The Serpent and the Rainbow 
by 

Wade Davis

 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Wade Davis has written an entertaining, at times profound, tale of his research into the zombi-phenomenon in Haiti. As an ethnobiologist, he has sympathetically brought together the country’s history and sociology, conventional medicine and pharmacology, religious ritual, and his own personal experience in a nail-biting narrative. Your typical swashbuckling hero has nothing on Davis - except perhaps a little self-effacement.*

What I find most compelling about The Serpent and the Rainbow, though, is Wade’s appreciation for the theological import of the uniquely Haitian way of life signified by Voodoo. That Voodoo is a religion is often challenged by other religions originating outside of Haiti, especially, for historical reasons, Christianity. But despite objections, it is clear that Voodoo has not only a central spiritual purpose but also a rather sophisticated theological structure. I’ll try to enumerate my reasons for this conclusion based on Davis’s observations.

1. Voodoo is intensely syncretistic. It absorbs almost every spiritual belief it encounters and transforms the original into an aspect of its comprehensive worldview.
2. Consequently Voodoo has no fixed doctrine or dogma. It’s expression in prayer and ritual may vary greatly and yet still be recognisable for what it is. 
3. This absence of fixed doctrine is accompanied by an interesting association between symbolic ritual and physical causality; or, if one prefers, between the psychological and the material.
4. While it is without doctrine, Voodoo maintains itself through tradition. Its West African origins are evident in its vocabulary, ritual, and spiritual cosmology.
5. In Voodoo, while spirits of various sorts exist and affect daily life through their presence in material things or events, these things or events are not the spirits themselves.
6. Neither do various ritual prayers and actions cause the presence of spirits. Spirits are merely invited, often begged, to participate in human activities. It is a mistake to term ritual aspects of Voodoo ‘magic.’ They are the equivalent of what can be called psychic or spiritual therapy: “... the human form is by no means just an empty vessel for the gods. Rather it is the critical and single locus where a number of sacred forces may converge, and within the overall vodoun quest for unity it is the fulcrum upon which harmony and balance may be finally achieved.”
7. There are no moral absolutes in Voodoo. Good shades into Evil. In fact Good and Evil often inhabit the same situation in a sort of Zen condition. Davis quotes one of his sources: “Good and Evil are the same; but do not confuse them.”
8. While Good and Evil cohabit in Voodoo, there is nevertheless Justice. Before anyone is punished or condemned, correct procedure must be followed. This involves listening to those who are aggrieved as well as to those who are more sympathetic, and only then forming a consensus on guilt.
9. Despite its pervasiveness in Haiti, Voodoo is not an established religion. It has no clerical hierarchy, no fixed structure whatsoever. And although it has been infiltrated from time to time by governmental elements (like the Ton Ton Macoute), it remains an independent force in Haitian society.

No wonder the that other religions find Voodoo so disturbing. It defies all the presumptions of ‘global religions.’ It is democratic, decentralised, non-coercive, therapeutic, respectful of dissent, and able to exist without state support. A real marriage of heaven and hell.


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*Some of Davis’s historical material is astoundingly revealing. For example, in the ten years prior to the Haitian Revolution in 1793, over 400,000 Africans were imported into the country. These were part of the 5 million Africans brought to the Caribbean (The entire population of The United States was 2.5 million at the time of the American Revolution). A white population of less than 10% of this number drove the most successful colonial enterprise on the planet, accounting for economic activity greater than that of the whole of the newly formed United States. 

The Haitian Revolution also had profound effects for the future of the young United States. Napoleon had dispatched two armies, totalling in excess of 40,000 troops, to reinforce French settlements along the entire Mississippi valley. He also ordered them to mop up the continuing mess in Haiti. Both armies were destroyed in Haiti and never arrived in New Orleans. In a pivot to Plan B, Napoleon agreed the Louisiana Purchase with the Jefferson administration. One can only speculate what the inhibition to American migration would have meant to the entire West if the Haitians had been subdued.