15 - Voodoo and Modern Devil Worship

To appreciate witchcraft as it stands today, it must be considered not only in terms of its origins, but its survival, expansion, extension, and above all, whatever new vitality it has gained. The final point is most important, because witchcraft, like everything else in our complex world, must strike a popular tempo and fill some modern need to win itself support. To say that witchcraft has done just that is putting it mildly indeed.

The primitive witchcraft of the Australian bushmen, which can still be found in a pristine state today, has been directly linked to the ultra-modern subject of ESP or extra sensory perception; and the same applies to many beliefs, rituals and superstitions found in Malaysia, India, China, Mongolia, and even the hinterlands of Europe and America. All this, however, is to be expected; of greater interest is the fact that such things have taken new root and found new growth in surroundings even more lush than those from whence they originated. That brings up a prime example of the witchcraft of today - voodoo.

According to good authorities, witchcraft in the West Indies is of two distinct patterns - obeah, or obi, a direct outgrowth, indeed almost a transplant, of Ashanti beliefs. It is found in various islands, most notably Jamaica, because many members of the Ashanti and related tribes were brought there as slaves. They, in turn, brought their witchcraft with them and gradually obeah men emerged, whose powers resembled that of their Ashanti counterparts.

Some critics of obeah claim that it is truly diabolical and therefore all bad; but others refuse to go along with that opinion. They point out that obeah, as a power to work evil, is partly balanced myalism, or a power to work good; and that the same practitioner can apply himself to both, though he is more apt to specialize in one or the other.

A mean trick of the obeah man is to steal away a person's shadow, or at least the spirit that supposedly dwells therein, and to spellbind or "nail" it to the great silk-cotton tree, the chosen residence of that great evil spirit Sasabonsam, the same malignant entity so dreaded by the Ashanti. Thus deprived of his shadow, the owner is sure to pine away and die, if for no reason other than the fact that he and everybody else believe that he will do so.

But if a myal man can pick out the right tree and conduct the correct ritual, he can loosen the enthralled shadow and catch it departing from the tree. He may need the help of assistants to make sure of returning it to its shadowless owner, and back in the 1890's, the going price for such a job was six dollars. No recent quotations are available but they would naturally run much higher.

Many more intriguing facets of obeah could be discussed in detail, but they would simply reiterate much of what has already been related regarding African witchcraft. In contrast, voodoo, while also of African origin, has spread its roots so far and wide, and has had such intriguing phases of development, that it has had far more impact on the world at large. In Haiti, Africans of many unrelated tribes and cultures were brought together and, through sheer necessity, began to share one another's languages and beliefs. Thus they developed remarkable rites that are distinctive in themselves, yet with many variations of their own.

All rites begin with a supplication to Papa Legba, gate-keeper of the voodoo Valhalla, to "open the way" for worshipers to appeal to other members of the pantheon. The major gods may come from almost any part of Africa, but their ranks have been so amplified by all grades of divinities and local spirits, that it would take dozens of pages merely to list them in small print. These include the souls of many departed hungans and mambos, who served as priests and priestesses, respectively, at voodoo rites. So, even in compiling a list, it might be incomplete by the time you reached Zaka, the popular god who patronizes farmers and their crops, since new deities might have cropped up in the meantime.

Hence, a survey of voodoo, from the standpoint of witchcraft, must necessarily be confined to the methods used and the results gained. Perhaps the commonest way to begin is with the old reliable "devil doll," which has figured so regularly in witchcraft everywhere, but seems to be unusually popular and potent in Haiti. A striking case was that of a U.S. Marine captain who became an officer in the Haitian gendarmerie. One day during inspection he found a braided horsehair effigy hanging from his saddle. How and when it was placed there, he didn't know, but he disregarded the wanga, as the thing was called, and simply hung it in his hut as a souvenir. A few days later, that saddle unexplainably came loose as he was mounting his horse and he was nearly killed in the runaway that followed.

A more powerful procedure is for a hungan to conjure up an image of a person in a pail of water; then stab it with a knife. If the water turns red like blood, the victim will die. This ritual has apparently been witnessed on many occasions, but it raises a question as to where witchcraft leaves off and trickery takes over.

Granting that even a reliable witness might imagine he saw an image in the water - even mistaking the reflection of his own face for someone else's - it might still be impossible to convince him that water turned blood red unless it did.

There, the juice of some tropical plant, applied to the knife blade, might supply the crimson dye that would add reality to illusion, for those who know their voodoo are often skilled herbalists as well, and there could well be occasions when death by some secret poison has been timed to an appropriate ritual.

