Rubedo - Artigos

Aphrodite Goes to Haiti

Jay Livernois

Erzulie is the Haitian Aphrodite, the “voodoo” goddess of love, so I would like to begin by giving a brief description of what “voodoo” is, although my real subject has more to do with Christianity and its constant whitening not only of Aphrodite but of sex itself.

“Voodoo” or vaudun, as it is known in Haitian Creole, is a living polytheistic religion, originating and primarily practiced in Haiti, although, because of the Haitian boat people Diaspora, vaudun ceremonies are now regularly performed in New York, Miami, Montreal, and other fortunate places. It is a syncretic religion made up of elements from West African animism, Amerindian beliefs from the Caribbean basin, French Roman Catholicism, and Masonic symbolism. Vaudun has a complete mythological pantheon whose gods and goddesses are called loas or mystères. Like Greek and Roman mythologies, there are deities for all the archetypes—for war, Ogoun; for the sea, Agwe; for death, Ghede; for fresh water, Simbi; the Haitian Hermes is called Legba, and so on.

These major goddesses and gods are called the Grand Mystères of vaudun. Additionally though, there are literally hundreds of less powerful mystères or loas in vaudun that are either forces connected to specific places, family ancestors, deified heroes from Haitian history, or a subtle variation of a Grand Mystère.

A priest in the vaudun religion is called a houngan, and a priestess is called a mambo. The church-like temple where a houngan or mambo conducts a vaudun ceremony is a houmfor. Houmfors have altars, and like Christian churches, they have chapels and adjacent rooms. But unlike contemporary churches, houmfors sometimes have areas outside to keep sacrificial animals used in ceremonies. Houmfors are usually brightly painted with the images and symbols of loas, and the focus of a houmfor is the peristyle. It is an empty, enclosed, public space, which is usually found in the houmfor’s center. In the middle of the peristyle is a pole, called a poteau mitan, down which the loas descend during a ceremony.

The most important part of vaudun belief, and the high point of a ceremony, is the moment of possession. This happens when a loa descends into the peristyle down the poteau mitan and possesses the houngan or mambo, one of their assistants, an active participant, or maybe even a spectator. Through a combination of ritual drumming, singing, prayers, and the overall ambiance of a houmfor during a ceremony, possession occurs. One important aspect of the houmfor ceremony is that the floor of the peristyle is decorated with a symbol, called a vever, of whatever loa is being invoked. It is drawn on the floor using either chalk, corn meal, or flour, and it gets erased in the course of the ceremony due to the many feet walking over it.

In vaudun when a person becomes possessed during a ceremony, it is said that he or she has been “mounted.” The person possessed is seen as a horse, the cheval, of the loa. And it is imagined that the person possessed is being ridden by the loa in the course of the possession.

A possessed person usually serves an oracular role in the ceremony. The loa, speaking through the possessed person, is asked questions, for help, or protection. Yet sometimes, instead of just providing knowledge to the vaudunists during a ceremony, a loa bestows power on someone present or cures an illness.

The actual act of possession has been probably best described by Maya Deren in the final chapter of her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren was a vaudun initiate and had the experience of at least once being possessed by Erzulie during a ceremony. She says the feeling of possession is like being in a “white darkness.” Deren relates that when she first began to notice that she was being possessed, her left side became stiff, and her left foot stuck to the ground. After noticing these sensations, she did not remember anything more. But for others who have experienced possession, it seems to occur suddenly, and they often feel as if they have just been hit in the neck. Sometimes they faint and fall over seemingly blown down by a strong wind. This possession and its oracle-like function are perhaps the most fascinating thing about vaudun from an archaic perspective, after of course, its mythology, which has provided a unique inspiration for the multicolored art and culture of Haiti.

