by Wade Davis
In Haiti, there are literally dozens of methods, and that is perhaps why anthropologists call the entire phenomenon voodoo death.
Voodoo death has been so commonly reported, and so frequently documented and verified by scientific observers, that its existence is no longer a matter of debate. Of course, no scientist would believe that there is a direct causal relationship between the death of the victim and, for example, the physical act of pointing a bone. Clearly it is the victim’s mind that mediates the sorcerer’s curse and the fatal outcome. What remains to be discovered is the mechanism that actually allows this to occur. Three possible explanations have been offered.
The first scientists seriously to consider the phenomenon of voodoo death were not anthropologists but physicians, many of them affected by the peculiar cases they witnessed on the battlefields of Europe during the First World War. In the nightmare of despair and death on the Western Front, certain traumatized soldiers who had not suffered any wound inexplicably died of shock, a medical disorder normally brought about by a critical drop in blood pressure due to excessive bleeding. When these physicians later became familiar with cases of voodoo death, they saw a connection. They suggested that individuals terrified by a magic spell suffered, like the soldiers, from an over-stimulation of the sympathetic-adrenal system, which led to a form of fatal shock. Fear, in other words, could initiate actual physiological changes that quite literally led to death.
Many anthropologists, less familiar with the complex workings of the autonomic nervous system, have considered voodoo death as a psychological process, emphasizing the power of suggestion. If faith can heal, they argue, fear can kill. Psychologists have studied, for example, something that most of us take for granted—that the likelihood of becoming ill or even dying depends to a large extent on our frame of mind. Feelings of depression, hopelessness, or despair do not cause diseases, but somehow they make us vulnerable. Loneliness would seem hardly a fatal affliction, yet a disproportionate number of spouses die in the first year after the death of their mates. Psychologists label this the “giving up/given up complex.” According to this view, the victim of voodoo death becomes caught in a vicious cycle of belief that indirectly kills him, perhaps, as some suggest, by making his body susceptible to pathogenic disease. His psychological state can be imagined. He is doomed to die by a malevolent curse that both he and all those around him deeply believe in. He becomes despondent, anxious, and fearful. His resignation is both recognized and expected by other members of his society. They join him in speculating how long he may survive, or who is the source of the curse. And then a strange thing happens. A consensus is reached that the end is near, and his friends and family retreat as from the smell of death. They return, but only to wail and chant over the body of this person they consider already dead. Physically the victim still lives; psychologically he is dying; socially he is already dead.
A third group, also anthropologists, agree with this perspective but carry it further by suggesting an actual mechanism to account for physical death. They point out that in many cases the victim of voodoo death is not merely a benign presence but, having by definition crossed into the realm of the spirits, has become an actual threat that must be removed. And in the case of the Australian aborigines, this is precisely what happens. Weakened by the long ordeal, the victim of sorcery receives no relief from even his closest relatives. On the contrary, these former supporters actually take food and water away, on the theory that a dead person has no need for either and with the motive, as one physician was told, “if real close up finish, take water away so spirit goes.” In the deserts of Australia, where the daytime temperatures average over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, death by dehydration occurs in about twenty-four hours.
Not all cases of voodoo death are as clearly explicable as these examples reported from Australia, where because of the harsh climate a relatively simple act by the kin eliminates the victim’s life supports. More usual in voodoo death, but again more enigmatic, the victim dies despite the fact that his family offers succor.
All that can be ascertained is that voodoo death occurs, and that as a process it involves a number of complementary factors. Fear probably does initiate physiological changes. Certainly it makes the victim psychologically vulnerable, and this in turn affects the physical health. Neurophysiologists still do not fully understand the process, though the response of the victim’s family and society would seem inevitably to influence both his psychological and his physical well-being. So, while a universal mechanism to account for voodoo death has not been identified, the basic assumption is clear. As one researcher has put it, the brain has the power to kill or maim the body that bears it.
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The metamorphosis of Clairvius Narcisse from human to zombi was a very special instance of voodoo death. A sorcerer’s spell initiated a long process that exploited the victim’s greatest fears, mobilized the reinforcing beliefs of the community, and finally led to actual death. To the Haitian peasants Narcisse really did die, and what was magically taken from the ground was no longer a human being. Like many sorcerers around the world, the bokor that spun his death had a prop—in this case an ingenious poison that served as a template upon which the victim’s worst fears might be amplified ten thousand times. Still, in the end, it was not the powder that sealed Narcisse’s fate, it was his own mind.
Consider for a moment what he went through. As a Haitian peasant he had been socialized since childhood to believe in the reality of the living dead. This conviction had been enforced throughout his life by both a complex body of folklore and, more importantly, the direct testimony of friends and family; in Haiti virtually everyone has a vivid zombi tale to tell. For Narcisse, a zombi was a being without will, on the very frontier of the natural world, an entity that could manifest itself as either spirit or human. Zombis do not speak, cannot fend for themselves, do not even know their names. Their fate is enslavement. Yet given the availability of cheap labor, there would seem to be no economic incentive to create a force of indentured service. Rather, given the colonial history, the concept of enslavement implies that the peasant fears and the zombi suffers a fate that is literally worse than death—the loss of physical liberty that is slavery, and the sacrifice of personal autonomy implied by the loss of identity. Critically, for Narcisse as for all Haitian peasants, the fear is not of being harmed by zombis, but rather of becoming one. And it is to prevent such a horrid fate that the relatives of the dead may reluctantly mutilate the corpse if there is any suspicion of foul play. Unless, of course, the family itself was involved in the zombification.
