What people not from these islands refer to as “Voodoo”, has been grossly misunderstood for generations. As stated above, it is a blend of African tribal rituals and folk medicine strongly influenced by Catholic culture and rituals. It is the product of the Caribbean slave cultures, people who had to fend for themselves on the land within a social structure that provided no healthcare and without a codified justice system within the slave culture. Voodoo was a way to solve problems among people who had no access to science as we know it. Placing ritualistic curses on enemies, which is so popularly emphasized in fiction, played a very small part in it.
There are different cultures on different islands, depending on which country colonized them, so there were variations of what is called voodoo on Haiti, with different terminology and was practiced under many different names.
Zombies were people entranced at rituals, much like the trances and speaking of tongues in some fundamental Christian sects who believe they talk to God. These were people who were thought to be able to communicate with the dead, sometimes assisted by herbal hypnotics, narcoleptics, and paralysis-inducing drugs administered by a voodoo priest or priestess. They were sometimes painted a ghostly white in hopes of them not being noticed as they traveled through the netherworld. I’m assuming some never recovered and remained zombie-like, just like many drug abusers we see today. These rituals were seen by visitors throughout the centuries and became lucrative subjects in literature and later in film.
Today, there are festivals that incorporate many of the costumes and traditions of these old beliefs, but few take them seriously. It has been a source of embarrassment to the governments and educated people of these islands and has been discouraged in the latter part of the twentieth century. Political independence has brought healthcare and a good educational system to these islands, and this has replaced the necessity for these religions. Only recently have people felt a need to get back in touch with these aspects of the slave culture in order to gain a better understanding of their past.
The Caribbean consists of many thousands of small islands, difficult and expensive to access adequately by healthcare as most of you know it. Therefore, there is still a strong tradition of folk medicine in these islands with a bit of spiritualism in the mix—a common belief in a higher power. There is some ritual, if the patient so desires, but this usually consists of burning herbs or scented candles, ritual foods, some prayer or singing.
These practitioners are men and women who know their herbal pharmacology, often handed down from parent to child, and administer family medicine among their people the best they can. Doctors can only make monthly or quarterly visits by boat and plane to the most remote islands and they often consult these local practitioners before making their rounds of a given village, much like a doctor will receive a status report from a charge nurse before he sees patients on a hospital floor.
But as modern medicine is more evenly distributed, the practitioners of folk medicine—the last vestige of what is called voodoo—are quickly disappearing and the knowledge is in jeopardy of being forgotten.
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