Well you could wait for me to suggest "The Four Horsemen", but since the name of the book that i think you are referring to is actually called "The Divine Horsemen" i am afraid that you would be waiting for a very long time. ;->
Anyway, your post isn't asking for book choices, it's asking about a specific book, so in all likelihood i would merely comment on the book you are asking about. But i haven't read this one. Sounds interesting though and i will have to look into it. Thanks. :-)

I have it....I read it a couple of years ago. I still have it in my library. It was not what I expected it to be. I did learn a little about the different ways Voudou is practiced in the US.... I'll dig it out of my library and give you some more feedback soon!

Hullo to you! :-)

Aha, sorry Nechesh. I have no excuse for the error. I'll check my sources a bit more thoroughly next time!

And thank you Crystal. I agree, it wasn't in the least what I expected. Though, if I were to name one thing it did provide, it would be the outlining of the separate forms the African religions have taken once they hit U.S. soil. Even if the details are murky...

Thank you both for the attention to the topic ^ ^.

Here are my notes on the book "American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World" by Rod Davis.

This book is part of a new tradition of people who are “seekers,” not religious in their own right, but looking to understand a certain spiritual path. (Examples of these kinds of books are Wade Davis’s own book __The Serpent and the Rainbow__, __Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure__ by Sarah MacDonald, and __Not in Kansas Anymore__ by Christine Wicker) These are basically colorful ‘reportage’ which describes people/places/things quite well, giving you a feeling of being there, the “mood” of being there.

He went to see Wade Davis (no relation), and “we agreed that little was known of American versions of voudou, which are more assimilated into Christianity than are Haitian models.”

Many members of the African-American community throughout the south shared with him “the most sacred parts” of their lives. The book chronicles his research-travels starting in New Orleans, and crisscrossing the states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, dipping down into Miami, and up to New York City.


From the back cover:

“Rod Davis is an excellent reporter. He starts with curiosity, moves into fascination, and is duly repelled by some of the things he encounters along the way, yet persists as he finds himself led by his intuition into recognizing the presence of voudou spirits at the crossroads or wherever.” -- Francis Huxley, __The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in Haiti__

"Davis skillfully shows voudou's relationship to forms of hoodoo, as found throughout the American South, and to African-American religion, as seen in beliefs and ritual of the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans. He also places voudou in a broad context of American cultural history, from slavery to Civil Rights movement, and from Elvis to New Age. Davis raises several important theoretical questions and offers insight into them, especially regarding the nature of religion, American culture, and race relations.” (Claude F. Jacobs, __the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion)

He begins by meeting practitioners of Santeria (which he calls “the Cuban form (of voudou)”) for the purpose of getting an “obi” reading done. “The idea was to ‘make the corners’ of the market, which meant walking the oblong perimeter and pausing at each of the corners so that Gary could throw the four coconut divining shell fragments, known as obi, and ask the spirits of the market, such as Oya, goddess of the wind and the cemetaries, and Elegba, the divine trickster and lord of the crossroads, for good fortune and the promise of success. The spirits are evoked on the street, with prayers and offerings...and the obi are thrown on the street, as well!

(Much like the people who were coming to ask Ghede for his blessing on their energy drink!)

He interviews Reverend Lorita Mitchell from the Antioch Spiritual Church (and she welcomes him, showing great hospitality, feeding him and her family welcomes him, too). Ava Kay Jones, dancer with the Voodoo Macumba Dance Troupe. She’s also an attorney who devotes her life “to the orisha.” She tells him that much of what she practices spiritual “was handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter.”

As he learns about Voudou, so do we. He lets them explain about their own beliefs and practices. He learns of their personal stories.

He visits “botanicas.” The “St. Lazarus Church Supply” store. He attends services at the Church.

He takes the “hoodoo trail” through Mississippi, simply looking in the phone book for shops selling “religious supplies. That’s how he found “The Shining Two.”