Not only did Narcisse believe in zombis, he undoubtedly was aware of how and why they were created. When his world began to close in on him, he was already personally isolated. Within his lakou he had been ostracized because of his antisocial behavior; within his own family he was actively engaged in a dispute with his brother over the question of the right to sell heritable land. Eventually it was, by all accounts, that very brother who sold him to the bokor. Had Narcisse been in the right, and was zombified by his adversary without the support of the community, it is difficult to imagine that the brother would have been tolerated in the community for close to twenty years. But in fact he was, and even today Narcisse is not. In all likelihood, at the time of his demise, Narcisse had support from neither his immediate society nor his kin; his closest relatives may have been his greatest enemies. And since family members were involved, gossip and rumors undoubtedly took their toll, especially when he began to suffer physical symptoms that he had never known. Gradually as these symptoms got worse and worse, he would have realized that he had become a victim of sorcery. And more than likely he knew why.
His symptoms were real and concrete, and they worsened. He consulted houngan, but they did nothing. By now desperate, he entered the alien environment of the Schweitzer Hospital, knowing something the doctors did not. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and then something more extraordinary occur
red. We have noted the devastating impact that social death has on victims of voodoo death throughout the world. The Haitian model takes this one step further. Narcisse was actually pronounced dead in a hospital by Western-trained physicians. More incredibly, from the known actions of the toxins in the poison, and from his own testimony, there is every reason to believe that he remained conscious for much of the time. He actually heard himself pronounced dead, was aware of his sister’s weeping, saw the sheet lifted over his face. Like the Japanese victims of tetrodotoxin, he strove desperately to communicate, but with the paralytic poison, he found it impossible.
Then Narcisse entered another realm. Having caused such a dramatic, virtually complete, reduction in metabolic rate, the poison took its victim quite literally to the frontier of death. Indeed, it very nearly killed him … as it may have killed many others. His symptoms remained consistent, yet at one point there seems to have been a qualitative change. Perhaps not surprisingly, the advanced symptoms of known tetrodotoxin poisoning merge with those of what Western physicians have termed the autoscopic near-death experience (NDE). Recall once again his description. He sensed that he was floating above his body at all times. When they placed him in the cemetery, he remained above his tomb, still floating, constantly aware of everything that was going on. He was content, he was without fear. He sensed that his soul was about to take a great journey, and it did travel, he insisted, taking in great passages over the land, timeless passages, immaterial yet powerfully real. His travels were multidimensional, yet they always returned him to the gravesite. His notion of time was lost. His tomb was the only axis of his existence.
Strange things happen to us when we die, at least if we are to believe the word of those who come back. Those who have been close to death speak of an ineffable dimension where all intuitive sense of time is lost. Like a dreamscape, it is timeless, but unlike a dream it is impossibly real, a place of crystal awareness wherein the process of death is acknowledged as something positive, calm, even beautiful.
Like Narcisse, virtually every medical patient who has been to the frontier of death experiences a profound separation between his material body and an invisible, nonmaterial aspect of himself, one that often hovers above the flesh; and in nearly all cases the patient identifies not with the body, but with the spirit. An elderly woman who nearly died during severe complications following surgery in a Chicago hospital wrote her physician, “I was light, airy, and felt transparent.” Often patients distinctly remember floating above their bodies, looking down at their material selves. A cardiac patient noted, “I was going up slowly, like floating … I was looking from up, down … they were working the hell out of me.” Also typical is the amazement of a construction worker from Georgia following cardiac arrest: “I recognized me lying there … [it was] like looking at a dead worm or something. I didn’t have any desire to go back to it.” Sometimes survivors of autoscopic near-death experiences recall conversations between attending physicians and nurses. Often they describe their frustration at not being able to communicate with others physically present at their bedside. “I tried to say something,” one patient remembered, “but she [the nurse] didn’t say nothing … she was like looking at a movie screen that can’t talk back and that doesn’t recognize you’re there. I was the real one and she was unreal. That’s the way I felt.” Certain survivors describe an extraordinary ability to “travel” through space and time. “It was just a thought process,” one explains. “I felt like I could have thought myself anywhere I wanted to be instantly. I could do what I wanted to … it’s realer than here, really.”
And then, those who go through a near-death experience and survive share one thing in common: they all retain a distinct awareness that at one point their immaterial aspect returned to its physical body. It was at this moment, many remember, that they regained consciousness. In hospital patients, this often occurs instantaneously, coinciding with a particular resuscitative procedure. A cardiac patient responded to electric shock: “She [the nurse] picked up them shocker things … I seen my body flop like that … it seemed like I was up here and it grabbed me and my body, and forced it back, pushed it back.” Another experience ended with the sudden arrival of a loved one. The patient explained, “I was up at the ceiling…. Then when someone in the family came to the door and called … I was instantaneously back in my body.”