But why present the Caribbean Haitian goddess of love, Erzulie, at a festival in the south of France, in the ancient Roman territory of Gallia Narbonensis, in the romantic province of Languedoc, the place of origin of the medieval courts of love, and the birthplace of the dark love of de Sade? Certainly not because she adds a multi-cultural aspect to this conference, or because Haiti and its mythology are exotic and primitive, and I want to add some sophistication to my merely being an American descended from English religious fanatics (Puritans) and French-Canadian outlaws. It is of course appropriate to bring Erzulie here because Haiti is, overtly, a francophone country, and this is France, and because André Breton, Pierre Mabille, and André Malraux, those high priests of modernism, “discovered” Haitian art and culture, and because their modernist visions were so informed by what eurocentrism terms African primitivism.

But the real reason I want to talk about Erzulie here stems from the controversies that arose and almost consumed the last “Myth and Theatre Festival” at Villeneuve-lez-Avignon in 1991. These controversies were centered on the different interpretations of the ancient world. I do not have a problem with differing interpretations and fantasies of what classical culture was like per se, whether they are from Marxist sociologists, Freudian art historians, French semioticians, or feminists reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess for the first time. But when these interpretations exclude other fictions, for political and (usually unconscious) religious reasons, a fundamentalist monotheism breaks out, as we saw here in 1991. The intellectual atmosphere at the last festival felt close to what I imagine has produced the situation in the Balkans and has led to Europe’s strange impotence in the face of Serbian and Croatian Christians killing masses of Bosnian Moslems. At this point it is especially good to remember that there is a continual and relentless persecution (including the killing) of vaudunists in Haiti by Christians, often recent fundamentalist converts, whose psychological intolerance of polytheism insists on destroying Haiti’s pagan culture.

Ironically many people at these “Myth and Theater” conferences run around believing they are some kind of “born again pagans” or are intellectual or psychological polytheists, or they think they can literally identify with a goddess (usually expressed as the goddess within), or can now express their pagan “wild man,” and they feel that they are spiritually part of a “New Age.” Of course religiously they cannot be anything more than apostates or syncretists given the Christian culture that they are born into and the pervasiveness of that culture. We do not live in a polytheistic world or culture, no matter how much we would like to think so, and we clearly have a difficult time imagining what European culture and religion was like two thousand years ago when polytheism was actually still alive. Consciously or unconsciously we remain monotheists because of the larger cultural context we find ourselves in. Even archetypal psychology, the most intelligently polytheistic of modern psychologies, comes out of a Jungian psychology heavily influenced if not unconsciously dominated by Protestant transcendental theology. Archetypal psychology itself admits to being Jewish and Christian, besides polytheistic, but it really has little choice in the matter.

This Christian monotheism is not just in our heads, it is in our bodies. This fact became all too clear to me when I saw the restored ancient bronze statues of Riace displayed in Florence in the Spring of 1981. The now famous bronze bodies of the two male warriors are beautiful and striking, although not perfect or idealized. However they contrasted dramatically with the bodies of the people in the museum audience looking at the statues. The people had terrible posture with hunched shoulders, curved backs, and no musculature (read European intellectuals). There were also many people who were grossly fat or paunchy with apparently no life, no lust in them. The crowd seemed like a collection of physical grotesques. The amazing thing was that this group of people was made up almost entirely of Florentine Italians—no American or German or English tourists (in case there are any Italians reading this who want to explain away this observation in the usual manner), and I was seeing this in Italy, the land of la bella figura, and in Florence, the city of the Renaissance. I asked the Italian I was with what had happened to the people of Italy in the last two thousand years to bring about such a shocking difference between the gorgeous statues before me and the ugly crowd. She unhesitatingly replied that Christianity had tragically broken the backs and bodies of the Italian people over the last two thousand years.

There is of course another place besides our heads and bodies where this Christian monotheism thrives, and this is in our souls. When we imagine the ancient polytheistic world of our ancestors, we always imagine it as a world of white marble classicism. Our fantasies have been formed by art museums full of age-bleached artifacts like the Elgin marbles or the Venus de Milo; or by Hollywood “sandal flicks,” which almost always end with the hope of Christianity looming on the screen to save us from Roman slavery, injustice, and orgy rape; or by the bloodless pedantry of classicists who in our schools read mythology as a primitive superstition and do not really believe in the power of their own material.

