Lecture, Session 19

Mama Lola: The purpose of ritual

Vodou as a Healing System

Health through Vodou Ritual

The immediate motivation, the precipitating event for many, if not most, Vodou rituals is: affliction, sickness, and misfortune. Religious systems are healing systems.  Consider Karen Brown's writing on page 345: "Healing is the main purpose of all types of (Vodou) ritualizing.  Whether Alourdes is treating clients one-on-one in her altar room, an activity that goes on nearly every day in her Brooklyn home, or staging elaborate birthday parties for the Vodou spirits, which happens 6 to 8 times a year, what she is doing is healing--healing individuals and healing groups".

Here, we see health as a function of good relationships with a group.  This includes relationships with spirits.

Sickness 

The Vodou idea of sickness blends body, mind, emotional and psychic life.  Sickness is usually multi-symptomatic: it can mean physical ailment, bad luck, loss of employment or  property, strained interpersonal relations, alcoholism, accidents, ominous dreams.

Vodou Healing, Bon Dieu, and Lwa

Vodou is not hostile to biomedicine, but rather embraces it in co-existence (despite often humiliating experiences Vodou practitioners undergo in association with medical professionals).  With Vodou, a person seeks not to know simply how someone got sick but why.

There are two options:

1. very personal, relational, social, and motivated
   

1. 1. “sent” for a specific person by a resentful, attention craving lwa or by a jealous, malevolent person procuring the services of a sorcerer.
2. impersonal or unmotivated (coincidence, but able to be understood)
3. 1. understood by Bon Dieu, but not accessable by humans because Bon Dieu is remote, inscrutable, and uninterested in peoples' lives
   2. As Mama Lola explained to KB: Bondye (Bon Dieu) isn’t concerned with people, “he is too busy”
   3. Lwa, along with one's human enemies, is on the opposite side of the spectrum; they are constantly interfering in people's lives. 
      

Illness and Classification

Illnesses are rigorously classified according to a systematic logic.  Each category of being controls a taxonomy of symptoms.  Furthermore, within the spiritual world,  afflictions are correlated with pantheons.  Each pantheon controls its own class of illness.  The logic roughly corresponds to the “old” humoral model.  This reflects both the African and the old European influences.  Said European influence was from the Spanish and the French in the 17th and 18th century pre-modern era.  For further information see the Table of Lwa and the Table of Haitian Illness.

Spirits are classified in a spectrum from cool to hot, and send cool to hot illnesses.  Cool pantheons are associated with experiences ranging from chronic, non-acute symptoms to acute, sudden, and life-threatening episodes (e.g. Danbala of the cool, rada pantheon in association with malaise, fatigue, headaches, vision problems; also, Ti Jean, zandò or petwo, are associated with seizures).  

Note: afflictions associated with lwa are different still from those caused by sorcery, which has its own complex of symptoms. Though, we will talk about this later.

Therapy

Typically, they would go to an MD first.  Only after resistance to diagnosis and cure do they go elsewhere.  If they haven’t recuperated because the cause of the illness remains virulent, they may seek symptomatic cure by the MD.  But, if the source is a social/spiritual one, the only helpful diagnosis is divination, and the the only cure is through ritual, both public and private.  If for lwa, PUBLIC, because they demand the involvement of the group, thus denying individualism.  If for sorcery, PRIVATE, in order to counter magic and exorcism.

Sorcery

Sorcery promotes a morality opposed to religion, and sorcery undermines what lwa stand for as moral exemplars.  Sorcery is about individual ambition, private gain, the denial and ruin of community.  It is imagined as unbridled greed, unnatural monstrous beings.  Prevalent symbolism in sorcery includes putrefaction, cannibalism, and greed.

Lwa or Mistè spirits and Genealogy 

Lwa or Mistè can "catch" or "hold" members of a group.  Affliction often depends on being a member of a group; these relations are frequently generational, and affliction follows lines of descent.  There is, therefore, much linkage between descent, affliction, diagnosis and cure. You have to know your genealogy in order to determine the source of your illness.

For example:  Person A is ill:

1. Her affliction comes from a lwa on her mother’s mother’s side, inherited through her mother’s mother.
2. The divination by the shaman involves naming the right ancestor and then summoning him or her to speak through the medium of the shaman. 
3. Hopefully, the ancestor will divulge the name of the spirit. 
4. The shaman can summon the spirit and the spirit will speak and say what the infraction was and what the family--never the individual--must to do get the victim released.
5. This reinforces the idea that you get sick as a member of a group and can only get better by affirming the identity and continuity of that kin group.  In that sense, the resolution of every affliction can be said to recreate and make tangible the life and continuity of the group.  You need a group to meet your ritual obligations and to stay healthy.  It is the responsibility of parents, especially the mothers, to do this for their lineal kin.

Terminology

1. A victim of illness is said to be “held, seized, caught” (kenbe) by the lwa
2. The cure is to be released, lage.

Lwa Treatment, elaborated

Lwa cure, as mentioned before, is ritual and public.  It involves both the social relations of the afflicted and those of the lwa.  It is a community effort to heal the person and restore good relations with lwa.  Many people I know, if given the choice of being afflicted with a spiritually-sent illness or a disease would choose the latter.  The former invokes a life-time social relationship, burden with a spirit and his/her family.  Rituals are expensive, time-consuming, disrupting, socially-demanding enterprises, like planning your own or your child’s wedding.  There are multiple elements of a ritual healing: food offerings, sacrifice, libations, prayer, music (drumming and singing), dance, visual art (vèvè), possession. In addition, feeding or nurture is the dominant metaphor of Haitian ritual.  The word for worship is sevi--”to serve” “in the sense of serving food and drink, not in the sense of serving a master--frequently misrepresented in the writing about Haiti.  The word for a ritual is a “service for the lwa” or “feeding of the lwa.”  The word for a devotee, for the faithful is “sevite” one who serves (food and drink). Trying to make use of American terms and customs, Mama Lola looks for the closest parallel in the American experience and in English: “birthday parties.”  She gets that from the centrality of the elaborately iced cake.  This cake is the focus of a ritual with candles, a guest of honor, prescribed rules about carving it, distributing it, order of eating, etc. As a further parallel, offerings for the lwa typically include iced cakes.

Religious practice as a symbol for society

Among people, feeding is the quintessential symbol of relationship. If I feed you with generosity, we are in a close relationship.  If I nurture you, I care about you; I love you. Stinginess with food is one of the worst sins--the butt of many jokes and negative proverbs.  What people do for the lwa above all is to feed them.

Mama Lola's love for Karen was demonstrated by the way she fed her and vice versa. A friend once told me when his daughter returned from college with her boyfriend; he could tell that they were sharing intimate relations because they ate off one another’s plates without being conscious of it.  By sharing food we become family.  People in the family are those who eat from the same cooking pot.

Identities of Spirits

The spirits are highly differentiated and unique.  Each god has its own tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes--scrupulously acknowledged in the food offerings.  Again, a dominant metaphor for god's temperament is “hunger.”  Neglected lwa is "hungry" and wants to be fed.  A hungry lwa "grabs" descendants.