‘And, Canevin, he raised his other arm, the one that was not holding the torch, and pointed and answered: “Straight to the south, Lord of Fire!” ’
‘Canevin, I could have kissed that Indian! Another chance! I went up to him and hugged him like a bear. I don’t know what he thought of that. I didn’t give him time to think, to make up his mind. I held him off at arms’ length as though he had been my favorite brother-in-law that I hadn’t seen for a couple of years! I said to him: “Speak, heroic Servant of the Fire – name your reward!”
‘He never hesitated an instant. He knew what he wanted, that fellow – saw this was his big chance. He breathed hard. I could see his big chest go in and out. He’ll go a long way, believe me, Canevin!
‘ “The lordship over – these!” he said, with a little gasp, and pointed with the torch, around the circle. I raised both my hands over my head and called out: “Hearken, men of this nation! Behold your overlord who with his descendants shall rule over all your nations and tribes and peoples to the end of time. Down – and salute your lord!”
A little later, when they got it, as they dropped in rows on their faces, Canevin, I turned to that fellow holding the torch, and said: “Call them together; make them sit in a circle around us here. Then the first thing you are to do is to pick out the men you want to help you govern them. After that, tell them they are to listen to me!”
‘He looked me in the eye again, and nodded. Oh, he was an intelligent one, that fellow! To make a long story short, he did just that; and you can picture us there in the moonlight, for the moon had a chance to get going long before the Indians were arranged the way I had said, the new king bossing them all as though he had never done anything else, with me standing there in the center and haranguing them – I’d had plenty of time, you see, to get that speech together – and, as I palavered, the interpreters relayed it to the rest.
‘The upshot of it all was that we started off for the place, the other place where He could “put his foot upon the earth” as I had said, the place where we found you. It took us all night, even with that willing mob swinging their machetes.’
I thanked Pelletier for his story. He had already heard the outline of mine, such as I have recounted here somewhat more fully. I let his account sink in, and then, as I have said, I was able to be myself again. Perhaps Pelletier’s very commonplace sanity, the matter-of-factness of his account, may have had something to do with this desirable effect. I do not know, but I am glad to be able to record the fact.
‘There is one thing not quite clear in my mind,’ said I, after Pelletier had finished.
‘Yes?’ said Pelletier, encouragingly.
‘That figure in the temple – Aquarius,’ I explained. ‘Just how did you happen to fasten on that? I understand, of course, why you destroyed it. It was, like the tree, one of His “foci”, a “bridge” to earth. By wiping those out, as I understand the matter, you broke what I might call his earth-power; you cut off his points of access. It’s mysterious enough, yet clear in a way. But how did you know that that was the focal point, so to speak? Why the statue? Why not, for example, the altar?’
Pelletier nodded, considering my questions. Then he smiled whimsically.
‘That’s because you do not know your astrology, Canevin!’ he said, propping his bulk up on one arm, for emphasis, and looking straight at me. He grinned broadly, like a mischievous boy. Then: ‘You remember – I touched on that – how important it is, or should be, as an element in a modern education! Aquarius would fool you; would puzzle anybody, I’ll grant you – anybody, that is, who doesn’t know his astrology! You’d think from his name that he was allied with the element of water, wouldn’t you, Canevin? The name practically says so: “Aquarius” – water-bearer. You’d think so, unless, as I say, you knew your astrology!’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘It’s too much for me, Pelletier. You’ll have to tell me, I’m afraid.’ It was plain that Pelletier held some joker up his sleeve.
‘Did you ever see a picture of Aquarius, Canevin, in which – stop and think a moment – he is not represented as pouring water out of that vessel of his? Aquarius is not the personage who represents water, Canevin. Quite the contrary, in fact. He’s the fellow who is getting rid of the water to make way for the air. Aquarius, in spite of his name, is the zodiacal symbol for air, not water, as you’d imagine if you didn’t know your astrology, Canevin! He is represented always as pouring out water, getting rid of it! Aquarius is not the protagonist of water. He is the precursor, the forerunner of air!’ As he said this, Dr Pelletier waved one of his big, awkward-looking hands – sure sign of something on his mind. I laughed. I admitted freely that my education had been neglected.
