What is Vodou?

I grew up being told Vodou was evil—something to fear, something to stay away from. But no one ever really explained what it was.

In this first episode, I start by confronting the myths. From cartoons to political commentary, I unpack how Vodou has been portrayed in media—and how those images shaped the way Haitians, including my own family, understand it.

Through an honest conversation with my mother, I begin to trace where that fear comes from, and ask a simple question: what if everything I was taught about Vodou is wrong?

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Alright. Alright, we're good. I hope you don't mind that I'm recording.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

It's the day after Christmas. My family is fresh off celebrating the birth of Jesus, probably eating leftovers, bundled up against the northeast cold, and I'm here. 5,000 miles from home in Africa, in Benin, at a voodoo ceremony.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

I got a couple of horns, a bottle of rum. Yeah. I'm mixed.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

I don't feel green. I'm exhausted from the travel, four different flights. It's almost a hundred degrees, already dehydrated, and sweat is just pouring off of me. My head is spinning. The voodoo drumming is loud. I'm sitting on a bench in front of about a dozen local folks who came to see the ceremony, which is happening just a few yards in front of me. Seems like I'm a guest of honor. To my right, a group of women and children are playing drums. They seem like they couldn't be having a better time. To my left is a voodoo priest. He's shirtless with a white cap on his head and a red, black, and white skirt-looking thing covering his bottom half. It's all very dreamlike. That rustling sound you hear are these things called zangbetos. There's four of them spinning around the courtyard. They're six feet tall, shaped like little tents covered in overlapping layers of straw that have been dyed different colors. They're wild, kicking up clouds of dirt, and they're going off totally on their own. No one is touching them.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

This is like insane.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Now the Zimbettos are dancing and reacting to people at the ceremony. So I just presume there's somebody in there. But then the voodoo priest walks over and touches one of the Zimbettos. It stops. He pours some liquid over it and smacks it a few times. And what I saw next, I swear is what I saw. The voodoo priest looks over at me, he lifts the entire Zimbetto and tips it on its side in the dirt. Right at the center, there's a turtle. Not a human, just a turtle. About the size of a small salad bowl. I freaked out.

SPEAKER_03 2:28

That whole thing was a turtle? Yeah, nah, no way. Nah, no way. No way. No way. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

In case you missed it, my guide, a young dude named Chris Bell, translated the priest's words to me. He said, This is the power of Africa.

SPEAKER_05 2:48

How did that happen?

SPEAKER_06 2:51

It's a matter of spirituality, so science can't explain that. They say that Jesus turned uh water into wine, but here we have more.

SPEAKER_03 3:04

This is crazier than turning water into wine. Someone turned water into wine. I'm not even that impressed no more.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

In voodoo mythology, Zungbethos are ancient spirits, older than the human race. They're guardians of the night and sources of wisdom. At a voodoo ceremony, the belief is that these ancient spirits possess and animate the spinning Zungbethos. But I'm thinking this has to be a magic trick or something. The voodoo priest puts the turtle back under the Zungbetho and it starts spinning again. And now I'm watching it like a hawk. Again, the priest stops the Zungbethel, lifts the whole thing up onto its side. And now the delirium comes crashing back over me because my friends, the turtle was gone. And in its place was a chicken.

SPEAKER_03 3:55

That's really a chicken. That is a it was a turtle just now. People are not even gonna believe this. They can't believe that's the craziest thing I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_06 4:13

My friend, this is voodoo.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

My friend, this is voodoo. My name is Baudelaire. I'm Haitian American. I grew up in a family that is really tied to our culture, like, really proud of it. Like we never missed eating soup jumo on New Year's. My mom almost exclusively speaks to me in Crayol, and I started drinking coffee when I was like seven years old, always with a small piece of Haitian bread. But despite all that, none of the adults ever wanted to talk about voodoo. Not my mom, not my dad, not my aunts and uncles. But I was a curious kid. I knew voodoo had something to do with Haitian culture, so I'd ask questions. Sometimes they just flat out didn't answer. And if they did, they'd tell me voodoo was nothing to play with. It was something I should stay far away from. And it's not just my family. Like, there are Haitians who are gonna see the name of this series, the Voodoo Project, and be like, nah, nope, no way, I'm all set. Not even gonna listen to one minute of that voodoo business. So, like a lot of Haitian kids, I just assumed the adults were right. So I stopped asking questions. But I would see Voodoo mentioned on the cartoons I'd watch.