But these are mere trifles compared to other voodoo tales that run the gamut from the bizarre to the macabre. These include weird sacrifices to Damballah, the Serpent God; ritualistic dances held in jungle clearings, driving the participants to mad fury by the beat of tom-toms; the hand of a dead hungan rising to point out his young successor, so he can recall his own departed spirit and transplant it with all its wisdom in the mind and body of someone who can use it well.

Wandering ghosts of various types thrive in the tropical atmosphere of the West Indies. In obeah, some of the most malevolent are termed "duppies" or "jumbies" and voodoo has its counterparts. Vampires take on the shape of great birds that might snatch anyone on a dark night, and not many years ago, there was talk of an automobile called a "tiger car" that prowled the streets of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, making off with unsuspecting victims.

Most startling of all are the "zombies" or walking dead, who are presumably the products of highly virulent witchcraft, which is used to draw a spirit from a human being, causing the person to die. His body can then be animated through powers known only to voodoo, so that it becomes a mere machine, serving only its voodoo master. Tales are told of troops of zombies being marched down from the hills and signed up as workers cutting sugar cane by a clever operator who collects their wages for himself.

They require little upkeep, except scant portions of tasteless food - enough to keep them going mechanically; but care must be taken not to feed them certain substances, especially salt. It can revive their sense of taste, and with it, a homing instinct that enables them to march right back to their graves and burrow themselves beyond any further voodoo influence. Also, there is always the chance that zombies may be seen and recognized by friends who frequently reclaim them and take physical vengeance on the voodoo man.

The zombie legend provides some definite clues regarding the physical factors involved in voodoo. Hypnotism unquestionably plays a major part in all voodoo rituals, starting with the commanding presence of the hungan or the mambo, gaining force from the incessant drum beats and reaching its zenith in the contagious effect of the dance, plus the crackle and blaze of voodoo fires. Often, persons recalling the fantastic things they witnessed are forced to agree that they were under some hypnotic influence.

Drugs are another explanation. Marijuana, and other hallucinatory products are sometimes used; and there are subtle poisons of tropical origin, unquestionably known to specialists in voodoo. Certain mysterious ailments, such as the African sleeping sickness, often induce a coma-like state that could give rise to a zombie rumor. All this accounts for the popularity of voodoo charms as preventive measures.

Voodoo has traveled far from Haiti, a reason why it has become such a significant factor in the witchcraft of today, as we shall see.

One of the earliest points of contact for voodoo in the United States was New Orleans, way back when Haiti and Louisiana were both French colonies. Powders, potions, perfumes for all purposes are now available almost anywhere. So, too, are voodoo dolls - complete with pins. While their appeal is chiefly to ignorant purchasers, the intelligentsia fall for such things, too.

In the early part of the twentieth century, "civilized" people, rather than take up voodoo, which they passed off as pure nonsense and jungle superstition, turned to its predecessor - Satanism. Their leader was a debonair disciple of the Devil, named Aleister Crowley, who claimed to be the Beast with the Number 666 mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

Aleister Crowley had attained a peak as a Satanist early in 1914, according to American "tramp poet" Harry Kemp, who was living in London at that time. Through an artist friend, Kemp learned of the mystical - and almost mythical - leader of a fantastic cult, who conducted diabolical ceremonies as its "high priest" in some obscure, buried retreat. But Kemp was utterly unable to meet the sinister master or learn any more about the strange devil cult, until one night when he and the artist were dining in the Cafe Royal. Suddenly the artist pointed out a slightly balding middle-aged man, with a curious lock of hair extending down his forehead.

"There!" the artist confided in a breathless undertone. "There is the high priest of the weird cult I told you about!"

Staring toward the corner table where the strange man sat, Kemp met the gaze of sharp, dark eyes; small and piercing, like gimlets. Lowering his own gaze, Kemp noted that the man's plump and very whitish fingers were covered with ornate rings. Kemp pressed the artist for an introduction then and there, though his friend undertoned a warning that he might be sorry if he mixed with even the fringes of what the artist now pronounced to be a "damnable" cult. But Kent persisted, so the artist caught the strange man's eye, received a nod, and conducted Kemp to the corner table, where soon the three were happily sipping absinthe, the most potent drink available.

Such was Kemp's meeting with Aleister Crowley, the remarkable man whom William Somerset Maugham had already immortalized under the name of "Oliver Haddo" in an early novel titled The Magician. Kemp found the devil master cordial and engaging, with the result that he was invited to call at Crowley's studio the next week. Kemp went and his description of the place was graphic indeed. He was admitted by a girl clad in a black robe and literally found himself enveloped in a purple cloud created by the smoke of exotic incense streaming from surrounding burners.

