Voodoo practitioners have an age-old take on the devastation, which their Christian neighbors chalk up to just such beliefs.
Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air.
This was the time for God and for spirits.
On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm.
"Kem kontan Jesus renmem, aleluya," they sang -- joyously, not mournfully. "I'm so happy Jesus loves me. Hallelujah."
Farther down the road, two voodoo priestesses sat down on buckets with another group. They made the sign of the cross and started a Catholic hymn, before splashing some rum on the ground to reach out to the gede, the spirits of the dead.
"We are thanking you that we are here," said Marie Michele Louis, a priestess, called a manbo here. "We are thanking all the spirits of Africa. We are not afraid to serve the spirits of Guinea."
In Haiti, the spiritual world is omnipresent, a raucous realm where voodoo, folklore, superstition, Protestant and Catholic faiths compete, clash and sometimes converge.
When the earth shakes no one talks about fault lines and tectonic plates. Instead, there are many otherworldly explanations of why the earthquake hit and the aftershocks go on here, from the biblical to the superstitious to the conspiratorial.
The devastation Jan. 12 has also widened a rift that has been growing since U.S. missionaries began coming to Haiti in the 1800s: Evangelical Christians blame voodoo for bringing on this ruin, claiming it is satanic. Voodoo priests counter that the Christians are exploiting the catastrophe to convert people and raise money.
"The Protestants tell people that voodoo is evil," said Louis, 52, who lives next to the cemetery. "They say that voodoo is responsible for this. They are taking advantage of the situation to get people into churches."
Louis was teaching her children about the spirits in her temple, which stands behind an iron door on an alley off the Grand Rue downtown, when the earthquake hit.
The walls fractured, but the two-story building didn't fall.
"It's thanks to the spirits that we are alive today," Louis said.
Voodoo has a pantheon of these spirits, the lwa, which evolved from the beliefs slaves brought from Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. When they were taught by priests in the French colony, they saw the lwa as similar to the Catholic saints, if not actually the saints themselves, and appropriated certain Catholic rituals and liturgy.
Followers believe in God as the almighty power, but find his underlings to be more accessible.
"We are like good neighbors with Catholics," Louis said. "They just tell us to pray, they don't tell us we're evil."
The Roman Catholic Church does not endorse voodoo, and many Catholics avoid it, but it has not combated it as the Protestant faiths have.
Even under constant assault from Christians, voodoo and traditional folklore have retained deep roots, particularly in the slums and countryside. A man might casually mention that another man carrying a heavy load on a cart is a zombie, or that vampires are killing children in the night.
The spirits of the dead that Louis invokes are a mischievous bunch. They wear black top hats and glasses, live in cemeteries and have funny names like Gede Ti Pete -- Little Fart.
The spirit Louis knows best is Stupide Lacroix. When he appears, he adjusts his belt and top hat and saunters around with a cane. Believers splash high-quality Barbancourt rum on the ground for him.
Source:latimes.com/
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