BACKGROUND - I spent my childhood among the Geechee-related people of Central Georgia. In the late 1940s and '50s television and interstate highways had not yet come to this area, and on hot Summer nights I would listen, transfixed, to the local ghost lore, early stir- rings that would become the Civil Rights movement, African Methodist Episcopal theology and . . . voodoo. Central Georgia hoodoo was a long way from New Orleans, or Haiti, or West Africa. But the candle-burning ceremonial, and the "lucky hands" (charm bags) blessed by the Seven African Powers were as real and enchanting to me as the winking fire flies and marsh gases of the hot summer nights. One evening I went to meet Papa Limba, and danced his dances to an R&B sound, never suspecting I was being introduced to an ancient West African deity. I think it was this that led me to magick. The hot steamy night in the deep south did not diminish the ardor of the participants. Inspired and liberated by the powerful, evocative "Hymn to Legba," the dancers danced on, absorbed, possessed by their barbaric dancing in the light and shadow of the green and yellow candles. As the priest poured liquid fire over the sacramental foods -- various fresh fruits and powdered sugar -- they burned, and the night reeked of, and was perfumed by the scent of human sweat and alcohol. The air was filled with spirituality...and lust. At various points the priest plucked these delights from the blue fire, offering of them to those present. Later, the remnants would be left under a tree as an Offering. The place was a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, the year was 1975 and the priest was me. The ceremony was derived from a description of a voodoo rite which took place about 80 years before and documented in Robert Tallant's classic work on the subject, Voodoo in New Orleans.
The chant grew, the single line was enunciated in stronger pulsations, and other voices joined in the wild refrain, Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum! Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum! Bodies swayed, the hands kept time in soft pat-patting, and the feet in muffled accentuation............ The Danse Calinda is perhaps the outstanding example of the nature of Voodoo as practiced in America. It is a strange, very old, eeriely haunting song of synthetic Creole/African origin. In the public, voodoo-tinged displays in what was once known as Congo Square in New Orleans, before the Civil War, the Calinda was present. An inoffensive version survived among the rural white Cajun folk of Louisiana into the 1950s - at least. In the 1960s Dr. John (the "night tripper" that is; the underground pop musician of the period was not, as we shall see, the first "Dr. John') recorded a version of the Calinda on his sub rosa hit record and salute to New Orleans - style voodoo, Gris-gris. Yet the Calinda is known to be part of the "outer" world of voodoo. The darker "inner" world of voodoo is something else again. There are long standing rumors in both American and Caribbean version of the sect of human sacrifice; animal sacrifice is a given part of the long trance - possession dance essential core of voodoo. Rumors of sacrifice of "the goat without horns' -- that is, human sacrifice -- is more conjectural, and have never been proven, though since The Serpent and the Rainbow appeared, it seems more creditable. Certainly, the descriptions available of the most traditional rites, held at night in primitive splendor under the open sky and following the religio-orgiastic practices people of European extraction might associate with the primordial Mysteries of Dionysos, or the people of the Indian subcontinent with the Rites of Shiva, are intensely sexual and sometimes violent, and this of itself might account for the contemporary Western World's love/hate repulsion/attraction relationship with voodoo. The cult, in any case, has often enough fallen victim to persecution and prosecution, so that, from its earliest manifestations, secrecy has been a major factor, and the spread of the cult in the Americas has been no exception to the rule. You see traces in Black and Latin ethnic neighborhoods and, occasionally, at arcane "religious supply stores,"the paraphernalia often billed, as "sold as curios only'.
A "Temple Supply Store" in Atlanta, Rondo's Temple Sales, continuously in business since 1945, has brought this tradition down to the present. In the first half of the present century the public face of voodoo in the United States had pretty much degenerated into a collection of charms and spells. In the early 1970s, I searched New Orleans for traces of voudon with my local very history-conscious contacts, and could find no real trace of it. Two factors, however, have in recent years served to modify this trend. The "occult revival' of the late nineteen sixties/ early seventies created a greater public, and for that matter legal, acceptance of fortune telling, charms and talismans. And, the enormous influx of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America during the same period brought with it any number of adherents of various quasiCatholic/voodoo cults and practices to this country. Already, by the middle years of the nineteen eighties, the old voodoo remnants were showing signs of melding with those recently introduced from South of the Border. The magick of brujo sorcerers and the Cult of the Saints, or 7 African "powers ' had made its way North. It can be argued that the older voodoo which reached America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - reaching its pinnacle in the 1800s when charm seller and brujo, Dr. John and Madame Marie Laveux were the witch king and queen of New Orleans - was already a watered-down or imperfect version of the cult. Haitian voodoo is usually described as a synthesis of highly complex West African tribal beliefs and Roman Catholicism. But its sophisticated magical practices often reflect a knowledge of European ceremonial magick as well, raising further questions. It is known that two Lodges of the legendary French Illumanati (as opposed to the Bavarian version) had relocated in the late 1700s from France to Port a Prince in Haiti. Little is known of the fate of these lodges in the turbulent decades ahead, but traces of freemasonic republicanism and ceremonial magick can be found throughout subsequent Haitian history, and in the voodoo cult itself.