Black curtains served as dividers to form three rooms. The first was walled with rows of bookcases containing black leather-bound books, bearing silver cabalistic signs, for titles. The second room was fitted with divans and floor cushions where visitors could loll while they awaited developments. The third room had a black altar topped by a golden circle with a lifelike emblem of a golden serpent zigzagging across it. Above was a canopy, while the floor below bore cabalistic signs.

Kemp was shown all this by Crowley himself and he found that the black-bound books represented a vast collection of rare volumes on all forms of mythology, mysticism and witchcraft - black and white. But it was not until three months later that he won the high priest's confidence sufficiently to be invited to attend a meeting of the Satanic cult - a meeting which Kemp branded as a "Black Mass."

The worshipers who thronged the place all appeared to be of high social status, though each wore a black domino mask to hide his or her identity. The only light in the weird room flickered from a seven-branch candlestick, which was suddenly extinguished. From the Stygian blackness came the solemn voice of Aleister Crowley, the mighty Satanist himself, reciting the cult's creed:

There is no good. Evil itself is good. Blessed be the principle of evil. All hail, Prince of the World, to whom even God Himself has given dominion.

Amid a bleating response, a ghostly light pervaded the room, and through a haze of sickening incense, Kemp saw a huge crystal globe emerge from the floor, giving off clouds of white smoke that materialized into the shapes of midget dancing demons who cavorted fantastically to the weird wail of a distant flute and the throb of unseen drums. One woman screamed and tore away her mask, revealing a handsome but thoroughly panic-stricken face. She was led out through the curtains while the rites continued, uninterrupted.

As the demons vanished, the candles ignited again and Kemp saw Crowley, attired in his Satanic robes, step forward to the altar, where he picked up an oddly shaped knife. Raising his chant to a high piercing pitch, he ripped open the front of his robe and stabbed himself repeatedly in the breast. As his disciples pressed eagerly forward and knelt before him, he marked their foreheads with strange cabalistic symbols drawn with his own oozing blood.

From then on, according to Kemp, the worshipers went berserk, some tearing off their clothes as they danced about, raising their voices in obscene, blasphemous chants. In the midst of the hideous orgy, Kemp escaped to the street and made his way back to his digs in the light of early dawn. He arrived there safely enough, for all this had happened, not in some underworld section of London, but in a house set in a garden on Fulham Road, in the highly respectable suburb of Kensington.

It took the tramp poet a long while to get over his fantastic experience. When he related the events to his artist friend, the latter agreed that he, too, had been shaken after attending one of Crowley's Satanic ceremonies. As the artist put it, "You have come into contact with the powers of darkness and they do not want to let you go." So Kemp packed up and headed home to America, where he salved his conscience by revealing the secrets of the Satanists, putting it all into a feature story under his own byline.

That happened just before the outbreak of World War I. Within a few months, Crowley, too, returned to the States as things in Europe were in such a hellish state that even a Satanist couldn't stand it there. Crowley promptly issued a denial of Kemp's account, which the newspaper printed in rebuttal. In it, Crowley was quoted as saying that "Kemp honestly believes he was present at the things he describes, but he wasn't. I merely made him dream a scene of black magic and he thought it was actually happening and that I was participating He dreamed it himself."

Crowley went on to describe more beneficient rites in which he admitted participating, such as evoking the spirit of Mars in the form of hidden occult forces, so the world might know what lay in store for it. Symbolically, Crowley had worn a blood-red robe, while his two associate students of the occult, a high-ranking British naval officer and a famous violinist, wore robes of white and gold. That incident, Crowley claimed, had taken place four years before, and the invoked spirit, which Crowley described as "sexless and oxlike" had materialized amid clouds of incense with its "hideous human features suffused with blood," while it hoarsely prophesied that Europe was on the verge of a destructive great war.

Crowley spent the war years in America, establishing branches of his London cult. Occasionally, he retreated to an island eighty miles up the Hudson River, near Kingston, New York, to engage in deep contemplation. There, for the benefit of passengers on river steamers, he painted a statement in huge red letters:

"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

That summed Crowley's creed, which found its widest acceptance in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, a rendezvous for people who were willing to try anything, not just once, but often. There, in his "Temple of Darkness," Beast 666 taught his disciples that the world was peopled by witches, demons and devils, dating from the satyrs of Greek mythology and their kindred spirit, the god Pan. Soon, new tales of his Satanic rites were confirming the spicy reports that Kemp had made. In the wake of these scandals that were beginning to undermine his cult, the Beast decided to decamp for a fresher field.

Crowley chose Cefalu, in Sicily, where he set up a sex cult called the Abbey of Thelema, which attracted some of his most rabid - and wealthiest - followers to date. But the sudden death of a young Englishman under somewhat unexplainable circumstances forced Crowley to leave Italy for France. However, his stay there was also short-lived, and he was soon ordered out of France when word leaked out that he was planning Satanic rites in Paris. All this made sensational headlines in the pulp London weeklies where Crowley was branded as "The King of Depravity," "A Human Beast." "A Cannibal at Large," and the "Wickedest Man in the World."