SPEAKER_11 5:33

What's going on? That fiend Voodoo is using his magic voodoo doll powers. I've seen the zombie you speak of.

SPEAKER_09 5:42

The old witch that brought him to life with her voodoo magic. I gotta find a way to get rid of my art teacher. Izzy, Voodoo. Is there a voodoo queen you can drug me to? Oh yeah. She listened to a trailer down by Yogurt Land.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

I got older, started watching older shows and movies, but I kept seeing it.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Michael, I don't like this game. It's scary. It's not scary. I don't like my character. Voodoo Mama Juju, the witch doctor of the Savannah Swamps. I'm not comfortable with this.

SPEAKER_07 6:12

You really want to know the one thing you should be afraid of?

SPEAKER_09 6:15

Yes, I really do.

SPEAKER_07 6:16

Voodoo. That shit will mess you up. Promise me that you'll never go to Haiti.

SPEAKER_09 6:22

I promise, Dad.

SPEAKER_07 6:23

This was good. I enjoyed spending time with you.

SPEAKER_09 6:26

Me too, Dad.

SPEAKER_07 6:27

Oh, and hey, do you want to go to Haiti sometime?

SPEAKER_09 6:29

No.

SPEAKER_07 6:30

Good. Good.

SPEAKER_11 6:31

What's the name of that guy that had the voodoo curse put on him? Wallace Walcott. He was messing around with a Creole girl and Play of Dirty, and she put voodoo on him. Shh shh his dick shrunk up the size of a cocktail mini.

SPEAKER_14 6:43

No, it didn't. Bullshit. You guys gotta get out of the jungle with that witchcraft jazz, man. So you're a licensed therapist? I am.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Because I don't believe in, you know, alternative, whatever, you know, holistic voodoo stuff, no voodoo. Got it.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Real quick, let me just say finding voodoo references for that montage was way too easy. Witchcraft.

SPEAKER_14 7:09

Uh oh, my voodoo doll of mom. Voodoo. Yeah, that's sound like voodoo. I've seen people die from a simple voodoo hex. Devil worship.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Like, I had to stop myself from pulling more. And they go back way before my era of watching TV. Check this one out from Gilligan's Island in 1964.

SPEAKER_13 7:26

Just between us, Gilligan. I hope it's only a vicious killer and escaped convict. I'm afraid it's something much worse. Something much worse? Yes, I think it's voodoo. Voodoo? Shhh, let's not upset the women.

SPEAKER_05 7:38

Let's not upset the men either.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Alright, there's one more clip I want to play for y'all, and this one might be the most interesting of any of the ones that I went and found. This one goes back to 1932.

SPEAKER_10 7:50

Baby is full of nonsense and superstition. They're always mixed up with a lot of mysteries.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

This is from a film called White Zombie. The star in this movie? An actor named Bella Lugosi. You probably never heard of him, but he was a big deal, maybe even an icon. Because before White Zombie, he starred in a movie called Dracula, which was a huge box office hit in 1931. It was so successful that Universal decided to lean into making more horror films. So one year after Dracula, this huge movie star goes from playing a vampire in Transylvania to the next scariest thing they could think of: a voodoo practitioner in Haiti.

SPEAKER_10 8:26

There's superstitions in Haiti that the natives both heal from everything. Some of them can be traced back as far as.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Now let me drop some history on y'all. In 1932, the year this movie came out, Haiti had been under U.S. occupation for about 15 years. And I could talk about how the real horror in Haiti in 1932 wasn't white people getting mixed up in voodoo and zombies. Nah. The real horror was the way the US occupation was stealing wealth and resources from Haiti and massacring the Haitian people who demanded that the US get the hell out of their country. But we'll save that for another episode. For now, the point is that for the last century, pop culture has been feeding us an image of voodoo as witchcraft, as basically devil worship. The kind of thing a kid should stay far away from. But it's not just pop culture. In 2010, Haiti experienced a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

SPEAKER_08 9:35

Pat, this is a calamity of cataclysmic proportions. It's just um it's a mess, Pat.

