Laennec Hurbon's Voodoo: Search for the Spirit is a remarkable book, a combination of text, sidebars, and dazzling photographs which immerse the reader/viewer in the voodoo experience as much as a book possibly can. The reader leaves the work educated about, if not swept away by, the history and evolution of voodoo, its primary aims and rituals, its cultural impact, and, especially, the vitality of this belief system which clearly should be considered one of the world's major religions, despite the fact that it is not considered this by most writers on religion.
The roots of voodoo, or vodun, were in Africa and were transported to the New World with the slaves. The word "means an invisible force, terrible and mysterious, which can meddle in human affairs at any time." This innate mystery was overlaid by further layers of mystery in its New World form because the slaveowners wanted to break the slaves connections to their African roots. In order to worship the slaves incorporated major elements of the Christian religion, especially the Catholicism of the Spanish captors, producing a hybrid which was more acceptable to those captors.
Hurbon examines the specific origins of voodoo in Africa, its many subtleties and variations from region to region and group to group, even family to family. The overriding similarity, however, is how all-embracing the religion was in the lives of its adherents. That is, voodoo was not simply a religion which believers referred to now and then at especially religious points on the calendar. To the contrary, voodoo permeated nature, culture, society, death, ancestor issues, etc., just as it does today for its faithful followers.
Hurbon writes that the Europeans simply did not understand voodoo, but only feared and despised it. Again, this attitude drove the religion deeper into mystery for non-adherents, where it remains today. Voodoo more than any religion remains a frightening or disgusting wa...