The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  Vodoun is not an animistic religion, Max Beauvoir had told me. The believer does not endow natural objects with souls; they serve the loa, which by definition are the multiple expressions of God. There is Agwe, the spiritual sovereign of the sea, and there is Ogoun, the spirit of fire and the metallurgical elements. But there is also Erzulie, the goddess of love; Guede, the spirit of the dead; Legba, the spirit of communication between all spheres. The vodounist, in fact, honors hundreds of loa because he so sincerely recognizes all life, all material objects, and even abstract processes as the sacred expressions of God. Though God is the supreme force at the apex of the pantheon, he is distant, and it is with the loa that the Haitian interacts on a daily basis.

  The spirits live beneath the great water sharing their time between Haiti and the mythic homeland of Guinée. But they often choose to reside in places of great natural beauty. They rise from the bottom of the sea, inhabit the rich plains, and clamber down the rocky trails from the summits of the mountains. They dwell in the center of stones, the dampness of caves, the depth of sunken wells. The believer is drawn to these places as we are drawn to cathedrals. We do not worship the buildings; we go there to be in the presence of God. That is the spirit of the pilgrimage.

  Having bathed in the falls, I made my way to the mapou, and there among the buttresses and serpentine roots found shelter from the cold, damp wind. The roar of the water dominated all other sounds, but before long it fell away, leaving a welcome cushion of silence, the hollow tone one imagines deaf people hear all the time.

  There were two snakes, I was warned, one green and one black, that lived at the base of the tree. If so, they left me alone. From the edge of a fitful sleep, I sensed only the thick hide of the mapou on either side of my face, and beneath my hands the texture of root bark. I knew every structure within that tree, each vessel, each pore and trichome, the placement of each stamen, and the pathways of every drop of green blood. In botanical studies I had watched it dissected into a thousand or more parts until each one lay isolated, a separate hypothetical event, simple enough to be explained according to the rules of my training. This was the legacy of my science. Each of us chipping away at the world, doing our bit. But what was I to make of Loco, the spirit of vegetation, the one that gives the healing power to leaves? This was his home, and it seemed to me strangely alive and different suddenly, not a series of components but a single living entity, animated by faith.

  I caught a fingernail in the bark, and it sent chills up my back. I sat up abruptly. At my feet and all around the tree the pilgrims curled up like sheepdogs, their bones stiff and soaked in darkness. Around me in the crotch of other roots, I saw the faint glimmers of other penitents placing candles at altars that weren’t there when I lay down. Hands reached forward, pressing soft wax into a fissure in the smooth bark. The flames flickered and spat smoke and kept going out. Below us all, the sheer power of the falling water.

  I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn’t even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn’t have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

  Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologists different peoples develop it in different ways, and the distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

  Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something our ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The vodoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what’s more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

  Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coincidence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the vodounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

  For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What’s more, for most of us our basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition. Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough
infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.

  It was a lovely morning. The summit of the waterfall caught the first light, and as the earth moved the tips of the forest trees at the base of the ravine turned to copper. Birds spun in waves across the valley; scents too, from stoked fires, even through the mist and growing sounds, herbs and sweet woods burning in the limpid light of dawn. On all sides, like flowers, the pilgrims broke from sleep to take small drops of the sun. From the shadows I too emerged, only into a peculiar and wonderful anonymity that I had not known in Haiti up to now. In part it was my own exhaustion, but mostly it was the power of the place and the sheer exuberance of the people; for once a solitary and bedraggled blanc was of little interest. Asking no questions, having no past, I simply wandered, a silent witness to a sacred event unlike anything I had ever known.