‘And what next?’ I asked, smiling at my big friend. He laughed that big contagious laugh of his.
‘Canevin,’ said he, wagging his head at me, ‘I’m wondering which of the archaeologists, or maybe some rank outsider, who will go to the top on it, and get D. Sc.’s all the way from Harvard to the University of Upsala – which of ’em will be the first to “discover” that the first Maya civilization is not defunct; knock the very best modern archaeological science endwise all over again, the way it’s constantly being done in every “scientific” field, from Darwin to Kirsopp Lake! An “epoch-making discovery”!’
Then, musing, seriously, yet with a twinkle in his kindly brown eyes: ‘I have great hopes of the leadership they’re going to get; that they’re getting, right now, Canevin. That was some up-and-coming boy, some fellow, that new king in Quintana Roo, the one I appointed, the new ruler of the jungle! Did you see him, Canevin, standing there, telling them what was what?
‘Do you know, I never even found out his name! He’s one of the very few, by the way – told me about it on the trek back to the Circle – who had learned the old language. It’s come down, you know, through the priests, here and there, intact, just as they used to speak it a couple of thousand years ago. Well, you heard him use it! Quite a group, I believe, keep it up, in and around Chichen-Itza particularly. He told them, he said, how fire had prevailed over their traditional air – Aquarius lying there, toppled off his pedestal, to prove it!’
I was glad I had given the young chieftain my bronze sword. Perhaps its possession will help him in establishing his authority over those Old Ones: that giant from whose hand I originally snatched it there in the temple may very well have been their head man. He was big enough, and fast enough on his feet; had the primitive leadership qualities, in all conscience. He had been mightily impressive as he came bounding ahead of his followers, charging upon us through the clouds of dust.
I have kept the sliver Wilkes, poor fellow, cut from the palm of the great Hand. I discovered it, rolled up and quite hardened and stiff, in the pocket of my trousers there in the hotel in Belize when I was changing to fresh clothes.
I keep it in a drawer of my bureau, in my bedroom. Nobody sees it there; nobody asks what it is.
‘Yes – a sliver cut from the superficial scarf-skin of one of the ancient classical demigods! Yes – interesting, isn’t it!’
I’d rather not have to describe that sliver. Probably my hearers would say nothing much. People are courteous, especially here in St Thomas where there is a tradition to that effect. But they could hardly visualize, as I still do – yet, fortunately, at decreasing intervals – that cosmic Entity of the high atmosphere, presiding over His element of air; menacing, colossal; His vast heart beating on eternally as, stupendous, incredible, He towers there inscrutable among the unchanging stars.
Obi in the Caribbean
Shortly before the annual Christmas horse-races on the American West Indian Island of Santa Cruz, in 1922, a young colored man named Anduze, living in Christiansted, was murdered, and the murderer was subsequently convicted in the American district court. The object of this murder was to procure Anduze’s heart and liver. An obi-doctor had been engaged to work voodoo on one of the racehorses owned by a black man, and the heart
and liver were the necessary materials for the magicking.
The horse in question, which had been ‘obi-doctored’, happened to win the race. Immediately afterward one of the gentleman-planters of Santa Cruz went over to Porto Rico to purchase a first-class race-horse with which to make certain that the obi horse should be beaten at the Easter races. The new horse won his race against the ‘doctored’ horse, and what gave promise of a recrudescence of black African magic on this island of Uncle Sam’s newest colony, the Virgin Islands, died a natural death.
