I went to Daniel Rodriguez’s lecture on Santeria on November 15. He gave an overview of Santeria but also talked about how it’s viewed in culture and media. One of the things he talked about that I found really interesting was the assigning of orishas to people. In Santeria people have “head orishas” that are their main orisha and although they may also honor other orishas, that one will still be their main orisha. He specifically mentioned Obatala and the story of the creation of the human race. Obatala was tasked with creating humanity, however he got drunk and when he was drunk he decided that that was the best time to start creating humans. He ended up creating humans with deformities, such as missing limbs or birth defects. Rodriguez said that kids who are born missing limbs, or with birth defects, or autism are immediately initiated to Obatala because they are seen as being his children.

He also talked about the way Santeria is viewed by outsiders. The name “Santeria” has a negative connotation because of the ways the media portrays it. There’s a song by the artist Sublime that has the lyrics “I don’t practice Santeria,” and one thing that I’ve seen with the media’s portrayal of Santeria was in an episode of Criminal Minds where a killer they were trying to catch was a practitioner of Santeria. They pretty much only showed the pieces that could be viewed as wrong, such as rituals with animal sacrifice. Rodriguez stated that many practitioners of Santeria actually call it Regla de Ocha, meaning “the order of the orishas.” However, he also mentioned that there was some controversy about it because some people want to use the name Santeria in order to sort of reclaim it and try to change the connotation but many would also much rather use the name Regla de Ocha.

Overall I found his lecture incredibly interesting, not to mention the fact that he was funny and very interesting. He talked a lot about ritual and about what being initiated is like and about how it’s not for everyone. In class we talked a lot about the outsider’s point of view, especially at the beginning of the class with the article about the Nacirema. Daniel Rodriguez’s lecture made me think a lot about the outsider’s point of view and how understanding the religion is a big part of not perpetuating the ignorance around Santeria.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QcD7YEpKbo8e5Ub7bnqrEviOXMUmB7nP74kxyCLFYYA/edit?usp=sharing

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.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Ezili.” In Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, 219-58. University of California Press, 2010.

This book was found through articles on JSTOR. The title was mentioned in many of the articles I found on Ezili Dantò. I read the chapter on the three Ezilis, focusing on the section about Ezili Dantò. The main idea of the section on Ezili Dantò was that above all else she is a mother. She is a healer, a protector, and a warrior. The chapter had stories about what the Vodou priestess Mama Lola and her family have experienced with Ezili Dantò. Altars for the goddess usually have money, clothes, and dolls on them and none of the items are ever used by anyone in the family. The chapter gave background on the goddess and what she stands for. Ezili Dantò fought in the Haitian slave revolution alongside her children (the Haitian slaves) and during the revolution she was wounded ending up with two parallel, vertical scars on one of her cheeks. Ezili Dantò also cannot speak because during the revolution her people believed that she wouldn’t keep their secrets so they cut out her tongue. The chapter stressed the fact that Ezili Dantò is a mother, she is always depicted with a child and she will drop everything to help her children in times of trouble. These characteristics are extremely helpful in teaching me about who Ezili Dantò is and what represents her.

The author herself does not show much bias in her writing. The book is more of a first person narrative about the experiences she had with Mama Lola and what she learned from her. McCarthy Brown’s purpose in her writing is to educate through the voices of those who practice Vodou. She doesn’t actually argue anything due to the writing style but the emphasis on Ezili Dantò being a mother above all else is clear.

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.

I found this source while looking through articles on JSTOR. I found the name Kyrah Malika Daniels repeated and looked her up and found a research paper she did on Haitian pakèt kongos on Project Muse. In this article she talks about how pakèt kongos are used for healing and how problems like a broken leg aren’t just treated as physical, but as spiritual too. There is a belief that whatever ails the patient is both a physical or mental and spiritual problem and the patient may have fallen out of sync or that there is an imbalance in the cosmos. A pakèt kongo follows a basic shape with an orb at the bottom and a stem coming out of the orb. The orb contains soil from a graveyard, essentially trapping a disembodied spirit within it. The fabric wrappings on a pakèt kongo are not just to keep the soil from getting out but also to keep the spirit in so that the pakèt kongo will work for ritual healing.

The author’s goal with this article is to educate on the pakèt kongo and how it is used in Haitian Vodou. She talks about her own experience with it but also about research she did on it. There is no bias in this article, mostly because it is not an opinion piece and mostly consists of facts and research. The author is a practitioner of Haitian Vodou so may be biased in terms of how she talks about the pakèt kongo but it is not very prevalent in the article. The information in the article is extremely relevant to me and will help a lot with my analysis of the object.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, 1-25.