In point of fact ancient statues were not just white marble but were painted with bright colors, adorned with gold, silver, and gems. They often had human hair, were clothed as well as naked, and had magical talismans either fixed to them, hung on them, or inserted inside secret caches. Worshippers sometimes even had sex with the statues, especially with statues of Aphrodite and with certain phallocentric gods like the Roman bedroom deity Mutunus Tutunus. Blood and/or vegetal sacrifices were made to all of them, and in such quantities that when it was warm, ancient temples would become covered with flies; the smell of the temples in the summer must have been somewhat unpleasant. I mention this only to point out how far we are from a living sense of polytheism, and how our museum-based imagining of it, because of Christianity, has so little to do with what probably went on in the ancient world.

Haiti is thus enormously important and enriching to the over-all culture of the world today. Erzulie and the other gods and goddesses of that island make up a living polytheistic culture, though for how much longer cannot be said given the present assault on vaudun by Christian fanatics. In Haiti we can see how a polytheism works, and by studying its practice, instead of smashing it, perhaps even get a better sense of how the ancient world worked. From Haiti we may even get a better insight into the goddess-archetype of love as she works through us.

At this point I would like to introduce—as a further challenge to you, and to show you how stuck I believe we all still are on these subjects—an account of a vaudun ceremony from a book, Voodoo Fire in Haiti, written by Richard Loederer, a German, in 1935. His whole sense of what he sees is informed by European monotheistic culture (which is still basically ours today) that demonizes anything other than a single, transcendent conception of God. I would like to point out particularly the demonic yet seductive atmosphere of death and eros as described by the author. Loederer writes:

As we rode through the night the drums were beating again—but with a new rhythm that I had never heard before. I was keyed up to a pitch of perspiring excitement, fearing what was to come and yet unwilling to turn back. We were about to participate in a monstrous performance, an orgy which not one white man in a million has ever seen. Tonight was a Voodoo Fire, and we were to be present.

I shivered as I rode along. I was horribly afraid; afraid of the night, afraid of the menacing drums, and above all, afraid of seeing too much.

The path climbed upward amongst the jagged hills. Below us lay the town and, far off, the sea, glittering in the moonlight. It was a warm night, yet the pale rays of the moon cast a chill aura of malignant evil over the scene. We rode through a cemetery where the whitewashed tombstones flitted past like serried ranks of ghosts, then the dark shape of trees rose up again on either side, stretching their gnarled branches in our way.

And all the while the hollow booming of the drums rang in our ears; now nearer, now further off, rising and falling in subtle cadences... The drums were calling, they drugged the will until all resistance died. I realized with impotent horror that it was impossible to turn back; the power of the drums was too great.

Suddenly we emerged into a wide clearing. In the middle was a huge fire and round it were at least two hundred negroes and negresses...

To the left of the fire a row of stakes had been driven into the ground. Fixed horizontally across them at the height of a man’s head were crossbars from which depended five long conical drums. A gigantic naked negro stood in front of each, working like a fiend. Two of the men used short wooden sticks but the other three evoked a peculiar rhythm by gliding their fingers and palms over the tightly stretched goatskins. The drums responded to the efforts of these sweating blacks with a shattering resonance of sound.

Suddenly a negress wearing a white chemise and a scarlet sash stood up. It was the Mamaloi...

Backwards and forwards danced the Mamaloi. In and out between the rows of squatting figures. Her eyes were fixed in a rigid sightless stare and the sweat poured down her body. Saliva ran from her mouth, trickling down her neck and between her breasts. She approached the fire...

A violent fit of trembling shook the woman. It was as if a demon lover had taken possession of her and were exploring her limbs to their very extremities. Someone handed her a black cock which she raised high above her head. The scene was diabolical. There stood the naked negress, her sweat-streaked body glistening in the ruddy firelight, and at arm’s length she held a terrified black cock, the very symbol of Satan, squawking and flapping its wings, while the feathers flew in all directions. An awful sickness gripped me. I felt as if I were looking into the very depths of evil. The thunder of the drums grew to an avalanche of deafening reverberations.