This, of course, is what Clairvius Narcisse remembers happening. One moment he was floating above his tomb, and then he heard someone call out. But for Narcisse, the voice did not come from a loved one, and when he returned to his body it was not in a hospital bed, it was in a coffin. And for him, the ordeal was only about to begin.
PART THREE
The Secret Societies
9
In Summer the Pilgrims Walk
“EVEN AS YOU SEE ME, I passed beneath the earth,” Marcel confided as we shared another drink in his small bedroom at the Eagle Bar. “It was the same powder that I gave you. It can cause one hundred and one ailments. Mine was a disease of heat. I sweated even in the ocean. It cooked my blood until my veins ran dry, and then it stole the breath from my lungs.” He was describing for me his own exposure to the poison.
There was some kind of disturbance in one of the rooms, and Marcel got up from the bed and slipped back into the bar. His place looked good. There was a new sign out front and a fresh coat of paint on most of the rooms. Rachel reached forward to fill my glass.
“Some party,” I said. The rum warmed my tongue and the back of my throat. Both of us were still damp with sweat. Marcel had been happy that we had come to see him as soon as I returned to Haiti, and when he’d found out that the powder had worked his excitement had spilled over into a celebration. One of his women had unlocked the Wurlitzer, and the place had become pretty wild. Marcel and Rachel had danced a mad salsa while I’d been swung around by the women and some of the men, and with the pounding jukebox and the sweltering summer heat, sweat had soon greased the concrete floor. Now things had settled down, but there was still a licentious air to the place, stronger than usual.
“Is it strange to be back?” Rachel asked me.
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s difficult to say. Sometimes when you travel a lot, the landscapes pile up so fast that you lose all sense of place.”
“And faces?”
“Yes.”
Rachel started fooling with the heel of one of the cheap shoes she always wore. “You know they say Marcel paid fifteen thousand dollars to get cured,” she said.
“Where’d he get that kind of money?”
“There used to be money. He worked the docks. Some kind of racket with the tourist boats. Marcel was a big Ton Ton and he had some position in the port.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Then he went too far. Too many beatings, too many in jail.”
“Where’d you pick up all this?”
“My uncle, mostly. He was the prefect.”
“I see.”
“Nobody thought that he’d live. They passed the powder, and for three days they thought he was dead. There was even a wake. His face was all bloated, and his belly swelled up, and my uncle said that if you pricked his skin, you didn’t find blood, you got water.”
Marcel returned bearing a noxious-looking bottle containing a thick, viscid liquid. “You see,” he said, “it still lives. This was my blood. When they sent the powder all the animals came into me and laid eggs. A cockroach came from my nose, and I passed two lizards from behind.”
“There was nothing you could do?”
“No. If your force is strong you can resist a coup l’aire, but the powder is different. If you’re wrong it gets you, if you’re right it gets you.”
“But how can they direct it at you alone?”
“The bones. It’s only the soul from the graveyard that has that power. That’s why the bones are so dangerous.”
“But you survived.”
“I passed through the hands of thirteen houngan. They drained all the bad blood from my foot. I am still not well. Look at my face. I live only because of the strength of the spirit that calls for me.”
Marcel recounted how there had been many treatments, but only the last had saved him. It had been administered by a mambo, a priestess in the Artibonite. On the critical night she bound his jaw, placed cotton in the nostrils, and dressed him in the clothing of the dead. His feet were tied, as were his hands, and he was laid in a narrow trough dug into the ground of the hounfour. A white sheet covered his entire body. A pierre tonnerre and the skulls of a human and a dog were placed on top of the sheet, the sucker of a banana plant beside him. Seven candles cradled in orange peels surrounded the “grave,” and calabashes rested by his head, on his abdomen, and at his feet. These three offerings, Marcel suggested, represented the sacred concepts of the crossroad, the cemetery, and Grans Bwa, the spirit of the forest. The mambo straddled the grave, and in a high-pitched wail she invoked Guede, the spirit of the dead. She took a living chicken and passed it slowly over his body, then broke each of the bird’s limbs to extract the death spirit from the corresponding limbs of the patient. Next she took the head of the chicken in her mouth and bit it off that she might touch Marcel with its blood. Marcel then felt the contents of the calabashes massaged into his skin, water splashed on his face, and hot oil and wax from the lamps applied to his chest. He heard the crack of the breaking water jar, and felt the pieces of hardened clay fall into the grave. Finally, still lying immobile in the ground, he counted seven handfuls of earth taken from the crossroads, the cemetery, and the forest landing on his shroud. The mambo’s sharp cry ordered him from the ground, and as the others hurriedly pushed in the loose dirt, two men tore Marcel from the grave. He was anointed again in blood, and spent the night in the sanctity of the temple.