Amulets, Grigris, Charms, And The Evil Eye - The Voodoo Of American Democracy

Amy Stall was a frequent traveler to Haiti - that is, before the country's descent into social chaos and during the quiet time of the Duvaliers, five star Petionville restaurants, all night dancing in Carrefour, and the African markets of Duvalierville. 

 

Amy did not go to Haiti for the restaurants, the music, lambi creole and the tropical beaches of Les Cayes, but for something else - the dark spirits of voodoo, zombies, and the Baron Samedi. There was something both frightening and potent about the ceremonies in the hills above Kenscoff, the savagery, the possessions, the invocations, and the ecstatic revelations that were irresistible.

 

For Amy religion in America seemed tame, ordinary, predictable, unimpressive, and unmoving.  The closest it came to real power was the consecration of the Catholic Mass - the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ but only a metaphor. Real sacrifice was held on the Mesoamerican plains where virgins were sacrificed to the immanent gods of the surrounding mountains in a plea for sanctuary. 

As a child she had filed into St. Maurice's church and suffered through the bells and incantations of the Mass, the Kyrie, the Offertory, the Confiteor, and the blandishments of old Father Murphy whose voice trembled and trailed off and his hands shook as he gave communion, 

She had left the Church, its canon and its pale belief, and for years, searched for something more meaningful, more heart-throbbing - that is what women were supposed to feel when seeing Christ on the Cross - something more spiritually rendering. 

She turned to Protestant fundamentalism and its charisma.  Jesus Christ visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday in Aberdeen, Mississippi but he never offered to be her personal savior.  He was just as remote and fictional as the Jesuits' God. 

It was much later, when she was a traveler to Africa did she have her first glimpse of real religion - the tribal, animist religion of the forest, the savagery described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, the descent of man into his most primitive, but thereby bringing him closer to divinity.  Not the congenial, welcoming, loving divinity of Christianity, but something far more essential.  This was fundamentalism, not the stage version of Pastor Isaiah Phillips. 

She began wearing the amulets and grigris given to her by African priests whom she sought out in the same Congolese forests where Kurtz thought he had found his salvation.  She had been an observer of the same inchoate, primitive rituals that Conrad had seen, a privileged visitor because of some animal sense felt by the Africans or because she was a white woman, a goddess in the forest myths of Ngomo

This forest odyssey was just the beginning, for it was Haiti and voodoo which had captured her interest.  Somehow there she would realize her longstanding evolutionary passion - to see God. 

She always fell short.  These ecstatic revelations belonged only to natives, those who were born and raised within the spirit of the gods, djinns, and evil spirits. The Turkish nazar would not protect her from the Evil Eye no more than the shrunken ear of a Congolese devil could.  She sniffed at the hems of limitless power, the primeval forces of the jungle, the heart of darkness and divinity, but could never be embraced by them. 

Amy was a seeker, a person of heightened sensibilities, optimism, spiritual hope, and endless patience. God was there somewhere, and with deliberateness and single-minded virtue, she would find him. 

Tolstoy was such a seeker and explored every avenue which might lead to God without success. History, mythology, science, philosophy all failed him.  Either God did not exist or he was ineffable.  He ended his search exhausted and dispirited but calm.  If tens of millions of his fellow men believed, and if hundreds of millions had believed before them, then perhaps there was something there. 

Such religious seekers are often secular ones.  The transference of inescapable passion for truth from the divine to the secular is not uncommon, and has been extensively chronicled.  The phenomenon is particularly American wrote Professor Amadeus Wilson historian and social biologist who wrote in the Duke Medical School Journal of Forensic Psychology:

The American Seeker is a person of emotional febrility - burning with eschatological passion and secular reformism who sees no distinction between the primal energies of religious ecstasy and the achievement of practical goodness.  He does not see, he feels.  The world is very much the territory of djinns, spirits, and the daily incarnation of the gods.  He is just at home in a revolutionary meeting to change the world as he is walking up aisle to embrace Jesus Christ.  Both sides of his brain emit the same irresistible energy.  In psychiatric terms, he is doubly troubled

Amy Stall was the poster girl for Professor Wilson, for she had joined the progressive movement not as a substitute for her religious hejira but as a complement to it.  When she was amidst a crowd of true political believers, all were filled with passion for the climate, for social equality, for economic justice, and expressed their ecstatic passion in ways no different than the peasants of the Kenscoff hills or the tribal faithful of the Congolese jungle. 

As importantly, these political seekers see evil in the world, real, palpable, and incarnate.  There is such a thing as the devil and he, not the sentient, calculating Devil of Milton, but the horrific demon of the Amazon and the Central African jungle is here now and everywhere. 

It wasn't the political progressive canon per se which was the fuel for her passionate embrace of social reform. It was the almost mythical communal ecstasy of true belief.  The impending climatic doom mattered less than the embrace of the idea as a path to epiphany.  As Amy stood amidst an almost hysterical crowd of climate activists, all who unquestionably believed in the coming Armageddon, she was filled with the same ardor, the same soul-filling happiness of revelation. 

Sympathetic political observers say that this ecstatic expression of political belief and commitment is a good thing, for without passion, ideals founder.  The warriors of the Crusades marched across Europe to Jerusalem under the flag of Christianity.  Their mission was holy, their purpose divine, their war sanctified.  Modern progressive activists are no different, infused with passionate belief, with complete faith in the rightness of their cause, and an undying fidelity to the holy canon of reform. 

Professor Wilson wrote further on secular religion:

The political True Believer is a person apart, detached from rational exegesis, logic, understanding, analysis, and reasoned conclusion.  He is no different than the Mesoamerican peasant ecstatic as the blade pierces the breast of the inviolate virgin, or the Salem burgher filled with God himself as the apostate goes up in flames, the African who dances around a fire in an invocation of tribal spirits, or the voodoo priest holding the headless body of an eviscerated animal. 

More telling, he went on, passion becomes hysteria and hysteria becomes viral.  There is no stopping it once it gains currency and traction. 

Any Stall never read Professor Wilson or gave a thought to such academicism. 'I am The Movement' she said, 'And The Movement is Me!' and with that she finally fulfilled her expectations, her dreams, and her desperate religious needs.  God and Jesus Christ disappeared, supernumerary distractions from the real purpose of being - making a difference, doing something, doing good. 

Professor Wilson concluded in this way:

Just like the mental patient interned at St. Elizabeth's' the True Believer loses all sense of touch, feel, sound, and smell of the real world and inhabits a much happier, elegiac, and ecstatic place.  Both are happy in their own way, unable perhaps to function in the real world, but for them social accommodation is the farthest thing from their minds. 

For the True Believer just like the religious saint, there is no opting out; and Amy Small continued in her march to a Utopian progressive future without fail or fatigue. She was and would be a soldier in the crusade for a better, verdant, and more compassionate world forever.