Slowly the body of the Mamaloi relaxed from its rigid posture. She began to turn; faster—faster—faster. Like a madman she spun round on her toes. She swung the cock now only by its legs and as it flew through the air in dizzy circles it spread its wings wide in the last convulsions of death. As though carried through the air by the beating pinions the negress whirled forwards in frantic ecstasy. The drums rose to their shattering finale, the woman stopped motionless, and then—a miracle—the dying cock twisted its neck convulsively and crowed—crowed loud and raucous into the surrounding night. It was the final touch of horror. (265-71)

From this account it sounds like Loederer witnessed a ceremony to either Erzulie or to Damballah, the Haitian ambisexual fertility god. Unfortunately the version is so sensationalized and lacking in important details, it is hard to tell exactly what he saw—that is, if Loederer actually went to a ceremony at all. It is possible he just made the account up. In any event what we clearly have here is the combination of terror and erotic fascination that the darkness in polytheism holds for Christian eyes; like Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, going up the Congo with his trading boat full of Christian culture, only to die in what is for him its erotic “heart of darkness,” and crying out at the end of his long, strange trip, “The horror, the horror.”

So often when we talk or write about Aphrodite, we see her monotheistically, filled with the white marble and pious rhetoric of wholeness and union. I see this as a clear signal that we are profoundly misreading Aphrodite. Look at what a one-sided monotheistic interpretation she gets in a book many people love, The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford:

By imagining Aphrodite at the very beginning of the process of creation when Heaven and Earth are parted—as the Orphic myth does with Eros—love is drawn in the greater perspective of humanity’s longing for reunion with the whole. Aphrodite is no longer the one Great Mother Goddess who is the origin of all things, but, as daughter of the sea, she is the child of the beginning. Consequently, she is the figure who, in the likeness of the original goddess, brings back together the separate forms of her creation. In this sense Aphrodite is “born” when people joyfully remember, as a distinct and sacred reality, the bonds that exist between human beings and animals and, indeed, the whole of nature. The myth proposes that this happens through love. Union is then reunion, for love that begets life resounds with the mystery of life itself. (353)

Almost twenty years earlier the great Jungian classicist, Karl Kerenyi, expressed a similar monotheistic vision of Aphrodite in his book on the Goddesses of Sun and Moon. He wrote:

The images of Anadyomene rising up out of the depths of the sea, is the transparent purity of complete union become visible. Through Aphrodite the whole world becomes pellucid and thus so brilliant and smiling, because in her the opposites are dissolved into unity, and this unity reveals to every living being the possibility of the same unproblematic—using the current adjective, though said in a more Greek way it would be calm-sealike—situation. (58)

The problem with both of these visions of Aphrodite is that there is no dark side or shadow to the goddess. In a living polytheistic system, a goddess or god holds both good and bad attributes at the same time. In a monotheistic system, a goddess or god does not carry any evil or darkness; it is split off. Christ has no shadow, at least for Christians, but the Devil then comes into existence.

Kerenyi says of Aphrodite, “Under the sign of Aphrodite we are not dealing with something heavy and darkly earthy, with an unconscious dissolution into a state of fusion, but rather with something bright and lucid” (58). Baring and Cashford also see no shadow to Aphrodite. They write, “As an image arising in the human heart, Aphrodite comes alive when the animal nature of humanity is experienced as divine. She is there whenever life sparkles with beauty and joy” (351).

The problem with all this sweetness and light is that polytheistically goddesses and gods not only carry shadow, but we often contact them—and they often contact us—most vitally through shadow. It is as daimon, demon, symptom, madness, disease—and what the Apostle to the pagans, St. Paul, so contemptuously called porneia—that the pagan goddesses and gods press themselves on us, move in, by, and through our souls. Without shadow, demons, and porneia (the dark erotic images), there are really no goddesses or gods moving in soul, just white marble concepts that we manipulate like medieval scholastics or modern scientists. One only has to look at the classical myths of Aphrodite to see this shadow. Yet if one is seduced into a vision of Aphrodite as an example of wholeness and union, it disappears.