SPEAKER_12 9:41

Well, if all those buildings are down, I understand more fallen than they're standing. Uh it may be uh a blessing in disguise. There might be a massive rebuilding of that country. Is that possible?

SPEAKER_08 9:52

Well, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

I would think that the second guy you just heard is Pat Robertson, a conservative Christian commentator who had a big influence on modern Republican politics. Now, the blessing in disguise line was already ridiculous. But his next take is what really got me.

SPEAKER_12 10:09

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and uh people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. It's a true story. And so the devil said, Okay, it's a deal. And um, they kicked the French out, you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

When I heard Pat Robertson say that, I was pissed. My half-sister lived in Haiti at the time, Jennifer. We'd never met in person, but we talked on the phone all the time. I loved her. In 2010, my dad was making plans to move her to the U.S. I was beyond excited. She died in that earthquake. So when I heard Pat Robertson say this shit on TV, I was offended. He tried to say, My ancestors made a deal with the devil to end their own enslavement. And that this deal with the devil is what ultimately killed my sister and over 200,000 other Haitians. I couldn't buy that. I was hurt, I was angry. But it wasn't just right-wing evangelists telling me that voodoo was the devil.

SPEAKER_04 11:35

No, that that thing is a devil. That devil.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

This is from a conversation with my mom. Over the years, I've tried to talk to her about voodoo sometimes on tape, and she almost always shuts it down.

SPEAKER_04 11:46

Voodoo, you know, he's a devil. I don't have to talk about it. He's a really, really devil. That's you see, devil has it one place, God has it one place. My father always always said that. I see it right now in the Bible. Devil has a place. When you give it the place, he got we go in.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

So now let's think about what you have. And like I said before, it's not just my mom. There's a lot of Haitians that want no parts of this conversation, even in the younger generation. As I started working on the show, my fiancee ran into one of our friends at the gym. He's Haitian. He asked her, Hey, how's Baudelaire doing? And she tells him, Oh, he's working on a new project about voodoo. And he got serious and then said, Why does he want to learn more about the devil? Fact. Starting in 1659, France occupied Haiti. They called it Saint-Domingue. At one time, they had upward of 500,000 enslaved Africans on the island, farming sugar and coffee. It was France's most lucrative colony. Fact, in 1791, the Haitian Revolution began. The enslaved fought the French. Fact, at the time, France had one of the most powerful militaries in the world. Fact, in 1804, the enslaved people of Haiti defeated that French army. Fact, the Haitian armies went on to liberate the enslaved people in the Dominican Republic and to liberate parts of South and Central America. Haiti also was early in recognizing the independence of Greece. Fact. All this liberation, it all started at a voodoo ceremony in 1791. That's where the Haitian Revolution was declared. Once I learned that, I had a new question. If we Haitians are such a proud people, why doesn't our pride extend to voodoo? There's gotta be more to voodoo than just the caricature. Something beyond the cultural hesitation to even talk about it. Now that trip to Benin you heard at the start of this episode, that wasn't the beginning. This is a few months before that. Hey Oliver. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_04 14:10

I'm doing good.

SPEAKER_02 14:13

This is the house I grew up in, right outside of Boston. That's my mom's dog, Oliver. He whines a lot and he's kind of annoying, but don't tell her I said that. Now my mom knows I make podcasts and all that, so it wasn't weird to her when I asked if she'd answer some questions on mic. What you doing right now, mom? What are you doing? But I didn't tell her it's about voodoo. Because honestly, I was a little nervous. You got like 30 minutes? Yeah. I gotta I gotta ask you some questions. Come with me. I'm 31 years old, a grown-ass man. My mom is in her 60s, but my whole life, the conversation about voodoo has only gone one way, and that's nowhere. Alright, mom. I need you to sit down right over here. Um, first, I'm gonna ask you about Haiti. Alright? Most of these questions are gonna be about Haiti. Alright. So, okay, what was Haiti like when you were growing up?

SPEAKER_04 15:13

Oh, beautiful. When I'm growing up. Very beautiful in Haiti.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

What was your favorite part of growing up in Haiti?

SPEAKER_04 15:22

Oh, Dejin.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Deading.

