When I walked into the museum after being told about our project I already knew that I wanted to pick something on the Haitian Vodou altar. There is something about Vodou that has always intrigued me. Maybe it was its misrepresentation in media that made me want to learn more about it, just like with my interests in Paganism and Wicca. That morning I walked into the exhibit and over to the Vodou altar I noticed objects and details that I had not noticed when we had previously visited. I was drawn to multiple objects that had feathers on them, objects that my prior knowledge of African diasporic religions could not help me understand. There was one specific object with blue and red feathers and an orb and stem kind of shape that caught my attention. Looking through the booklet next to the altar I found the object and read about it. It was a pakèt kongo for the goddess Èzili Dantò, protector of single mothers and abused women. At that point I did not need to look at any other objects, I knew I wanted to research Èzili Dantò and the pakèt kongo.
A pakèt kongo is a kind of container. The one I chose is primarily red and blue and is completely made of fabric, except for the feathers. It sits elevated on the altar, the blue and red striped base is full and held with a blue ribbon tied in a bow. Ribbons come out from the middle of the base, pale yellow and sticking up like bubbles on top of a drink. As my eyes move farther from the center, gold ribbons with a green pattern of flowers and squares and red ribbons embroidered with blue flowers and stems and gold trimming curl outwards giving the rounded base the appearance of a blooming flower. Protruding upward from the pale yellow ribbons is a stem wrapped tightly in red fabric. Two feathers extend from the stem, wispy and bent. The large red one grabs my attention first, but the smaller blue one demands to be seen too. An intricate kind of calm intensity surrounds the object, which was at first confusing but as I learned more about Èzili Dantò and about how pakèt kongo’s work, I began to understand its meaning, how it is used in Vodou, and how it represents Èzili Dantò.
The pakèt kongo is a power object in Haitian Vodou. As I will talk more about later in this paper, pakèt kongos have soil from a graveyard or cemetery in them. This, along with what god or goddess the object is for gives it power. This one for Èzili Dantò is intricate. Èzili Dantò herself is an incredibly powerful Petwo goddess. It is not just her status as a goddess that gives her power, it is the fact that she is a woman and a protector, the fact that she is a warrior mother, that gives her as much power as she has. Her emotions are charged and intense, just like the pakèt kongo. Spiritual, emotional, and physical power all come together in the pakèt kongo for Èzili Dantò. It is interesting to see this object in a museum, especially an art museum. The pakèt kongo is not just art, there is energy in it that does not quite fit into a museum setting. In this essay I will talk about the ways in which Èzili Dantò’s power is represented in the pakèt kongo and how spiritual, emotional, and physical power all come together to make this object what it is.
Many African diasporic religions have the belief that when someone is sick or injured the problem is not just physical; it is also spiritual. It is usually thought that the problem occurred because whoever is sick or injured has fallen out of sync with the universe. The problem is then addressed ritually and holistically. In Haitian Vodou practitioners see doctors when needed, like for broken bones or serious illnesses, but the issue is still taken care of through ritual healing ceremonies in order to restore balance to the spiritual side of things. Most, if not all, of these rituals involve pakèt kongos.
The ancestor of the pakèt kongo is the nkisi, a healing bundle that comes from Kongo in Central Africa. There are minkisi (plural of nkisi) that have a kind of stem-on-globe shape, and then there are minkisi figurines. Both have medicinal herbs inside them, but the shape that has persisted through Haitian Vodou is the stem-on-globe shape (Thompson, 1983, 119-127) (Daniels, 2010, 418-423). Minkisi had many different uses and were often associated with spirits, much like Haitian pakèt kongos. However, pakèt kongos are not filled with herbs or medicines, the bases of them are filled with soil from a graveyard or cemetery. They are “charged with spirits from underneath the land of the living” (Daniels, 2013, 423). This core component is essential for the pakèt kongo to work at all.
The slaves that were in Haiti back in the late 1700s and early 1800s mainly came from Kongo and Benin. The slave revolution lasted from 1791 until 1804 and the slaves were aided by Polish troops that came with the French troops. Due to this Haitian Vodou was exposed to Catholicism and Èzili Dantò was paralleled with Our Lady of Czestochowa, the black Madonna. This exposure to Catholicism and the different aspects of Haitian Vodou that are still mixed with Catholicism add to the idea of syncretism. The word syncretism is generally used to “describe the process of conversions to Christianity…” (Johnson, 2016, 760). In Haitian Vodou many gods or goddesses have Catholic or Christian counterparts. The three Èzilis all have counterparts related to the Virgin Mary. Èzili Freda, known for her beauty is related to Our Lady of Sorrows, Lasyrenn, both a mermaid and a whale, is elusive. Lasyrenn’s counterpart is Our Lady of Charity, and Èzili Dantò, whose counterpart, as I said before, is Our Lady of Czestochowa. (McCarthy Brown, 2010, 221). However, the mixture of Vodou and Catholicism doesn’t end there. Many practitioners of Vodou attend Mass and go on pilgrimages to various churches. Attendance at Mass is incorporated into many complex Vodou rituals.