This article was one of the class readings. The author talks about the basic beliefs in Haitian Vodou. She goes into detail about their ideas and beliefs on healing and personhood. She talks about spirit possession and goes over some of the details of Haitian cosmology.

The goal of this article is to go over the basics of Haitian Vodou while not leaving out any of the most important details. There is no central focus on one idea in Vodou, it’s more of an overview of the religion. This article is helpful to me because it gives a lot of information on personhood, healing, and other aspects of Vodou that I need to know about in order to write my object analysis.

I believe that the main point of this chapter was to tell a story about the experience of having a sacred object from another culture. The main point was also to educate people on the purpose of such objects and to say that if you’re going to have an object like the bottle it is better to know how to take care of it and know the purpose of it so as not to fetishize the culture.

I found the idea of the afterlife really interesting. The belief that human souls go essentially underwater for a time after they die is incredibly intriguing. There are many ideas about the afterlife in a lot of different cultures and I find this one to be pretty unique. In the times of the Romans and the ancient Greeks the ideas of the afterlife also involved water but there were different regions of what they called the underworld. What region you went to was based on what you did in life. If you went to the Elysian Fields you were a distinguished person who was righteous and had ethical merit. Those in the Elysian Fields could either stay there or be reborn and those who were reborn and went to the Elysian Fields in each life they lived then after the third time they would be sent to the Isles of the Blessed. Then there were the Fields of Asphodel which were for normal people who didn’t commit any major crimes and didn’t achieve greatness, the souls there had to work, unlike those in the Elysian Fields. The Fields of Punishment were for those who had committed crimes against the gods and those who wreaked havoc while they were alive. Tartarus was reserved for those who committed heinous crimes against the gods and were given specific punishments, like Tantalus who had the gods over for dinner and tried to feed them his son. He was forced to stand in a pool of water under a fruit tree, and when he was hungry and reached for fruit the branches would move out of his reach. When he wanted water the pool would dry up.

The underwater world where Haitian spirits dwell after death is incredibly different from that and I find that extremely interesting. Other religions have ideas of heaven and hell but that doesn’t seem to exist in Haitian Vodou. So I guess my question is: In Haitian Vodou is there any sort of punishment in the afterlife for those who committed heinous crimes? And do any gods decide where people go if that punishment does exist or does everyone end up in the underwater land of the dead?

I am studying the Pakèt Kongo for Èzili Dantó on the Haitian Vodou altar. Èzili Dantó is the warrior mother, she is often depicted as a black Madonna and she is always shown with a child. Her colors are red, blue, and green. Èzili Dantó is the perfect mother, she will drop everything to help her children and she is the protector of single mothers, working women, and abused women. I am studying the Pakèt Kongo for Èzili Dantó because I want to find out how the object is used in Vodou, how it represents who Èzili Dantó is and why a Paket Kongo is used to represent her on altars. The goddess Èzili Dantó is sometimes often referred to as Èzili Dantór or just Dantór. She is one of the Petro Lwa and is considered to be one of the “hot” spirits because she can be wild, aggressive, and not easy to control. Èzili Dantó is matched with the image of Mater Salvatoris and with other Madonnas such as Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Johnson talked about hybridity in religion and the ways that religions like Christianity and Catholicism mixed with African diasporic religions. Christianity mixed with Haitian Vodou during the slave revolution in the 1800s in Haiti. Polish troops sided with the Haitian slaves which led to Our Lady of Czestochowa becoming an image of Èzili Dantó.
For my research and object analysis I’m going to need primary and secondary sources talking about Èzili Dantó and Pakèt Kongos and their functions on Haitian Vodou altars. I will use the UVM library to look for resources that have information on Èzili Dantó and on Haitian Vodou altars. Duke University’s site on the sacred arts of the Black Atlantic may also be useful in determining the purpose of Pakèt Kongos and how they represent the god or goddess they are for.