He follows his hunches and one person leads him to the next...as he said, “...even dead ends sometimes proved to be trailheads: the way of voudou no less than that of scientific discovery.” He seeks out people by going to bookstores, botanicas, churchs, little restaurants,

As he talks with people, he finds a pattern: “In each story, a mother, father, sister, or some other relative became mysteriously ill. Conventional remedies, including doctors, were useless. Then someone....usually an aunt or grandmother...intervened and tracked down the cause, a hidden bag or talisman or similar hoodoo object “planted” by an enemy. When the object was found, and removed, the victim got well.

Davis’s theory was that there was “an underground oral remembrance of voudou. Not of its content—that was too thoroughly banned–but its existence. Every family with a voudou story was part of the remembrance. Every telling was the myth made manifest.”

Davis also gathers lists of “cures” for all kinds of physical ailments made from herbs and from other things. (A Pneumonia cure is a tea from whitened dog manure!! A cure for a fever blister is to rub it with wax from your ear!)

“When asking around, I would only mention voudou if someone else did. If not, I would rely on a preamble about researching traditional Southern medicines and healings, and say I was seeking anyone in the area, probably an older person, who might have such knowledge or know someone who did.”

One woman tells him, “You’re talking about voudou,” she said matter-of-factly, looking at me as she bent to extract a pan of cornbread from the double oven, “I taught voudou for 6 weeks at my church,” she said, “There’s 33 verses about voudou in the Bible.” I must have looked slightly stunned. “I don’t believe in it,” she said quickly, “I study it to help people who think they’ve been hoodooed. I’ve been hoodooed myself. There’s some people in Chatham who made a candle against me ‘cause I preach against the hoodoo.”

Hoodoo...a “For his uses of oils, herbal potions, special teas and ‘annointments’ with poltices, he was called two-headed man, a prophet, a root doctor, a hoodoo and worse. Christians called him a ‘usurper of God’s powers.’

Went to Elvis’s grave “to see him as egun.” “Elvis, the poor white boy with the black music, might have been some unaware—or whimsically disguised—avator of Elegba, or Shango.”

“For white people to worship the dead, create gods of them, is not considered evil. Odd, perhaps, even camp, but not sacrilegious. Conversely, since the landing of the first slave ship in the Caribbean, that form of reverence has been in one way or another prohibited or taboo for Africans. As for their ritual of sacrifice–all the altar to an orisha requires is replenishment with fruit, water, candies, from time to time the blood of a fowl or perhaps a goat. Natural and straightforward. The altar of the dead god of commodity culture, on the other hand, requires the ongoing spiritual consumption of thousands a day: humans, in buses, with tickets.”

He goes to the grave of slain Civil Rights workers and gives them an offering and a prayer.

“It is true that, as DuBois said, the preachers are the priests. Not that the modern day preachers—or ministers, or reverends, or bishops—themselves will fully acknowledge their voudou lineage, except perhaps in terms of a vague, scholarly, historical link. That’s not what I mean. I mean the preachers are the priests. Directly invested. Unlike the Caribbean model, where cyncretization allowed voudou to retain much of its ritual and religious essence, and where the priests could continue to function as such, voudou in America turned political. The priests BECAME the preachers.

“Lacking the opportunity to function even in a cloaked version, the faith withdrew into the bones of its leaders. The hiding place is almost too good. In Cuba, you may look upon a santeria ceremony or visit a babalawo and know you are seeing the legacy of voudou. In Haiti even more so. And in America?

“Let them talk of Jesus and Mary. Were not preachers the leaders of virtually every struggle for black liberation in American history? Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, even Malcolm X—all based their power on religious vision. Perhaps the religions they invoked were no longer called voudou, but their role among the people was the same: to bind society, to provide a forum for the spirit, to produce leaders, to lead in struggle if necessary.

“If the martyrdom of Dr. King is seen as deriving from Jesus Christ instead of Ogun, Ochosi and Obatala, the misconception is but a passing quirk of mortal interpretation. Or so I thought, driving from the quiet graveyard in Philadelphia, Mississippi, my mind at one with what the snake knows.”

