The term “Vodu” (alternately known as Voudoun, Vaudau, Voudoux, or Vaudaux and commonly corrupted as “Voodoo” or “Hoodoo” in North America) comes to us from the Fon tongue– a language prevalent in the West African Republic of Dahomey, now known as Benin.

Beginning in 1724, Spanish and French raiders descended on Africa’s so-called Slave Coast, only to pass their unwitting conquests onto colonial outposts in the West Indies. In doing so, slave traders at various points along the way managed to transfuse the native beliefs of an African snake worshipping sect to the Caribbean and the American South.

In 1782, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez , Spanish governor of the Louisiana Territory, banned the importation of slaves from the island territories of Martinique ,and later Santo Domingo (the other half of which is now known as Haiti), for fear that the Vodu tradition propagating amongst the slave population “would make the lives of the citizens unsafe.”

As slave life in the 18th century Americas mainly consisted of chains, overseers and hard labor, African slaves - and their native born children – were forced to practice their ancestors’ faith at their own peril. Enslaved men or women caught in the act of vodu faced torture or death. The sentence for those caught with voduon “fetishes” (sometimes lucky charms or sometimes of more sinister “voodoo dolls”) called for the guilty to be “imprisoned, hanged or flayed alive.”

That began to change in 1803, when, in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, authorities rolled back restrictions on the importation of West Indian slave labor. At the same time, second and third generations of English speaking, American born slaves came into the possession of their masters’ descendents. Old barriers began to shift (if ever so slightly) and, in the early 19th century, it was not at all uncommon for slaves to tend to white children and attend plantation functions, such as weddings and receptions. In an effort to save the souls of their unconverted workers, some masters even went so far as to baptize their slave populations, thereby permanently intertwining their own Catholicism with the pagan African tradition. (In Central American cultures, this same cross-pollination resulted in the religion known as Santeria.)

But it was the post-Purchase influx of new arrivals from the Caribbean (and Santo Domingo, in particular) that truly ignited the myth of American voodoo. With slaves a common occurrence in urban areas and no more distance between plantations, it is said that Santo Domingo natives would congregate at an abandoned brick factory on Dumaine Street in New Orleans.

True their African roots, the devotees were said to revere a priestess cloaked in a python, who would deliver fortunes and prognostications. Still in other versions, the priestess was secondary to a male “king figure,” who would administer the secretive rites. Either way, the perverse ceremonies eventually led to the invocation of the snake gods Danbhlah-Wedo, Aida-Wedo or, most popularly, Zombi – just three of the many “loas,” or deities, that populate the Vodu pantheon.

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Tags: 1724, 1782, 1803, Africa Slave Coast and Voodoo, Banning of Slaves in Caribbean islands, Benin, Dumaine Street in New Orleans, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez, history of vodu, history of voodoo, hoodoo, Louisianna Purchase and Voodoo, origins of voodoo, punishment for practicing voodoo, slave life in 18th century America, Vaudau, Vaudaux, voodoo dolls, Voudoun, Voudoux, West African Republic of Dahomey