People from all over the world come to the Oṣun-Oṣogobo festival to celebrate their religion and to celebrate and honor Oṣun, one of the Oriṣas in the Yoruba religion. An Oriṣa is one of the many different aspects of the god that the Yoruba people worship. Oṣun is sometimes referred to as “the good mother” and she has a major role in the story of the world’s creation in Yoruba texts. She is represented by water and the color yellow, and her sacred grove lies in the town of Oṣogbo. The film talks about the spread of the Yoruba religion through the slave trade and the ways African-Americans are reconnecting with their heritage through religion and pilgrimage. At the beginning of the festival there is a tradition in which 16 lamps are  lit and people dance and celebrate around them. The film shows a mix of traditionalists, non traditionalists, and people who don’t practice the Yoruba religion dancing around the lamps.
The festival is a good example of African diasporic religion due to all the different people shown attending the festival, and all their different backgrounds. Yoruba religion is practiced all over the world and all the different people who go to the festival show that the religion is not going away anytime soon. At the beginning of the film a man says, “While we may have left Africa, Africa did not leave us.” That quote speaks to the ways people worship and the immense importance of the pilgrimages that people make to Nigeria to reconnect with their roots. The two African American women who are initiated as priestesses during the film talk about rewriting their destinies, and how at the end of the initiation they felt like they were at home. Johnson’s idea of hybridity in African diasporic religions fits some of the women’s experiences growing up. The matching of Catholic saints to different Oriṣas and the different aspects of God found in Christianity and Catholicism speak to the idea of a hybrid sort of religion. While African people were enslaved it was dangerous to practice their religion, and Christianity was forced on them. Instead of giving up their religion, they matched different saints to the different Oriṣas and while they may not have been able to worship and pray in the same way they had, they still worshipped. Thompson did a good job of describing the ways in which the slaves incorporated Christianity into their religion to hide their practices: “…they managed to establish altars to their dead even while blending with the Christian world: they coded their burial mounds as ‘graves’ but studded them with symbolic objects…”(Thompson, Overture: The Concept “Altar”.)
The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings people together, whether they’re practitioners of the religion or not, and to those who are it holds an incredibly special meaning. The vast diversity seen in the people attending the festival shows the ways in which the Yoruba people worship and how aspects of the religion are similar to those of other religions and yet the ways in which they worship are incredibly different. One of the women initiated as a priestess talks about how she tends to pray quietly but that it feels good to pray loudly so her prayers can be heard and how the bells force her to pray loudly. The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings out aspects of African diasporic religions that are beautiful and interesting while showing how the Yoruba peoples’ rituals during the Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival affect the atmosphere in the town and how they affect all the people in the town, whether they are practitioners, traditionalists, non traditionalists, or people who are just there to celebrate Oṣun.

-Hayden

People from all over the world come to the Oṣun-Oṣogobo festival to celebrate their religion and to celebrate and honor Oṣun. The film talks about the spread of the Yoruba religion through the slave trade and the ways African-Americans are reconnecting with their heritage through religion and pilgrimage. At the beginning when the 16 lamps are being lit there is a mix of traditionalists, non traditionalists, and people who don’t practice the Yoruba religion. One of the women in the film talks about how she was labeled as East Indian as a hard to place baby and that she fought to claim her African heritage. Another of the women talks about how she grew up christian but in her house there were altars for the catholic saints who correspond to different Oriṣas. Native Africans and people of African descent gather to celebrate Oṣun during the festival.
Johnson’s idea of hybridity in African diasporic religions fits some of the women’s experiences growing up. The matching of catholic saints to different Oriṣas and the different aspects of God found in christianity and catholicism speak to the idea of a hybrid sort of religion. The ways in which people of different religions worship varies but according to the priests in the film they are all worshipping the same God.
The festival is a good example of African diasporic religion due to all the different people shown attending the festival, and all their different backgrounds. Yoruba religion is practiced all over the world and all the different people who go to the festival show that the religion is not going away anytime soon. At the beginning of the film a man says that while slaves and people of African descent may have left Africa, Africa did not leave them. That quote speaks to the ways people worship and the immense importance of the pilgrimages that people make to Nigeria to reconnect with their roots. The two African American women who are initiated as priestesses during the film talk about rewriting their destinies, and how at the end of the initiation they felt like they were at home.
The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings people together, whether they’re practitioners of the religion or not, and to those who are it holds an incredibly special meaning. It is obvious that no one is against the ways that African diasporic religions mixed or the way that Yoruba religion mixed with Christianity. Johnson talked about the use of the word “hybrid” in relation to religion throughout history and how different scholars used it negatively, however, the hybridity of African diasporic religions is not a bad thing. The vast diversity seen in the people attending the festival shows the ways in which the Yoruba people worship and how aspects of the religion are similar to those of other religions and yet the ways in which they worship are incredibly different. One of the women initiated as a priestess talks about how she tends to pray quietly but that it feels good to pray loudly so her prayers can be heard and how the bells force her to pray loudly. The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings out aspects of African diasporic religions that are beautiful and interesting while showing how the Yoruba peoples’ rituals during the Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival affect the atmosphere in the town and how they affect all the people in the town, whether they are practitioners, traditionalists, non traditionalists, or people who are just there to celebrate Oṣun.