Mysteries and Secrets of Voodoo, Santeria, and Obeah

by Lionel

  In a life-threatening situation in Kenya, Dr. John C. Barker, a psychiatrist, became involved in a case in which a senior officer at a medical station was apparently cursed by a witch doctor. A magical package was found concealed over the cursed medical officer’s door. The spell worker had placed it there so that every time the victim entered or left his house, he would supposedly come under the influence of the negative spell. Dr. Barker, with his sound professional knowledge of how the human mind works, mixed a revolting-looking and foul-tasting spell of his own, which was actually perfectly harmless in spite of its obnoxious smell. He told all the suspects that it would kill the man who had caused the spell to be put on the medical officer — but would harm no one else.

  Under this threat, the client of the witch doctor confessed. Barker ordered him to fetch the witch doctor and have the spell removed from the medical officer. The guilty man sped away to do what he was told, and came back with the witch doctor, who bent over the hex victim, whispered something to him, and left. Within hours, the sick man made a full recovery.

  It was a case that even a professional psychiatrist like Barker did not find easy to explain.

  Dr. Barker’s colleague was more fortunate than fifty-three-year-old Finis P. Ernest, an Oklahoma nightclub proprietor. He and his mother had been prosperous business partners but he decided to sell the business against her wishes, and she allegedly threatened terrible things would happen to him if he did. Finis went ahead with the sale in spite of her threats.

  Despite years of previous good health, he was taken ill repeatedly whenever he went to visit his mother. On August 23, 1960, Finis died after making a telephone call to her.

  An even stranger case concerned a young woman who died on the day before her twenty-third birthday in 1966. Doctors in the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore attended her: no other place could have offered her better or more up-to-date treatment or more caring attention.

  The girl came from a remote part of the famous Okefenokee Swamp area that straddles the Florida-Georgia state boundaries. She was born on Friday, August 13, 1943, as were two other baby girls. The midwife in attendance told their parents that because of the date, all three of them were doomed. She warned their mothers that the first would not see her sixteenth birthday and the second would die before she was twenty-one. Sadly, both of these prophecies came to pass. The third baby was the girl being attended in August 1966 by the team of outstanding Johns Hopkins doctors led by Dr. Gottlieb Friesinger at the Baltimore City Hospital. The midwife had told her mother that she would die before her twenty-third birthday.

  Every test had shown that she was in good health, apart from being understandably anxious and overweight, but she began to develop serious heart irregularities and an erratic pulse. Her breathing became uncontrollable and she broke out in an abnormally heavy sweat. On Friday, August 12, 1966, despite everything that Friesinger and his assistants could do for her, she died. The autopsy could not reveal any natural causes.

  This selection of case histories and the preceding studies of Santeria and the other syncretized mystery religions raise the central question about Voodoo, Obeah, Quimbanda, and the rest: when Voodoo works, how does it work?

  Chapter 16

  WHEN VOODOO WORKS, HOW DOES IT WORK?

  From their earliest infancy, human beings begin to learn about the nexus between cause and effect. It is the basis of survival and progress. As children mature and gain more and more experience of life and the sophisticated relationships that exist among a complex array of people, objects, and events, they gradually discover that there are inexplicable irregularities in the cause and effect scenario. A personal example illustrates the point.

  When co-author Lionel was a small boy, his father took him fishing from the quayside in Gorleston in East Anglia. Periodically, his father would ask his mother to take Lionel to the local sweet shop and buy him a bar of chocolate or some sweets.

  Having been to the shop, Lionel would return to the quayside to find a fish on his hook. As a result, he came to believe that the shop was lucky — that somehow a visit to the shop induced a fish to take the bait. A child’s diagnosis of cause and effect is frequently erroneous. As we grow and gain experience of this mysterious universe, we become more critical. Visiting the shop had no magical effect on the fish. His father simply took advantage of Lionel’s absence to buy a fish from another fisherman and put it on the boy’s hook.

  One of the most dangerous fallacies known to logicians is the one labelled post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this, therefore because of this. A Voodoo priest or priestess casts a spell, lifts a curse, restores health, or creates prosperity or a happy, loving relationship for a previously lonely client. The client is naturally delighted. But how and why did the magic work? Was the spell really effective in some way, or was it simply another fish-and-sweet shop phenomenon?

  The twenty-first century’s most advanced science is still a long way from understanding the universe’s deepest secrets and solving its most profound riddles. When new solutions do come to light from time to time, they usually raise more questions than they answer.

  One partial explanation of the apparent effectiveness of some types of magic may be that certain things are able to work in lower concentrations and at greater distances than was hitherto understood.

  Dr. Christopher Clark working at Cornell University analyzed data that showed that whale noises can travel from one ocean to another, and can be detected up to two thousand miles away.

  At the other end of the size scale, certain species of insects are attracted to their plant or animal targets by the odours that their hosts give off. These pheromone chemicals seem to be detectable in minute quantities by the insects that are highly tuned to various chemical stimuli at great distances from the target. Pheromones also attract the insects to one another intraspecifically for mating purposes.

  Sharks can detect blood when it is diluted to as little as one part per million. They can also detect their prey by sensing its electrical field. The shark’s head contains hundreds — in some species thousands — of electroreceptors, which are known to marine biologists as the Ampullae of Lorenzini. These guide the shark to the electromagnetic field radiating from its prey. Their ampullae can also enable sharks to orient themselves and navigate using the earth’s magnetic field — something almost analogous to the SatNavs fitted in cars.