SPEAKER_04 15:25

Your neighborhood. My neighbor, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Okay, okay. What's what's dead in here? My mom was born in Haiti in 1959, and I loved hearing about her childhood. She started telling me about her grandmother.

SPEAKER_04 15:36

Oh, my gun very beautifully, very beautifully in a nice gun.

unknown 15:46

You know what's funny.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

My mom calls her grandmother gun, which kind of translates to grand, I guess, in English.

SPEAKER_04 15:52

Even I do something bad gun, never. Gun never men. Never. Even I beat some kids at school. I love my grandmother.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

What was her name?

SPEAKER_04 16:02

Pauline Azor.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Oh wow. I never heard her name before.

SPEAKER_04 16:06

My grandma Pauline Azor.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Usually when my mom references her grandmother, she says Gunwen. But it never occurred to me to ask what her actual name was. And honestly, it felt so nice. Pauline Azor. Do you have a like a favorite memory of her?

SPEAKER_04 16:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

So what my mom's saying here is that her favorite memory is being able to go to Pauline's house and know she was safe. Nobody could touch her once she got there.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

No way.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

It was honestly such a nice conversation, and here I was about to ruin it by asking about Voodoo. Now, the second part of this interview is I'm I I need you to answer these questions for me. Okay. Do you remember the first time you heard about Voodoo?

SPEAKER_04 17:02

Maybe Lem Timon like ten years old.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Okay. Ten years old. What did you what did you hear? So what my mom's saying here is that she heard that if someone hates you, they could kill you with voodoo. And do you remember who you heard that from? Like who who said that?

SPEAKER_04 17:25

Or my it was uh my grandpapa bo papam.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

She heard this from her grandfather on her dad's side. He's the one that said that.

SPEAKER_04 17:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

So your dad was born 1920. That means his dad was probably born 18.

SPEAKER_04 17:40

18 something, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

18 something. Yeah. Okay. At this point, I was amazed. Not only did she not shut down the conversation, but she was actually answering questions about voodoo. She's telling me that her mom and dad were born Baptist and Catholic, and that there was no voodoo in her house growing up. And then I asked her a question about whether or not she had friends who practiced voodoo. And that led her to share a story that blew my mind. And um So you remember when you had that birthday party for me when I was a kid, right? Like some of my friends that came to that party were Jewish. Some of them, you know, I have friends that were Muslim, you know what I mean? Like when you were a kid, even though Gun was Baptist and your dad was Catholic, did you have friends that, you know, you knew their families practiced voodoo?

SPEAKER_04 18:24

Yes. I know the friends of the actual high ninthale, mbezawe.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

My mom, the person who I could never talk to about voodoo, is telling me that when she was 12 years old, she snuck out to see a voodoo ceremony.

SPEAKER_04 18:42

You what did you want to go see? I want to see Abdance.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

How did you know about the ceremony? How did you know there was the ceremony?

SPEAKER_04 18:54

The other kids, the other kids a nosy, tell you.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

And um, so you're in your bedroom, right? Like, how did you do it? How did you get out of the house?

SPEAKER_04 19:08

No, I'm not in the bedroom. The the lakua laku.

SPEAKER_02 19:13

My mom, at 12 years old, is in a lacu, which is basically a field near her house. So in the in the lacku though, is your brothers and sisters all there?

SPEAKER_04 19:21

Brother and sister, cousin, a lot of people there. Is it big?

SPEAKER_02 19:24

You're playing with them, but you know you're gonna leave to go to the voodoo ceremony.

SPEAKER_04 19:28

I guess.

SPEAKER_02 19:29

And so you waited for a good time to leave.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

It's only not too long. It's only for 15 minutes, 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

That you went to the ceremony?

SPEAKER_04 19:37

I go there, then I have to come back.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Oh, so did anyone no one knew you went?

SPEAKER_04 19:42

No.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

You went by yourself?

SPEAKER_04 19:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

You didn't tell your sisters, you didn't tell your brother nobody went there? Wow. And so the ceremony, you watched it from like how did you watch the ceremony?

SPEAKER_04 20:00

I go inside.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Huh?

SPEAKER_04 20:02

Who watched it? What did that be?

SPEAKER_02 20:03

Nobody said nothing to you? Everybody said, So my mom says, somebody asked out loud, what's this kid doing here? And whose kid is this anyway? You said they killed a cow?