Obi bottles hanging on fruit trees, particularly those which bear the nutritious avocado pear, are common sights in the West Indies. These are ordinary bottles, ornamented weirdly with seeds, bits of string, scraps of red flannel, etc. These obi bottles are usually effective deterrents against theft of the ripening fruit. They are tabu signs, which, if disturbed, will arouse the malicious anger of Jumbee!
Of course only the black people use magic, although belief in it is not wholly confined to the ignorant black population of those jewel-like islands which form the sweeping northern boundary of the Caribbean Sea. There is something weirdly approaching the ‘sacramental’ about the West Indian magical practices. Here is a perverted application of the principle of the outward and visible being bound up with the inwardness – the ‘spirituality’ – of affairs. The invisible creation of God, as the black African West Indian sees the matter, may be either good or evil – like the visible creation – and may be invoked and even compelled. The West Indian hills are full of this magic – obi (obeah). It is part of the very atmosphere breathed by West Indians. The black shadow of obeah and voodoo (‘bad’ magic, i.e., deleterious) lies, a great cloud, over the minds of the blacks, once, of course, the slave-population of these incredibly fruitful and lovely isles.
‘T’ank Gahd it drap!’ A bit of food has fallen from the hand in eating. It means that Jumbee wants that bit of food – is favoring the eater. Therefore he thanks God for Jumbee’s favor, a characteristic anomaly.
Cabin doors are carefully closed at nightfall, lest Jumbee plague the sleepers. It is better to swelter through an airless night than to risk Jumbee’s pranks or malice. ‘Jumbee,’ so visitors may be assured, ‘was invented by the old planters to keep the blacks indoors after nightfall.’ Belief in him seems nearly universal through the islands. In the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he is ‘Zombi’, a close philological relative. Probably Jumbee originated on the African west coast, in the hinterlands all the way from Dakar to the Congo Basin. He is one of the most important personages in the West Indies. He is a kind of demon – any kind. The term is generic. On Martinique and elsewhere among French-speaking Negroes, one of his varieties is the ‘Zomblesse’. A Zomblesse is half man (or woman), half demon, a person able, like Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet, to shed his skin, hang it on a nail, and go out marauding after nightfall when the tropic dark ushers in the myrmidons of Eblis, to plague Ham’s sons. Finding and salting the skin renders the discoverer immune from any subsequent injury from that particular Zomblesse.
On the doors of Negro cabins ‘in the country’, i.e., outside the towns, crosses may be seen, much like those the Hebrews made with the blood of the Passover lamb. This is ‘to keep out de wolf’. The werewolf, especially inimical to prospective mothers, may also be kept out by placing sand on the cabin roof, since the marauder must, by the nature of his being, pause to count the grains before proceeding to tear up the roof. This is ‘wolf curiosity’, and that is almost an epithet! All the usual characteristics of the werewolf are also present in the West Indian variety.
There is ‘canicanthropy’ as well as lycanthropy extant. The central figure of this belief takes the form of a little black woman who transforms herself into a little white dog, which bounds up steps. Touching the dog with any part of the body is certain, immediate death. A blow from a stick will turn the dog, which increases in size and fierceness with every step upward, and then the little old woman may be heard pattering away howling with the pain of the blow.
Under certain ancient tamarinds and up sundry canefield ranges lurks the dread Sow with Seven Pigs. It is a dreadful portent if these run across the path of a late-returning reveller.
Many varieties of West Indian obi cannot be described, and these include not the least interesting from the viewpoint of the ethnologist. In them, definite phobias are invoked, more or less successfully. It is a question of beliefs, ‘les ideés fixes’.
‘Snake-Cut’ (recently described in Harper’s Magazine by an eyewitness) is still practised in the Guiana hinterlands, though I think it is unknown in the West India Islands proper. There back of French, British and Dutch Guiana, is a little transplanted Africa, and Africa changeth not! In the police court at Frederiksted, Virgin Islands, in October, 1925, before the late Justice J. L. Curry, a case of slander was tried. One old woman had entitled another, ‘to me face, Yer Honor!’ a ‘wuthless old Cartagène!’ That means ‘a Carthaginian’, i.e., a pirate, a marauder. It was Cato the Elder who enunciated ‘delenda est Carthago’ so insistently before his confrères in the Roman Senate, in the second century, B.C. But to this day black West Indians call each other ‘Carthaginians’ when they desire denunciatory emphasis. Carthage was an African seaport!