  There are further biological navigational mysteries surrounding the ways that bees search for nectar-bearing flowers and then return to the hive to inform other bees of the flowers’ location by performing a communication dance. Research has suggested that bees are able to navigate using the position of the sun, but the bees’ precise steering mechanisms are not yet fully understood.

  These long-distance communication mysteries in the natural world may have some relevance to the world of magic. The whale song that can travel thousands of miles through the oceans, insects’ sensitivity to pheromones, sharks’ ability to detect electromagnetic fields produced by other living creatures, and bees’ solar navigation and honey-dance communications all suggest that distance and the smallness and faintness of a signal are no object to its having a profound effect.

  The Santerian incense, coloured candles, talismans and amulets, strange chemical ingredients of a spell, vibrant music, and chanting, drumming, and incantations could, perhaps, operate in ways that are not yet understood — but resemble the natural mysteries demonstrated by whales, sharks, and some insects.

  Another group of magical theories that set out to explain the methodology of Santeria, Quimbanda, Obeah, and the other syncretistic mystery religions starts from the premise that the priest-magicians are genuinely in contact with paranormal psychic beings whom they refer to as Loas and Orishas. These entities, which are paralleled to some extent by the Christian concepts of saints and angels, can be called upon by Voodoo experts and other priest-magicians. They will then be begged for help with problems such as poor health, poverty,
loneliness, or unhappy relationships.

  If these supernormal beings exist, if they are benign, and if they really do have power to influence people, objects, and events, then Santerian miracles of healing, happiness, and financial prosperity are explained in terms of their benevolent intervention.

  A skeptical and cynical approach to an explanation of what appears to be magic would be the diametric opposite of a belief in Orishas and Loas and their interventions in human affairs. This set of theories says that every case that has ever been recorded — from zombiism to miraculous healings; from abject poverty to a millionaire lifestyle — has been misunderstood, misreported, wildly exaggerated, or simply caused by chance. What has been fondly thought of as magic has been something perfectly natural, normal, and ordinary viewed from an unusual angle.

  In the authors’ opinion — based on more than forty years of serious research into every aspect of the paranormal — the real answer lies deep within the mystery of the human mind. The brain contains 1014 neurons. That’s a figure one followed by fourteen zeros. A single thought is an electrochemical connection between any two (or more) of these neurons. The possible permutations reach a number so close to infinity that the difference is inconsequential. The human brain can think as many thoughts as there are atoms in the known universe. In our normal lives, even the most academic scholar, the most daring researcher, and the most imaginative creative writer uses only the tiniest fraction of the brain’s capacity. Are what people call “magicians” simply those gifted men and women who have learned how to use a few more of their neurons?

  The bulging archives of magic hold countless records of happenings that the cynics and skeptics cannot realistically or convincingly explain away. In the great majority of these cases, the common denominator has been human will, mind-power, and a determination to succeed against all the odds. The best-known magicians and miracle workers have almost invariably been men and women who would never take no for an answer. If magic exists at all — it exists within indomitable human minds.

  Where Santerian magic — and the magical elements in the other syncretized mystery religions — becomes most effective is within an environment that is conducive to releasing the hidden powers in the human mind. The drumming, the music, the rhythmic dancing, the incense, the chanting, the belief in possession by Orishas and Loas — these are all conducive to the release of mind-power.

  The electrochemical pathways in the brain can be classified as forms of energy — and it is energy in one form or another that keeps the wheels of life turning. The more priest-magicians think, the harder they concentrate, and the more focused they are on the magical objective, the more likely it is that they will be able to work mind-magic on behalf of those who have come to them for help. The awareness that those around them believe in their powers reinforces those powers. It also seems probable that trancelike states, periods of altered consciousness, also increase magicians’ mind-powers.

  The Christian gospel accounts of healings and other miracles, and the history of miracles in the early church, all indicate that faith is of vital importance: the greater the faith, the greater the achievement.

  What, then, is the real secret of magic? Is it the result of processes that are not yet fully understood but that will succumb eventually to the rigorous probing of hard science? Will strange, but perfectly natural and explicable, connections be found between magical spells and enchanters’ rituals and substantial changes in objective reality? Does the secret of magic belong in the same category as the shark’s ability to employ the Ampullae of Lorenzini, or the bee’s ability to dance her directions to the nectar sources? Do Orishas and Loas really exist? Do they have strange superhuman powers? And are they willing to use those powers when the magician-priest begs for help?

  Or are all human beings rather like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? Does everyone already have the power — as symbolized by Dorothy’s ruby slippers — to perform miracles and achieve their goals if only they would use it?

  The first two sets of theories regarding magic remain unproven and unresolved. There may be connecting power of an unknown type that operates over space and time when spells are cast. It’s an area worth investigating objectively and scientifically — but the jury is still out. The further science progresses, the more we learn about the amazing complexity of causes and effects. Magic may be shown to work in ways as mysterious as cetaceans, bees, and sharks. Orishas and Loas may exist and may be willing and able to assist Santerian priest-magicians to help and heal people in need. If skilled veterinary surgeons can help animals in ways that the animals do not understand, why shouldn’t Loas and Orishas help human beings who don’t understand how Loa power operates? Again, the jury is out.

  Magic and mind-power, however, seem to be almost synonymous. Thought may be a form of magic, and magic may be the expression of projected and directed thought. The wise St. Paul advised his readers to concentrate their thoughts on things that were pure and good and lovely. He was a very knowledgeable man, and he may have had something truly profound in mind when he wrote those words.

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