SPEAKER_04 20:16

Beef, cow, mutum, cow, food.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

A cow, a goat, and a chicken. Okay. My mom's 12-year-old self watches not just an animal sacrifice, but dances. It was all like women dancing. Like what was it?

SPEAKER_04 20:29

Women and men.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

Alright, so now something really amazing happens. My mom, the Baptist student preacher she is, gets up and starts showing me how the folks at that voodoo ceremony were dancing over 50 years ago. That same style of full-body dancing with every single limb that I would later see in Benin. Yeah, that is what the dance was. And when you were watching it, right? Not how you think now. At the time when you were watching it, what were you thinking?

SPEAKER_04 21:00

I it's a fun for me. It's very fun. Okay, then to watch it.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

But you knew while you were watching it, you had to get back.

SPEAKER_04 21:07

Yeah, I have to go back home.

SPEAKER_02 21:10

And so by the time you got back, people were still outside in the locker room?

SPEAKER_04 21:13

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:14

And so you just acted like you were there the whole time. My mom gets back right in time, right as all the kids are going back home for dinner. And when she gets home, her dad is pissed. How did he find out?

SPEAKER_04 21:27

The other kids, the big mouth, go tell my dad, so you money go to voodoo.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

So then he found out, and then what happened after he found out?

SPEAKER_04 21:36

He tried to beat me up.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

He didn't beat you up, though.

SPEAKER_04 21:38

No, that kid, he's not gonna fight me. I'm going to Glen's house.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

My mom booked it to her gun's house. Nobody would protect my mom like her grandmother, Pauline. When you got to Pauline's house, you did you tell her you went to a voodoo ceremony?

SPEAKER_04 21:52

I tell Gun. What did she say? Gun said Shidala. Shidala. I guess unkapimbo gula.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Pauline then told my mom. To stay at her house and told her no one coming into her house would lay a hand on her. So, she wasn't mad at you?

SPEAKER_04 22:06

Gun?

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Yeah.

unknown 22:07

Woo!

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Huh. You were curious then?

SPEAKER_04 22:10

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

Okay. When when did you stop being curious? About six years later, my mom went to a carnival celebration in Haiti where she saw a man that she knew was a voodoo practitioner stab another man to death. It was a chaotic scene. She saw the one guy take the knife out and stab it into the other guy's chest, right in front of him. She just starts running as fast as she can till she finds somewhere to hide. That's something not for me. She started thinking maybe her dad, who died a few years before, was right to be so mad at her for going to the ceremony as a kid. Maybe her dad and all those other adults were right. Maybe voodoo was the devil after all. Alright, Mom. That is um That's all my questions.

SPEAKER_05 23:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

This isn't the last time we do this. We're gonna do this again. So what is Voodoo? Is it the devil? Or is it the power of Africa? What is it to my mom? What is it to me? I'm calling this series the Voodoo Project. I want to know how voodoo started, how it's a part of African history, when did our view of it as a people even change, and why? I also want to know the role it plays in how we as Haitians see ourselves. In every episode, you'll hear at least one person who practices voodoo. I'm gonna go to all the places that might provide me with some answers, with some history. I'm gonna go to Benin, the birthplace of Voodoo. I'm gonna go to New Orleans, to Cuba, and to Haiti. But before we get to those places, I gotta stop somewhere a little colder.

SPEAKER_09 24:21

Welcome to Milwaukee where the local time is 1.23 p.m. Please remain seated with your seat.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

In the next episode, I put on my scarf and head to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the dead of winter in search of a high priest of voodoo. In the West, you might talk about the natural and the supernatural. There's no distinction where we come from. The supernatural is part of the natural. It is part of the order. That's Patrick Belgard Smith. He isn't just a historian and former professor at the University of Wisconsin, he's a wugong, the highest level of initiation within Haitian Voodoo. After I read his book, I reached out to him and flew to Milwaukee to hang out at his retirement home and interview him in person. That's all in episode two of the Voodoo Project. Wapkute the Voodoo Project. Messi Poupacetan Avem, you're listening to the Voodoo Project. Thank you for spending time with me, Mwele Baudelaire. My name is Baudelaire.