Readers of William Palgrave’s Ulysses, which is a more profitable book than James Joyce’s similarly entitled obscenities, will note that Queen Victoria’s consul-general at St Thomas during part of Mr Seitz’s Dreadful Decade has nothing to say about the Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands) though he gives very full accounts of his various other appointments in the British consular service. The fact is that Palgrave, who had published in the Corn-hill Magazine certain animadversions on the ways of St Thomas society, was literally driven out by a song made by the blacks about him during their spring ‘magicking’ in the hills back of the town:
Weelum Palgrave is a cha-cha, bal’hoo;
He is a kind of a-half-a-Jew!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Him go back to Trebizond.
He did! There had been certainty – hypnotism – ‘put’ into that silly little song, which contains delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface, which penetrated Her Britannic Majesty’s consul-general’s head and literally drove him out, so that St Thomas society was rid of its gadfly.
Love-philtres, curative ‘simples’ made from common West Indian herbs, and ‘charms’ of every description are in common, everyday use among the blacks, as well as the practices deriving from all the usual superstitions. Many authentic cures are recorded, for obi means both good and bad magic, obeah being, strictly, the good or curative variety.
Next to interior Africa, Haiti is probably the most magic-infested place in the world. There even the continental, European-educated intellectuals appear to believe in magic, and Haiti has always labored under the dead weight of these beliefs. It is not uncommon for a qualified physician to be called in and requested to demonstrate on a cadaver by means of a bodkin thrust through the heart that the dead person actually is dead. The belief back of this practice is in the magic of being ‘near-dead’. This state is attributed to some enemy or to the papaloi (witch-doctor) himself, who will, after the obsequies, dig up the ‘dead’ person, restore animation, and hold him in slavery for the rest of his life. Slavery is the bugaboo of which all West Indian blacks stand in fear.
A ‘toof from a dead’ is the equivalent of the American rabbit’s foot. Armed with this trophy a gambler is supposed to be consistently lucky. Having a dead man’s hand in the possession renders a thief more bold, or immune to capture, or even invisible! Various other members of the human body are believed to possess magical properties. A piece of string is often tied about a great-toe to cause the toe to ‘see’, and so prevent stumbling. The psychology here is simple and really practicable. The person who devoutly, unquestionably, believes that his toe can be made to see, will usually correct automatically a propensity to stumble.
Under the mental burden of these characteristic superstitions the blacks of the West Indies live continuously. It is a part, and a very important part, of their lives. It is only too frequently concealed beneath the honest piety of primitive people, their genuine religious conviction and the regular practice of their religion.
In the minds of these simple people there is being waged always a silent, desperate battle between ‘Gahd’ and His good angels, and the powers of darkness. This is no dry theological belief, of the sort ordinarily shelved in the minds of persons preoccupied otherwise by daily affairs, and with scant inclination to consider the matters of the spirit, whether good or evil. It is, rather, the literal condition under which ordinary life is lived. In the West Indies God and Satan are fighting out the destiny of mankind hand to hand, and the strange echoes of that desperate, incessant conflict resound in the preoccupied minds of the Negroes. In the daytime, under the glorious, reassuring sunlight of the Antilles, God reigns, in the minds of a grave but happy and carefree people. But after nightfall, even under the Caribbean moon, which seems twice as large and twice as near as the American moon, the evil powers come forth from their lurking dens variously to plague the children of Ham, accursed with a lingering, nameless fear – because their ancestor once dared to be so bold as to break a commandment and laugh at Noah, his father.
Jumbee
and other Voodoo Tales
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 42