Many said they were “part Choctaw.”

In Georgia, he meets and interviews Baba Oshun Kunle and Baba Tunde, both Panamanian-born but US residents for years. The first “a babalawo, the highest priestly order in voudou, interpreter of Ifa.” The second, priest of Obatala.

Baba Tunde gave him a reading, and told him he was “very close” to Obatala, and should consider his ways, which are “his pace is very slow. He takes care of things one at a time. You study the snail.” He was also told that “in some time another way back, in some incarnation, you was black. That’s why the spirit is there. It’s speaking of a black female spirit that is there, that was into all of these things.”

Then, because a “blockage” was found, the priests do a sacrifice (ebo). They let him hold a rooster, then wipe his aura with it, then behead it, and dripped the blood on the altar. Also annointed him with it.

In South Carolina, he visits Oyotunji village, with living quarters, open air temples, dancing pavilions and shrines. A royal compound with the King and some of his wives and man individual altars. Everything had been built by hand, over the years, exactly as it would have been done in West Africa.

(3 chapters on the Oyotunji village.)

He visits the grave of Zora Neale Hurston in Florida. (Headstone donated by writer Alice Walker.) In Florida he also visited another priest of Obatala, and then up to New York, to visit scholar John Mason and his son.

Back to Miami. “The city is now–to voudou–what New Orleans was a century earlier–the landfall of the Caribbean, the great demographic crossroads of the North American spirits: European, African, and Native American.” Botanicas flourish—some, boldly advertising as pet shops, openly selling livestock everybody knows is intended for sacrifice. Voudou in Miami is santeria. It is Cuban. The number of santeria followers in the city has grown to more than 65,000.”

Goes to visit the Church of the Lukumi’ Babalu Aye. Talks to the scholar Lydia Cabrera, who learned from her family’s Kongolese servant, Tula, and wrote books about Palo. He meets Chief A.S. Ajamu, who had lived in Oyotunji in the early 70s and now lived in S. Florida at the “Divine Guidance Psychic Clinic.”


ALL in all, it was a learning experience for Mr. Davis.....but how much he TRULY learned about Voudou is debatable. I DO know that after he wrote THIS book, he Rod Davis wrote a NOVEL called __Corina’s Way__: “More than any author I know Rod Davis understands and knows that hidden Southern space where the ancient currents of African spirituality still linger in the American soul. __Corina’s Way__, a story of faith and redemption, is a wonderful and powerful novel, a stunning fictional debut from an author who already brought us what is arguably the finest account of voudou in America.” –Wade Davis

Corina is a “streetwise Pentecostal psychic turned Voudou priestess who sees her ‘santos’ in all the bywaters and back streets of the Big Easy. David knows how hip and modern these ancient African gods of ‘voudou’ reallya re. – Donald Consentino

books.google.com/books

__American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World__ by Rod Davis

books.google.com/books

Here's some books that may also be interesting to you......

__The Bluesman: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas__
by Julio Finn

___Company of Prophets: African American Psychics, Healers & Visionaries___
by Joyce Elaine Noll

(both of the above are great books!)

Here's a page with short reviews of other books:

www.geocities.com/BourbonSt...Books.html

I hope people will add other books to this thread!!! (Is that OK, Boka??)

Of course it's fine Miss Maggie! I truly appreciate your synopsis! And I'll take a peak at your links when I'm given a chance. :]

It's odd -- I hope the majority of books out there are more truthful than inflated with Hollywood bull crap... I don't get out much, and it's difficult to truly talk to people about these things, so books are the easiest and most comfortable way for me to learn about such things. And it's when people pull bull crap and sensationalism into a work they call authoritative that really ruins the whole attitude the public has of the subject (in this case, the religion).

And that's an interesting idea, Maggie, turning this thread into a suggestion thread for books. :]

( You're welcome Crystal, haha! )

FYI, here is a book review of the "American Voudou" book on the mamiwata.com website:

www.mamiwata.com/vodou1.htm