WHAT HOODOO IS NOT: Voodoo, Santeria, etc.

[SunKat]

Hoodoo is not the name of a religion nor a denomination of a religion, although it incorporates elements from African and European religions in terms of its core beliefs.

As you may guess by now, it is not at all correct to refer to African-American hoodoo as "Voodoo." Voodoo (also spelled "Vodoun" and always capitalized, as a religion's name should be) is a Haitian religion that is quite African (Dahomean, in this case) in character. Above all, it is a RELIGION. The word "Voodoo" derives from an African word meaning "spirit" or "God."

One reason for the confusion between hoodoo and Voodoo is that the study of African American rootwork with respect to African systems of belief has only recently risen above the level of mere speculation.

Older accounts of hoodoo tended to emphasize West African linkages, in part because that area of Africa was heavily traversed during the 19th century by English speaking Christian missionaries who published books mentioning "native customs" -- which American slave-owners saw as similar to practices they observed among their slaves. This is why many 19th century accounts of hoodoo by white authors call it "Voodoo." However, by mid-20th century, with the publication of "Flash of the Spirit" by Robert Farris Thompson, scholarly focus shifted to the Congo as the source of most of what anthropologists would call "African retentions" in conjure -- beliefs, customs, sayings, or even complete rituals that have been recorded in Africa and that have survived in the United States through the many centuries that Africans have lived here.

As recent scholarship has uncovered, Congo African retentions more closely account for patterns of belief and practice found in American hoodoo than West African retentions do -- and this Congo emphasis also accords well with demographic reconstructions of the original homes of North American slaves.

Other African-diaspora religious syntheses sometimes confused with hoodoo include African-Cuban Santeria and Palo, African-Brazilian Candomble and Umbanda, and African-Jamaican Obeah. In most of these religions, as practiced in the Americas, African deities are masked with Spanish, French, or Portuguese Catholicism, and the Yoruban, Fon, and Congolese spirits (Orishas, Loas, and Nkisi) are nominally replaced by proxy Catholic saints, sometimes called the Seven African Powers.

Until the 1970s American revival of interest in African religions, the only place Voodoo was openly practiced in the United States was New Orleans, where Haitian slaves (and their refugee masters) had settled after the Haitian slave rebellion of 1803. The New Orleans version of Voodoo was known at least as far back as the 1930s to be so debased as to have lost much of its claim to being a true religion and to have mingled greatly with hoodoo, spiritualism, and Catholicism -- rendering it as much a system of folk-magic as of religion. However, in recent years, contact with Haitians and an influx of interested white practitioners with backgrounds in Hermetic magic have led to a rebirth of the forms of the rituals practiced there, which has given New Orleans Voodoo new life.

Santeria was introduced to the U.S. as early as 1954, when the first African-Americans were initiated by Cuban-born priests of Lucumi in New York City. It experienced rapid growth during the 1970s when the Cultural Nationalist movement led many American-born blacks to investigate their African heritage and a sudden upswing of immigration from Cuba simultaneously brought an influx of Santeros to the United States. Santeria and Lucumi are now widespread and flourishing among immigrant and U.S.-born people of various races. The veneer of Catholicism that Santeria acquired over the past few centuries is gradually being abandoned in the United States, especially by American Santeros who are actively interchanging information with Nigerians in an attempt to bridge the gap formed by years of diaspora. However, one of the many proxy images of Santeria --the so-called Seven African Powers, which consists of seven Orishas disguised as Catholic saints -- has entered into hoodoo practice and can be found in the form of candles, powders, incense and the like.

The bulk of the African-American populace in the U.S. -- that is, those people who are primarily descended from African slaves and Anglo-American slave-owners -- practice the religion known as Protestant Christianity. The major denominations represented are Baptist, Methodist, and African Methodist Episcopalian. If, in addition to their regular Sunday worship they also engage in folk-magic, what they are doing would in all probability be the African-European-American conflation called hoodoo, conjure, or rootwork.

Newcomers to hoodoo -- especially white folks with an interest in what they believe to be "exotic" or "other-cultural" -- often tell themselves (and, if they are authors, their unfortunate public) that the true and authentic source for all things hoodoo / Voodoo can be found only in New Orleans. This is manifestly untrue, and can be demonstrated to be a fiction by anyone who cares to interview rootworkers outside of the Crescent City.

There are, of course, certain customs and beliefs which can be seen as more or less "Pan-African (ancestor veneration comes to mind as an example) and these need not be linked to one African group or another -- for virtually every African captive would have shared these beliefs.

[SunKat]

Thanks Rosey!