  All morning the trail descending to the falls quivered with the mirage of pilgrims coming and going on foot. There was no order or routine to their arrival, but it was a constant stream—as many as fifteen thousand over the course of the three-day celebration—and the basin nestled into the side of the mountain swelled like a festive carnival tent to absorb everyone. It was to be a morning of joy; one saw it on the faces of the elfin children, the young city dandies leaping over the rocks like cats, the ragged peasants laughing derisively at a fat, preposterous government official. But for the sincere it was also a moment of purification and healing, one chance each year to partake of the power of the water, to bathe and drink, and to bottle a small sample of the cold, thin blood of the divine. Already on the long, stony trail that had brought them from Ville Bonheur they had paused at least once at the tree of Legba, the guardian of the crossroads, to light a candle to invoke his support. Now before entering the water, they gathered all around the periphery of the basin where the herbalists had set up their dusty stations, displaying sooty boxes, hunks of root, loose bags of mombin leaves, and tubs of water and herbs. Houngan and mambo spoke of magic done with dew, and tied brightly colored strings to barren young women, or around the plump bellies of matrons who, in time, would dangle the strings from wax stuck to the surface of the mapou, consecrated for the blessings of the gods. In the base of one of the buttresses, a young boy hung his head as he waited to be anointed by the mambo. To one side, a houngan massaged the breast of an old woman. Scattered among the long rows of holy men and women were the hawkers pitching food for the sacrifices, tin medallions, icons, and candles. A young operator content with his gods pulled out a game-board and dice and set up shop.

  One needed only to touch the water to feel its grace, and for some it was enough to dip in the shallow silvery pools, leaving their offerings of corn and rice and cassava in small piles. But most went directly to the cascades, women and men, old and young, baring their breasts and scrambling up the wet slippery bedrock that rose in a series of steps toward the base of the highest falls. At the lip of the escarpment the river forked twice, sending not one but three waterfalls plunging over a hundred feet. What was not lost in mist struck the rocks with tremendous force, dividing again into many smaller shoots, and each one of them in turn became a sanctuary for the pilgrims. The women removed their soiled clothes, casting them to the water, and stood, arms outstretched, beseeching the spirits. Their prayers were lost to the thunderous roar of the falls, the piercing shouts, and the screams of flocks of children. Everything stood in flux. No edge and no separation—the sounds and sights, the passions, the lush soaring vegetation, primeval and rare. Young men stood directly beneath the head of the falls; the force tore off the rest of their clothes and battered their numb bodies against the rocks, but still their hands clung.

  “Ayida Wedo!” someone called, his shout a whisper. It was true. Mist fell over the basin, and the water splintered the sunlight, leaving a rainbow arched across the entire face of the waterfall. It was the goddess of many colors, delicate and ephemeral, come to rejoice with her mate. Ayida Wedo the Rainbow and Damballah the Serpent, the father of the falling waters and the reservoir of all spiritual wisdom. Just to bathe in the cold, thin waters was to open oneself to Damballah, and already at the base of the waterfall, in the shadow of the rainbow, there were as many as a hundred pilgrims, mounted by the spirit, slithering across the wet rocks.

  In the beginning, it is said, there was only the Great Serpent, whose seven thousand coils lay beneath the earth, holding it in place that it might not fall into the abysmal sea. In time, the Serpent began to move, unleashing its undulating flesh, which rose slowly into a great spiral that enveloped the Universe. In the heavens, it released stars and all the celestial bodies; on earth, it brought forth Creation, winding its way through the molten slopes to carve rivers, which like veins became the channels through which flowed the essence of all life. In the searing heat it forged metals, and rising again into the sky it cast lightning bolts to the earth that gave birth to the sacred stones. Then it lay along the path of the sun and partook of its nature.

  Within its layered skin, the Serpent retained the spring of eternal life, and from the zenith it let go the waters that filled the rivers upon which the people would nurse. As the water struck the earth, the Rainbow arose, and the Serpent took her as his wife. Their love entwined them in a cosmic helix that arched across the heavens. In time their fusion gave birth to the spirit that animates blood. Women learned to filter this divine substance through their breasts to produce milk, just as men passed it through their testes to create semen. The Serpent and the Rainbow instructed women to remember these blessings once each month, and they taught men to damn the flow so that the belly might swell and bring forth new life. Then, as a final gift, they taught the people to partake of the blood as a sacrament, that they might become the spirit and embrace the wisdom of the Serpent.

