Unexplained Death - Haitian Chronicles Of Voodoo, Sorcery, And Mystical Power

Fielding Evans was no stranger to foreign lands nor to the immanent danger of remote, savage places.  He had travelled in the footsteps of Mungo Park, 18th Century British explorer up the Niger River and along the tributaries of the Congo River into Conrad's Heart of Darkness where he had witnessed, as the fictional Kurtz had, of ritual cannibalism and live human sacrifice. 

 

He had penetrated the jungles of Borneo and encountered the aboriginal headhunters and mud men of the island, barely escaping with his life.  He had seen every variation of human excess possible, or so he thought.  Pride cometh before a fall he well knew, and the world certainly held more surprises than he could imagine. 

He was most fascinated with religious expression.  A good Catholic, he had been brought up with miracles and mystery and was well versed in the mythic aspects of the faith.  The consecration, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and then taken, eaten, by communicant was nothing less than a pagan ceremony no different than those of the Amazon, Africa, and Borneo.  There was a commonality to religion, he felt, some element of sacrifice and savagery that suggested more about human nature than divinity, and he was tireless in his investigation of it. 

The Aztecs, Mixtecs, Olmecs, and Zapotecs of Mesoamerica had raised human sacrifice to sublime levels.  These Indian societies worshipped the gods of nature - God was immanent in the mountains, terrifying in his angry, thunderous violence, always vigilant and in need of worship and appeasement.  A human sacrifice on an altar of one of the gods of the immediate universe was a perfect consummation of spiritual, human, and mystic power.  The sacrifice of the Catholic Mass was but a lukewarm, remote imitation of ancient Mexico. 

Kurtz, the main character in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, dies speaking these words - 'The horror...the horror...'.  He in that final illuminating moment realizes that the cannibalistic violence of the African tribes with whom he lived was universal.  The human spirit is violent, savage, uncivilized, and uncontrolled. 

The one area of paganism that he had yet to explore was conjuring - that reported ability of shamans, medicine men, brujos, and witch doctors to cast spells, to will someone dead, to rob them of their souls. Haiti was the place where such conjuring was considered commonplace, and in the hills far above Kenscoff, the ritual voodoo drums were heard every night, echoing down the mountain and into the Victorian gingerbread neighborhoods below. 

In Port-au-Prince he inquired about these rituals and how he might participate in one; but he was told repeatedly, 'Don't go there, Sir'. Voodoo, the unofficial state religion of Haiti was not to be treated lightly, observed, recorded.  It was not like a Catholic Mass, the stations of the cross, confession, or Holy Communion.  It was a violent religion where unholy spirits were conjured and took possession of the unwary.  It was a religion where the dead walked the earth, where zombies lived and took souls like fruit from a donkey cart.  It had no saints but the living dead, and Baron Samedi, prince of darkness visited in the night. 

It was only under cover, camouflaged, and secretive to a fault did Evans make his way up the mountain, through the brambles and thick brush, past scorpions and rats' nests bitten and stung did he manage to find his way to the ceremony.  Cloaked, disguised, and well-hidden, he watched and listened.  He wrote in his journal:

I thought I was prepared, having observed many charismatic Protestant ceremonies where congregants are possessed by Jesus Christ and writhe in ecstatic agony as they are taken, channeling Christ on the cross, choking, aspirating his last breath, bleeding from his crown of thorns and from the sword wounds in his side. 

I thought witnessing exorcisms would give me some perspective on what I was about to see - the same violently tormented agony as the Devil was extracted from the possessed, a scene of torturous, impossible release.  Yet nothing prepared me for the hysteria, the pure, unadulterated, screaming savagery of demonic possession I witnessed in the Haitian mountains. 

What he saw, however, was only the immediate expression of the religion.  The real power, the true immanent sorcery of the voodoo priest, he was told was in his power to cast spells, to conjure the evil spirits to 'suck the life marrow' from an enemy afar. 

This devilish conjuring was not done incidentally, casually, or for a few dollars.  It was as detailed and complex as beatification.  Everything about the intended victim needed to be known, a detailed profile of his waking, sleeping, gait, expressions, and personality.  His effigy reproduced by the priest would have to be meticulously researched and crafted.  Bits of skin, strands of hair, scrapings of warts and moles would complete the configuration; and only then would the incantations work. 

This was one area of mystical religion that Evans abjured.  He understood and appreciated every immediate expression of faith no matter how pagan or inhuman, but this was beyond anything is rational mind could accept.  There could be no such thing, and any death presumed to be the result of sorcery would have to be explained by logic. 

How was the premise to be proven or validated.? Hearsay is the currency of the realm in matters such as these. Only the unthinkable - if the victim were someone Evans knew, a healthy young person whose premature death could not ever be attributable to natural causes would do. 

Why not? was his first thought.  It's all nonsense, abracadabra, and pagan idolatry anyway.  There is no way that such sorcery could possibly exist and if it did, wouldn't that mean the existence of another spiritual world, a message of hope even out of its infinitely diabolical intent?  It wouldn't be murder, at least the blood would not be on his hands, for he would not be the one boiling up the blood of newt and salamander bladders.  

Yes, hate has a role to play, explained a Haitian colleague who had studied Haitian voodoo and its Dahomey African origins.  'It is not a parlor game', he said. 'It works - or so they day - only when virulent hatred is added to the mix.  Someone must want the person dead out of morbid spite, vengeance, or retribution'. 

There had been a case, Evans was told by the Haitian ethnographer, where a man was unexpectedly found dead in his apartment and that a coroner's inquest could find nothing that had killed him.  No one but Haitians knew where to look - he was blindly hated by the family of the woman he had raped, murdered, and left in a ditch along Dessalines.  Somewhere, somehow, and someone had engineered his sudden death. It might not have been one of the aggrieved family but a sympathetic friend with underground connections to the voodoo inner circle. 

Evans could arrange the sorcery on behalf of someone else who hated.  That would exonerate him and still test the theory.  And so it was that this ordinarily recondite, honest, and principled man went overboard.  Was it a matter of faith? A willingness to suspend disbelief in order to probe the improbable? An intellectual fraud?

He squared the circle.  He identified the victim and the man who wanted him dead; and he found a way into the inner circle of mystical voodooism.  The fee would be substantial, and Evans was prepared to lose it all, for up until the last, he was diffident at best and skeptical at worst.  This simply couldn't be. 

The obituary in the Washington Post said that the victim, much beloved by friends and family had died of natural causes, but his death was not without suspicion.  'But he was so healthy...a man in the prime of life...a man with his whole life ahead of him...'  A special coroner's inquest found nothing unusual, and the forensic pathologist hired by the family concurred.  Although the specific cause of death would have to remain undetermined, foul play was definitively ruled out. 

'You see, it works' said the anonymous postcard postmarked Port-au-Prince; and with that, as he had promised himself, with proof now that God existed - or at least some form of divinity, divine force, or immanent power - he applied for and was accepted at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, a monastery of silence, simplicity, and devotion.