoo" spells and black magic.
Because indigenous pagan beliefs were suppressed, the religion was forced underground and it developed in secret. Hollywood has managed to so infect the minds of most Westerners that it is almost impossible to join in honest discussion of Voodoo. "Everyone knows" it deals in black magic and incantations carried on in the dark of night by Obeah women who speak with musical Caribbean accents. "Everyone knows" it is involved with evil spells that produce zombies or "walking dead." And there is a very small kernel of truth in what "everyone knows." But mostly, what "everyone knows" comes out of fantasy movies, not reality.
The truth is that Voodoo is concerned primarily with veneration of the ancestors, as is the case with Japanese Shinto. It recognizes a pantheon of "nature" gods, similar to Hinduism. These vary from group to group; it is difficult to summarize Voodoo because there are so many different expressions. Anthropologists can't even agree who the principal deities are. Many have compiled lists of the different names for the gods, but no two lists are the same.
What is known is that Roman Catholicism has shaped Voodoo culture. Both believe in a Supreme Being. The Catholic saints are paralleled by the Voodoo loa or lwa, the spirits of people who had led exceptional lives. Both religions believe in an afterlife and have, as their centerpiece, a ritual sacrifice involving both flesh and blood. Both believe in the existence of evil, demonic, invisible spirits. Both believe in the existence of the human soul, which leaves the body at death to enter the place prepared for it. Both believe in exorcism. The many ceremonies, songs, and dances of Voodoo are performed primarily to honor worshipers' ancestors or the loa.
Sources: Ellwood, Robert S., and Barbara A. McGraw. Many Peoples, Many Faiths. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. Gordon, Leah. The Book of Vodou. London, UK: Quarto Inc., 2000.