The experiences of T Michael Bertiaux and the Jean-Maine line of Afro-European magick in Haiti imply an unbroken tradition. In any case, one can follow the African Dahomean religious current passing into American voodoo in the person of Legba, the Dahomean god who resembles the ecstatic, erratic Dionysos and the communicative Hermes combined. In Haiti it is this latter attribute which contributed to his adaptation into the voodoo loa (or god) Papa Legba (or Papa Limba), a kind of earthy version of St. Peter and the "gateway' to the other loa. Thus the "Hymn to Legba" (a rudimentary "hymn to Pan') used at the beginning of my aforementioned ceremonial experiment, in that instance being from a recorded contemporary Haitian voodoo ceremony. In the U.S. Legba was transformed into Papa Limba, apparently something of a curious cross between St. Peter and Satan, thus anticipating the unlikely doctrine of the "unity of Christ and Satan" articulated by the Process Church in the 1960s. The propensity for absorbing whatever seemed appropriate to its needs has always characterized voodoo and marked it as an early manifestation of religious existentialism or spiritual relativism. For a time in America, the land of melting pots and blandness, this also almost proved the cult's undoing. "Voodoo" became "hoodoo"; in part because the various cult leaders such as Dr. John (a.k.a. John Bayou, Bayou John, Jean Montaigne, Voodoo John and John Fecelle), Marie Laveaux (who may have been two people -- mother and daughter) and later "Root Doctors," some of whom are still around today, found the commercialization of charms and potions more expedient and lucrative than practicing primordial folk religion. Even so, "hoodoo' as Tau Michael Bertiaux's deceptively simple course reveals, is far from unsophisticated. But, with the wider audience for, and acceptance of the occult, along with the influx of voodoo practitioners from the South, voodoo is today experiencing something of a covert renaissance in the United States.
CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTS - Bubbling beneath the usual tv-and-burger- franchise self-image of the American dream comes, like a call from the collective unconscious, what some would consider the American nightmare. The mystique of voodoo has quite literally haunted the supposedly solidly Christian Western Hemisphere for two centuries or more, raising the most fundamental spiritual issues and questions. During the late Summer of 1992 I led two preliminary voudon workings at Eulis Lodge's Dekalb Avenue temple space in Atlanta. The invocations of Grand Legbha, gate to the loa, began the series with the Hymn to Legba, recorded many years earlier in Haiti, an invocation of Legba, a secret "punch' and fruit offerings, trance dancing and becoming Divine Horsemen ourselves. As I danced around blowing my whistle and beating my drum, the last thing I can remember thinking was that I had not really wandered so far from my Central Georgia roots after all. On Wednesday, August 26, 1992, I conducted the first of the two preliminary gnostic voudon workings at an "open to the public' regular event. The working was conducted at the Temple of Eulis Lodge, a thousand square foot space quite suitable to trance dancing. The purpose of the working was to "open the gate" to the Loa , and therefore Legba as "gate keeper of the spirits' was invoked. Sister Lisa drew the veve flawlessly. Skull candles were placed at key points of the veve. The "Hymn to Legba" followed an invocation; Par pouvoir Saint Antoine de Padoue, Legba Atibon, Maitre Carrefour, Maitre Grand Bois, Maitre Grand Chemin, Legba Barriere, Legba Bois, Legba Caille, Legba Zan- clian, Legba Missebo, Legba Clairhoun'deh, Legba Cataroulo, au nom de Monsieur Avadra Bo-roi, vie, vie Legba. And with fruit essences as sacrifice and Eucharist, a secret elixir provided as inspiration of endeavor, I blew my whistle, beat upon the sacred drum and began the frenzied hour-long trance dance. Participation was VERY broadly based with mixed results -- four people departed, seemingly in great discomfort at the energies generated. The others were all possessed to greater or lesser degree. I became the Priest I was representing, and in that mode gave communion to all remaining. An almost unbearable erotic energy pervaded the working. On the following Wednesday, September 2nd, an invocation of Erzule was conducted along similar lines. The attendance was a bit smaller, but an excellent polarity balance prevailed. After appropriate invocation, the dancing began. The energy was much more sexual, but seemed to effect the males present in a pro- nounced fashion, while females reported a profound erotic reaction which manifested only later. This may be due to my concluding the ritual at a given point, according to the regulations of the host organization. Clearly, the event was on the verge of Sacred Orgy Entranced, or Ultimate Communion. The next working was therefore postponed to a more private occasion. As the group had been working much with Enochian seership, it was proposed by me that the working be an ecstatic invocation of Ghuedhe Nibbho , in specific of Mirroir-des-Sessions in the first grouping of Tau Michael Bertiaux's Grimoire Ghuedhe, the Famille Legba Nibbho.
I felt that Mirroir-des-Sessions was a relatively benign form of Ghuedhe Nibbho for a relatively inexperienced work group other than myself, as well as of specific value to the Work at hand with seership and scrying as major focuses. The form of David Cimochowski's preliminary invocation was proposed as an opening: upright crucifix, two beeswax candles, two taper candles, white and black, frankincense, a glass of water and the altar covered in black. The veves of Legba and Papa Ghuedhe Nibbho , along with the altar paraphernalia would be set up in the North. Legba would be invoked, the white candle lighted, and Legba asked to open the barriers to Papa Ghuedhe Nibbho. The other candles would then be lit, the water used to invoke the water elemental and the dead. The invocation of Ghuedhe Nibbho would follow with meditation, and communication using the water.
I've just looked at the author's list and there's a whole lot of them! Could you recommend a particular one or two? they all look interesting and I'm having trouble find my way through.
