*Ø* Blogmanac July 16 | Voudon pilgrimage of Saut D’Eau, Haiti


Today, thousands of Voudon (Voodoo) believers from Haiti and abroad will make a pilgrimage to the sacred waters of Saut D’Eau, a waterfall (pictured at right) where Erzulie Freda (pictured below) – the Voudon spirit of love, art, romance and sex – appeared twice in the 19th century.

Freda is a beautiful, wealthy white woman, a promiscuous love goddess-seductress, difficult and demanding, who loves luxurious items such as perfume, champagne and gold. Her sister, the dark-skinned Erzulie Dantor, is the spirit of motherly love, cognate of Saint Barbara Africana in the Roman Catholic Church. Dantor is heterosexual in the sense that she has a child, but she is also the patron loa, or saint, of lesbians. When Erzulie Dantor appears at a ceremony via possession, she speaks a stuttering monosyllable, “ke-ke-ke-ke-ke!”.


Origins of the religion
Where and how did Voudon originate? There are numerous explanations, including one that proposes that the earliest slaves in the West Indies, Yoruba people who had come from the West African regions of Dahomey, and parts of modern Togo, Benin and Nigeria, brought with them a faith in a powerful fetish and guardian spirit called Vodo.

Another possible derivation of the word comes from a medieval evangelist named Peter Waldo, or Valdez, who lived in Lyons in France at around the end of the eleventh century. Valdez, appalled by the extravagant practices of the Church of his time, saw it as his mission to re-establish the Church to its pristine state in which followers of Christ sold their goods and gave the proceeds to the poor, as exhorted by Jesus. Soon he was teaching a religion that included esoteric and occult elements.

Valdez gained adherents who called themselves after their leader. However, before long their name became corrupted and known as Waldenses, or Waldensians, or, in French, Vaudois.

Naturally enough, the Roman Catholic Church vehemently opposed the new sect and denounced it as satanic sorcery. In the name of Jesus, they persecuted the Waldenses, finally massacring large numbers of them in the 12th and 13th centuries. However, this was not before the Waldenses had gained adherents in far-off regions of France. It was one of the precursors of the Protestant Reformation, and also experienced a revival in the sixteenth century.

In 1677 Spain ceded Haiti to France and soon Roman Catholic missionaries travelled to the West Indian island to convert its people. Angered by their religions, the priests identified them with the heretical sect of the Waldenses and applied their name, in the Creole dialect, to those Haitians. (Many Voudon priests were martyred or imprisoned, their shrines destroyed, because of the threat they posed to Euro-Christian/Muslim colonialism.) Eventually ‘Vaudois’ changed to become finally voodoo, the name that, with various spellings, we know today.

Today, some 60 million people worldwide practise the old religion, and similar religions such as Umbanda, Quimbanda, Santeria and Candomble are widespread in South America and elsewhere. Voudon, like these others, is often portrayed rather ignorantly in popular culture as some kind of evil cult, a misperception which is quite far from the truth and derives from historical colonialist dynamics.



Each voodoo god has a symbol known as a vèvè, and this is Erzulie Freda's


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Peter Waldo, or Valdez
Waldenses, or Waldensians
Erzulie Freda Shrine (commercial)
Erzulie Freda banners
African symbols
Erzulie Dantor rite
Henna symbols
Erzulie Dantor magic
Dark goddesses in Voudon
How to Spell V-o-d-o-u
Useful links
More
Voudon FAQs
African-based religions