Women in rural parts of Haiti have very little power, however in areas that have changed more, like cities and urban areas, “at least half of the [urban] Vodou leaders are women” (McCarthy Brown, 2010, 221). Misogyny is a large part of Haitian culture, but Vodou empowers women. Èzili Dantò is important in Vodou because she gives power and protection to the women who need it most. Domestic violence is rampant in Haiti, and Èzili Dantò is the protector of abused women, through worship of her she gives women power.
Èzili Dantò is the fierce mother who will drop everything to protect her children, and she fought alongside the slaves during the revolution. She has two vertical scars on one of her cheeks, scars from an injury she received while fighting alongside her children. However, her children also betrayed her during the revolution because they thought that she could not keep their secrets. This belief caused them to cut out her tongue so she could no longer talk. It is said that Èzili Dantò cannot see blood because “At the sight of blood, Dantò goes wild” (McCarthy Brown, 2010, 231). One point that is emphasized in texts about Èzili Dantò is that above all else, she is a mother and her children come first.
In Karen McCarthy Brown’s novel Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, there is a story told by Mama Lola’s daughter, Maggie, about an experience she had with Èzili Dantò shortly after arriving in the U.S. Maggie got sick and had to go to the emergency room and the physician there thought she had tuberculosis and wanted to hospitalize her, but Maggie begged to go home. The doctor let her go home under the condition that she come back the next day for more tests. However that night:
We just went to bed, and then I saw, like a shadow, coming to the light… Next minute, I actually saw a lady standing in front of me… with a blue dress, and she have a veil covering her head and her face… she pull up the veil and I could see it was her with the two mark. Èzili Dantò with the two mark on her cheek… she told me to turn my back around, she was going to heal me… She rubbed my lungs and everything; she rub it, and then she said, ‘Now you know what to do for me. Just light up a candle and thank me.’… I went back to the doctor, and the doctor say, ‘What’s wrong with you? I thought you was sick!’ (McCarthy Brown, 2010, 227)
Èzili Dantò drops everything when her children are in need, without thinking twice. However, there is another side to Èzili Dantò that I mentioned briefly before. She is also known as Èzili of the Red Eyes and “some people call Dantò a baka (evil spirit)” because “Dantò can be evil, too… She kills a lot. If you put her upside down, you tell her to go and get somebody, she will go and get that person. If that person do not want to come, she break that person neck and bring that person to you” (McCarthy Brown, 2010, 231-232). She is the warrior mother, the protector of single mothers, working women, abused women, and all her children. If she needs to be fierce, or if someone wants her to be evil, she will be.
The bright red on the base of the pakèt kongo and the large red feather extending from the stem speak to Èzili Dantò’s ability to change emotions in a heartbeat and to go from a caring mother to an intense warrior when needed. The colors are used to attract Èzili Dantò during rituals and the feathers are used to alert her of her commitment to help her children and aid in rituals. Feathers are a staple of pakèt kongos, “they are positioned from the head toward the floor, representing the movement of the vibrations of the cosmos to nature” (Daniels, 2013, 422). The bend of the feathers is symbolic, and not just something that happened because they are feathers and bend easily. They could be made to point straight up, however they are bent toward the floor because of the meaning behind it.
The calm and intensity in Èzili Dantò’s personality are shown in her pakèt kongo through the blue and red colors that are present. The blue ribbon tied in a bow around the base is secured with pins, and the binding of the fabric is not just to keep the soil from getting out but “also to ensure that the spirit is kept in” (Daniels, 2013, 423). As I mentioned before, there is a belief in Haitian Vodou that an illness or injury needs to be addressed both physically and spiritually. Pakèt kongos are used to help correct the imbalances in the cosmos through healing rituals. The one for Èzili Dantò is most likely used to pray specifically to Èzili Dantò for spiritual healing.
At the beginning of this project I wanted to learn more about Èzili Dantò just because of what I read about her in the little booklet next to the Haitian Vodou altar. That evolved into me wanting to know more about how the pakèt kongo on the altar represents her and how pakèt kongos are used in Vodou. I think I would need to see one used in a ritual to fully understand the ways in which they are used in Vodou, however it is one of the most interesting objects I have ever studied. Haitian Vodou combines art with ritual and the pakèt kongo is a perfect example of that. The object appears incredibly decorative, but it does have a purpose, and one that is incredibly important. Seeing the object on an altar in a museum puts it out of context, automatically making it more difficult to understand the use of the object, it seems more decorative than purposeful. Art has power, and the exhibit gives that a new meaning, making it fitting that a pakèt kongo for Èzili Dantò be on the Haitian Vodou altar.
Bibliography
Daniels, Kyrah Malika. “The Undressing of Two Sacred Healing Bundles: Curative Arts in the Black Atlantic in Haiti and Ancient Kongo.”Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3(2013):416-429.
McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Ezili.” In Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, 219-58. University of California Press, 2010.
McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, 1-25.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. “The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun.” In The Flash of the Spirit, 119-127. Random House, Inc.
Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2016. “Syncretism and Hybridization.” in The Oxford Journal of The Study of Religion, 754-771. Oxford University Press, 2016.
