Posted on 03/08/2008 7:05:32 PM PST by HAL9000
Excerpt -
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) — In a Haitian dance hall transformed into a temple, dozens of voodoo practitioners dressed all in white, scarves around their necks in red, yellow or green, came Friday to pay homage to their first-ever "supreme master"."Open the barriers," a sole voice intoned in Creole.
"The master has arrive," answered the crowd of men and women, as they rose to greet Max Beauvoir, 72.
Until recently, the priests of voodoo, the heavily spirit-focused, African-rooted belief of many Haitians, operated autonomously without a formal hierarchy or rules.
But through the associations of followers, they decided to establish a national federation of "Haitian voodooists" and designate a formal leader. Led by two children who spread about white rose petals on a crimson carpet, Beauvoir paced ahead toward his new throne surrounded by other leaders of Haiti's millions of voodoo adepts.
The throne itself is shaped from the trunk of a grand tree, varnished into a piece of art itself.
"We do not want to vie with other religions, but we want to recover our real place in society," said the new supreme master, assuming his reponsibility for the public affairs of Haiti's voodooists.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at afp.google.com ...
Sounds like a good gig. Wonder if the pay is good.
Great. A Voodoo pope. That’s all the world needs right now. I can’t wait until he raises an army of the Undead to do his bidding.
On the other hand, Haiti needs all the order and structure it can get. Maybe this will turn out to have a silver lining after all.
I just hope HMSS has 007 on standby, just in case...
We got into a discussion about zombies. Here in the US, we laugh about those things, but in Haiti, it's not a laughing matter. Ed, the missionary I was with, would not discuss them and warned me strongly against talking with Mark about them. Mark believed that the zombies were actually the corpses of dead people who had been reanimated. Ed finally agreed to talk about them. The voodoo method of making a zombie was not at issue. The witch doctor would have someone kidnapped and make them drink some kind of liquid. I have no idea what kind of liquid or what properties it had. The victim was then put in a box and buried for two days. I think both the burial and the digging up were done at night, but don't recall for sure. After digging the victim up, he was forced to swear an oath of allegiance, and if he broke the oath, he was buried again and left there.
Ed believed that the zombies were people who had gone insane from the properties of the liquid and being buried, while Mark believed they had actually died and no longer had any will. However, whichever is true, both agreed that this was the practice, and that zombies were real. Ed was a missionary in Port au Prince for seventeen years, and Mark, who was about twenty, had been born and raised there.
Here is an account from True Crime Library of the murder of University of Texas student Mark Kilroy. It's pretty bizarre reading, and the story doesn't emphasize it, but "palo mayombe," the magic the group practiced, was African voodoo.
If you think there’s a silver lining to voodoo, you don’t know anything about voodoo.
I’m pretty sure they’re all going to hell.
Don't worry, Ash Williams will save the day!
Finally, someone who can make sense of our financial markets has appeared!
Breaking News; The New Senate Chaplain for FloriduH will Pieree La Boo, Vodoo Witch doctor and sidewalk pitchman.
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