If you ask any handful of average Ball State University students what they know about Voodoo, you'll probably get responses about New Orleans, Voodoo dolls, zombies and rituals.
The reality of Voodoo isn't quite what we see in the movies, though, said Don Merten and James Nyce, two professors from Ball State University's anthropology department, but it's just as interesting.
Most Americans know very little about the Voodoo religion, Merten and Nyce said, and public perception of it has twisted into something only loosely based on the real practices of Voodoo followers.
Despite the misconceptions of the public, the facts about this religion are out there. Here is a basic outline of Voodoo's history, its traditions and what it means to you.
The History
Upon their arrival in Haiti and other West Indian islands, many slaves were baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, according to ReligiousTolerance.org, but because of a lack of Christian infrastructure in the area, most slaves continued to practice religious beliefs they had brought with them from Africa. This was the beginning of Voodoo.
The Voodoo religion, also commonly called Vodun or Vodoun (traceable to an African word meaning "spirit"), has roots in the modern West African countries of Togo, Benin and Nigeria.
The traditions brought from various peoples in Africa mixed with Catholic beliefs in the Americas, Merten said.
"It's synchronistic at two levels, both in terms of African and in terms of non-African or Christian religion," he said. "People got together and looked to have a way of thinking about and talking about what their experience was and drawing on the old as well as the new."
Although Voodoo is practiced in New Orleans and Haiti and was named the official religion of Benin in 1996, the history of its development since the slave trade has been incomplete, Nyce said.
"The problem is the scholarship on the Voodoo phenomenon is pretty weak," he said, because much of what we know is based on oral history and folklore, a great deal of which was collected in the 19th century when there was a trend to learn about the supernatural.
According to ReligiousTolerance.org, accurate studies about Voodoo have only begun to surface since the late 1950s.
The Beliefs
Like in Christian religions, Voodoo traditions differ among various groups of worshipers, but common threads run throughout.
"One of the basic premises that they start with is that there's two parts to humans-the material part and the non-material part," Merten said.
The "non-material part" of people, he said, is the sum of all their experiences and their wisdom, a kind of spirit representing all the qualities of them. Voodoo followers believe not only that this part of people lives on after their material bodies die, but that it can also be separated from their bodies while living, through rituals and possession.
After people with exemplary characteristics die, families will often store their spirits in vessels in their homes, Merten said.
"The whole reason to do this is not to lose this really valuable thing, people's wisdoms, their really important characteristics," he said. "The things that people had gained over time, you didn't want to simply lose that because they died."
This tradition was particularly important, Merten said, because slaves were mostly illiterate, so any way to pass knowledge down generations would benefit them.
The Voodoo religion centers around many gods, who are often worshipped through rituals which include feasts, animal sacrifices, dancing and chanting, according to ReligiousTolerance.org.
Various gods are worshipped and various rituals are performed for different reasons, Nyce said.
"It's like a toolbox of belief and ritual," he said. "There can be many different histories, many different cultures, many different kinds of religions in that toolbox. They pick them up and fashion them. They need to cure, they fashion one way. They need to see the future, they fashion another way."
In this way, Voodoo is a very personal, functional religion that is part of followers' everyday lives.
The Image
Despite the knowledge we have about the true practices of Voodoo, the major public perception of the religion is skewed to represent it as some dark, evil belief system, Merten and Nyce said.
"Stereotypes so clutter the Western imagination it's really really hard for us to know what Voodoo really is," Nyce said.
According to ReligiousTolerance.org, some of these stereotypes began developing in 1884 when a book called "Haiti or the Black Republic" was published. It inaccurately and sensationally described Voodoo followers as evil and said they performed human sacrifices and cannibalism. Horror movies about Voodoo echoed these sentiments in the 1930s and have tainted American perception of the religion ever since, the Web site says.
Merten said he thinks some of these misperceptions come from our innate curiosity about immorality.
"There's something intriguing about that," he said.
Because Voodoo does have practices that involve dark forces, possession (often as zombies) and magic, Merten said people naturally make a jump in their imaginations.
"It's only a few steps from that to 'Night of the Living Dead,'" he said.
We are naturally curious about these kinds of things, Nyce said, because it reflects something in our own lives.
"We see our own fears and anxieties in [Voodoo practices], often so powerfully that we lose sight of whatever the real tradition is," he said. "In fact what Voodoo tells us more about is more about us than how it was practiced."
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