Voodoo as EvangelismJackson Snyder, October 1997 |
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My first experience with Voodoo was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in
1973. At 20 years of age, I
had traveled there with a church youth group.
The first night in town, I broke away from our host's house at
Delmas 75 and hired a “top top” (taxi) to take me "down
town." It was a foolish
and dangerous thing to do. I
thought that top tops ran all night, and that it would be a simple matter
to get back. Not so.
Nevertheless, armed with high school French, I set out at 8 PM for
adventure and didn't find my way back until dawn.
The things I experienced that night!
Port-au-Prince is a dark, dirty place, both in the natural and the
spiritual. In the middle of
the night, the spiritual darkness needs no longer to hide, but turns out
in blackness everywhere. Even
a headlight was seldom seen - most of the top tops were without lights.
Wherever I went, there trailed behind me an entourage of child
prostitutes, the victims of intense urban poverty.
I also encountered hundreds of the drunken homeless, some publicly
urinating or worse along the way, others dead in the gutter.
I saw sites and activities I can’t even describe here.
At one point, the machine gun-clad army, six or so in a ramshackle
jeep, scouted me out for arrest; but instead, accepted my pitiful bribe -
two rolls of nickels. And in
the wee hours I stumbled upon the notorious PAP Rum Factory, a traditional
stop on most guided tours, one often regretted by tippling tourists the
morning after.
But long before I found the Rum Factory, I discovered Voodoo --
everywhere. At one juncture
of the dirty pavement I heard wild music -- chanting -- drums and guitars
-- cacophony -- emanating from a crack of an alleyway off the drag I
followed. Down the filthy
cobblestones I stumbled, nearly overwhelmed by the noise and the smell.
Before my eyes appeared drums and guitars and whistles and fiddles
and rattles and a crowd of pitiful people engaged in the wildest of
parties. There I felt the
press and breathed in musky sweat and urine, now mesmerized by the savage
dancing of the nearly naked possessed -- with their dizzy shaking and
gyrating -- their provocative fondling by lecherous eyes and hands.
There were chickens about. One
was bloody dead upon a stump of an altar, the rest were in the stir and
whir. This was an evil place.
I recognized at once that I had stumbled upon a Voodoo sacrificial
ritual in full swing. As a
Christian, the cold feeling of the demonic squashed my flesh even harder
than the crowd. Some kind of
sick began to so grip me that I was unprepared either to rebuke or
retreat.
Unprepared, that is, until the music and dancing instantly and
abruptly came to a dead halt. The man in charge (the "hougan," or witch doctor)
looked straight at me across the alley and smiled a haunting, toothless
grin like a black skull. His
eyes were like flashlights in the dark.
He pointed at me (the only white person for miles), shouted, then
everyone else turned me-ward. And
everyone smiled -- not the compassionate kind of smile -- but the smile of
a viper at his mesmerized prey. Everybody,
it seemed, started moving in.
My morbid fear was that I would be the next sacrifice, sharing the
bloody stump with the hapless chicken.
I turned and ran as fast as my twenty-year-old legs would take me
right into the uncertain blackness of "The Port."
As I retreated, I realized that I had witnessed a classic (and
prosaic) form of devil worship. And
that there was no place to run but to Yahshua.
The impression was so spiritually and visually strong, and the
feeling I carried with me was so overwhelmingly evil that, in the evening
of that day and through the intermediation of a Christian layman, I cried
out to Yahshua, who I knew only then as Jesus, repenting of my sins and
rededicating my life to his service.
Voodoo is a religious system of taking, not giving; of power
abused, not benevolently used; of pride, not humility.
Of satan's gods, not Yahweh Elohim.
As the old story goes, the hougan demands fruit to heal the sick
child. When the child
languishes still, the hougan demands the goat. When the child languishes still, the hougan demands the
child. Avarice is the
foundation of Voodoo with satan the chief cornerstone.
In his wake are its millions of innocent victims, too impoverished,
too incultured - too terrorized to run.
Voodoo originated in the Haiti in the centuries prior to the 19th.
Plantation slaves, forbidden to outwardly practice the native
religions imported from Dahomey, adapted French Catholicism as a cover for
their traditional animism. This
was easily done -- slave hougans assigned their African loas (gods)
counterparts among the Catholic saints so venerated by their masters.
(The counterpart of the loa known as "Baron Samedi" is
Jesus Christ. "Baron
Samedi" actually means "Lord of the Sabbath."
But Baron Samedi is the loa of death whereas Christ is the author
of life - diametric opposites. The
other saints have their counterfeits, as well.
What appeared to the plantation masters as slaves practicing
Catholicism really always was voodoo.)
The Republic of Haiti came to be as the result of a slave uprising.
The story of the slave overseer Boukman who led the uprising is
legendary. He was a hougan
himself -- a high priest. The
story goes that he and his cohort made a pact with Satan that Haiti would
be his if only Satan would see the rebellion to victory.
In the woods under the shadow of night, they sacrificed a pig as a
blood oath to their gods. Then,
after a terrible bloody struggle that lasted several years, the revolt
succeeded, and every Frenchman on the island was put to death.
Two classes then ruled Haiti:
the "Blacks" and the "Yellows."
The "Blacks" were former slaves.
They had little but Voodoo. The
"Yellows" were the descendants of French colonists who
intermarried with slaves. The
Yellows were of aristocratic blood and inherited the vast wealth of their
ancestors. They are known
today as "Creole." Much
of the current political tension in Haiti is due to racial strife between
these two groups -- the haves and the have nots.
What both groups have in common is the voodoo religion, which has
not changed much in two hundred years.
One popular saying sums up Haiti's religious climate succinctly:
"Haiti is 90% Catholic, 10% Protestant and 100% Voodoo."
The crowning jewel of Voodoo is Carnival, or Mardi Gras, the
Festival of Flesh. Mardi
Gras, as we know it in the Americas, originated among the Creole people of
Haiti, and, over several hundred years, spread to what are known as Creole
regions in the United States, comprising particularly the Gulf coastline
from Shreveport, Louisianna to Pensacola, Florida.
Mardi Gras is still nothing more than a popularize form of Voodoo
ritual. Mardi Gras has become
satan's tool of evangelism in the United States, gaining more popularity
year by year with the ever growing number of cities and towns celebrating
it. But the root of Mardi
Gras is in the satanic ritual religion of Voodoo, no matter how innocent
the Carnival may seem, or how much it entertains the children, or how
entertaining it is for party goers or how innocuous its trappings appear.
Mardi Gras is still the bloody chicken on the stump.
Should Christians take part in it?
Never, unless we undertake properly planned up and prayed up
endeavors in evangelism. For
participation in Voodoo for any other reason entails satanic bondage, from
which the Savior has once set us free. |