  For the nonbeliever, there is something profoundly disturbing about spirit possession. Its power is raw, immediate, and undeniably real, devastating in a way to those of us who do not know our gods. To witness sane and in every regard respectable individuals experiencing direct rapport with the divine fills one with either fear, which finds its natural outlet in disbelief, or deep envy. The psychologists who have attempted to understand possession from a scientific perspective have tended to fall into the former category, and perhaps because of this they have come up with some bewildering conclusions, derived in part from quite unwarranted assumptions. For one, because the mystical frame of reference of the vodounist involves issues that cannot be approached by their calculus—the existence or nonexistence of spirits, for example—the actual beliefs of the individual experiencing possession are dismissed as externalities. To the believer, the dissociation of personality that characterizes possession is the hand of divine grace; to the psychologist it is but a symptom of an “overwhelming psychic disruption.” One prominent Haitian physician, acknowledging that possession occurs under strict parameters of ritual, nevertheless concluded that it was the result of “widespread pathology in the countryside which far from being the result of individual or social experience was related to the genetic character of the Haitian people,” a racial psychosis, as he put it elsewhere, of a people “living on nerves.” Even individuals otherwise sympathetic to vodoun have made extraordinary statements. Dr. Jean Price-Mars, one of the early intellectual champions of the religion, considered possession a behavior of “psychically disequilibrated persons with a mytho-maniacal constitution”; mythomaniacal being defined as “a conscious pathological tendency towards lying and the creation of imaginary fables.”

  These wordy explanations ring most hollow when they are applied to certain irrefutable physical attributes of the possessed. While recognizing, for example, the ability of the believer to place w
ith impunity his or her hands into boiling water, another respected Haitian medical authority noted that “primitives submit coldly to surgical operations without anesthesia that would plunge us into the most terrifying shock.” Rather tentatively he added that in asylums patients had been known to burn themselves and not notice even as the flesh fell away. What this well-meaning physician failed to note, among other things, was the perennial observation that the flesh of the possessed is not harmed.

  What is potentially destructive in these psychological interpretations is their inherent assumption that possession is abnormal behavior, a premise that anthropologists, to their credit, have irrefutably debunked. One ethnological survey of some 488 societies around the world identified possession of some form in 360, and possession marked by trance was present in over half the total sample (including, incidentally, our own). From the Delphic oracles of ancient Greece to the shaman of northern Eurasia, possession by a spirit has been accepted as a normal phenomenon that occurs when and where appropriate, and usually within the context of religious worship. Yet even the conclusions of the anthropologists amount to observations, not explanations. They have accurately characterized the phenomenon as involving some kind of separation, transformation, and reintegration of diverse aspects of the human psyche. And, to be sure, they have been correct in noting that to some extent spirit possession is a culturally learned and reinforced response that has a therapeutic value as a spiritual catharsis.

  Yet the central and disturbing questions remain. Why is it, for example, that the one possessed by the spirit in vodoun experiences total amnesia, yet still manifests the predictable and often complex behavior of the particular loa? For in Haiti, there is seldom any disagreement over the identities of the spirits. Legba is a weak old man, hobbling painfully and leaning on his crutch. Erzulie Freda is a queen, hopelessly demanding and vain. Ogoun has the warrior’s passion for fire and steel, usually brandishes a machete, and often handles glowing embers. And why is it that when Ogoun does pass the flames, the one possessed is not harmed? It was upon these unanswered questions that my logic wavered. There may, in fact, be a natural explanation for these extraordinary abilities, but if so it lies in regions of consciousness and mind/body interactions that Western psychiatry and medicine have scarcely begun to fathom. In the absence of a scientific explanation, and in the face of our own certain ignorance, it seems foolish to disregard the opinions of those who know possession best.