What is Aphrodite’s shadow? Well to begin with, Aphrodite is born out of the violent act of the castration of her father, Kronos, which is euphemistically and strangely described as a “harvest” (353) by Baring and Cashford. She also has the power to make men impotent which can be seen as a non-surgical form of castration. This is clearly illustrated in the Homeric Hymns where a disguised Aphrodite seduces Anchises. After they make love, she reveals her goddess within, and Anchises begs Aphrodite not to make him forever impotent.

...and begging her, he spoke these words: “Right then when I first saw you with my eyes, goddess, I knew you were divine. But you didn’t speak honestly to me. Now at your knees I implore you, in the name of Zeus who carries the aegis, don’t permit me to live impotent among men from now on. Pity me. For a man who sleeps with immortal goddesses loses his potency.

(“The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (I)” trans. Charles Boer)

More than just a castrator in this myth, Aphrodite has lied to and deceived Anchises to get him to fuck her and make her pregnant (with Aeneas). She then proceeds to destroy his life, the life of his family, and his country by bringing about the Trojan War. Talk about fatal attraction!

Contrary to the willful blindness of contemporary goddess mythographers, Aphrodite even had an Underworld connection in the ancient world which gave further depth to “the Golden One.” At Delphi an Aphrodite of the graves was worshipped. Prostitutes who specialized in graveyard locales, nicknamed “butterflies” in the ancient world, were especially fond of this cult at Delphi.

In addition some of Aphrodite’s surviving epithets hint at the shadow we seem no longer able to see. She was known as Melaina and Melainis, “the black one,” and Skotia, “the dark one.” She was also called Androphonos, “Killer of Men,” Anosia, “the Unholy,” Tymborychos, “the Gravedigger” and Epitymbidia, “she upon the graves.” These names point to Love’s orgasmic and tortuous connection with Death and the dead. What can be darker or more chthonic than this?

Here is where Erzulie and vaudun are so helpful. The goddesses and gods of Haiti have not lost their dark sides like our classical ones, because polytheism is still alive there. As a result Erzulie is not only the Haitian goddess of love, but the goddess of murderous jealousy as well, of sex for pleasure with absolutely no connection to fertility, and the goddess of a kind of wasteful luxury (horrific when seen from a Protestant perspective but understandable in pagan and Catholic Haiti). Erzulie is also portrayed as a bimbo, a slut, and a gold-digger. She whines and complains that she is not waited on enough, and that she is not loved enough. Erzulie cries, can go into rages, and be thrown into despair. She can be promiscuous yet demand total faithfulness from her multiple lovers. She can never make up her mind as to what to wear or eat or drink. In short, Erzulie can be, and is, wonderfully irrational, neurotic, and impossible, just like so much of the experience of love.

For Haitians, as the goddess of love, she is not just “beauty and joy” or “union and reunion.” That would be ridiculously too simple. For in vaudun, Erzulie, like all the Haitian loas, carries the demonic. She is as differentiated as love is itself, with all of its beauty, ugliness, terror, and shadow.

In vaudun, there is not just one manifestation of Erzulie, not just one goddess of love, as our monotheistic imaginations would have there be only one Aphrodite today. For Haitians, the fragmentation, differentiation, and sometimes even conflation of a goddess or god echoes their vitality. So in vaudun there is Erzulie Freda Dahomey, Maitresse, Gran Erzulie (her grandmotherly version), Erzulie Dantor, Erzulie Ze-rouge (red-eyed and jealous), Erzulie Toro (bullish and butch-like), Erzulie Mapian (louse-like and biting), Erzulie La Belle Venus, Erzulie Severine Belle-Femme (her My Fair Lady incarnation), Erzulie Dos-bas (meaning lower back, an Erzulie “always on her back”), La Sirene Erzulie, and La Baleine Erzulie (the whale-like Erzulie “for those who like their lovers big”).

Here in La Chartreuse I present to you these dark and different images of Erzulie from the living polytheistic tradition of Haiti not for polemic or analysis—please—but as another way of seeing our own classical Aphrodite. I do not want to bury Aphrodite in images of Erzulie but through them to praise her, darkness and all.