Shortly after Crowley's escape from France, a book appeared, giving inside stories of the Order of the Temple of the Orient - O.T.O. - Crowley's witchcraft cult of his Greenwich Village days. The book claimed that he had utilized a rare South American drug to make his clients see fantastic colors and impossible creatures. The book also listed the contents of A.C.'s favorite cocktail, the Kubla Khan Number Two, which consisted of unspecified amounts of gin and vermouth, plus lesser quantities from two other bottles, one being labeled "Poison." The informant found out later that the "poison" bottle contained laudanum, a tincture of opium. When Crowley sued the author for libel, his case was thrown out of court by an English judge, who classed as "blasphemous" some of Crowley's ritualistic chants that were quoted in the book.

All this simply roused new interest in devil cults and other forms of witchcraft, which sprouted in ever-increasing numbers, particularly in England. Aleister Crowley lived until 1954 and when he died in Brighton, there was a grand turnout of members of mystic cults at his funeral. Needless to say, it was celebrated in true pagan style. Scotland Yard was particularly interested in this very special funeral because it was steadily stepping up its investigations of secret organizations of the Satanic type that Crowley sponsored.

According to police reports, these groups form a veritable web that can enmesh unsuspecting victims in an ever-increasing tangle. The first step may be mere attendance at a lecture on some phase of witchcraft, where newcomers are approached and asked if they would like to witness a meeting or ritual of the type discussed. Similarly, an obscure bookstore handling volumes on metaphysical subjects can be the "front" for secret backroom meeting places. So-called "spirit seances" are also stepping stones to devil worship, as materialization of ghostly forms is their ultimate objective.

Small, third-rate hotels were also watched by Scotland Yard, particularly those with rooms so poorly furnished that it was a wonder why anybody would stay in them - although nobody really did. Instead, guests were conducted to the cellar, then through a secret door that was probably an old fireplace, into an adjacent basement where a closet was unlocked, with all the mystery of Bluebeard's castle, to reveal a circular staircase leading up to a Satanic Temple. After all that mumbo jumbo, a neophyte would be definitely conditioned for anything - from the worship of a hideous tropical idol to the celebration of a Black Mass.

In contrast to all this, there has been a concerted effort to revive witchcraft on a benign scale, with the claim that it is the "old religion," dating back even before the Druids. The chief advocate of this practice was a well-traveled Englishman, Dr. Gerald Gardner, who had studied primitive customs throughout the world and regarded many of them as offshoots of the "old religion" mixed with other beliefs. While Aleister Crowley was still finding himself unwelcome and unwanted in havens where he hoped to propagate his Satanic ceremonies, Gerald Gardner was serenely establishing himself on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, equidistant from England, Scotland and Ireland.

The Isle of Man was an ideal site for Gardner and his followers because it was steeped in lore of fairy-folk and witchcraft. It was also the cross-roads for many invading races and, even today, it has the status of a kingdom in its own right, with its government founded on the old Norse parliament. Hence the attitude toward witchcraft was different than in England, where the laws forbidding it were not repealed until as late as 1951. But the Isle of Man offered another attraction for a lover of the primitive like Dr. Gardner; thanks to its equable, sunny climate and its liberal laws, a nudist colony was thriving there, offering an opportunity to combine two popular cults.

Dr. Gardner added a new twist to an old distinction between "black" and "white" witchcraft, which supposedly represented the bad and good sides of the coin. He linked horrible deeds for which witches had so often been condemned, with diabolical rites in which evil spirits were invoked. That was the reason why a circle was drawn around the invokers - to keep the forces of evil from storming in and overwhelming their conjure-uppers.

Now, according to Dr. Gardner, good witches needed a surrounding circle to contain the power which they personally generated or exuded, until they were ready to launch it forth into the void as a full-fledged psychic power. By that same sound logic, Dr. G. decided that clothing would cramp the process. In order to charge the circle properly, nudism was the only answer. Hence neophytes should be introduced to the sacred circle wearing only a blindfold; and when divested of even that, they would find that the other members of the coven were also in the altogether, ready to participate in the initiation.

What a surprise! What an initiation! What fun! Anyway, that's how it was, how it is, and probably will be, regardless of how it should be. Based upon such a premise, witch cults have been on the increase in England ever since, until at last report there were an estimated 6,000 witches - masculine, feminine and possibly neuter - operating in England alone. Reports throughout Europe are almost as encouraging and, even in America, scattered returns show that witchcraft is on the rise.

Good, or white witches limit themselves to groups of thirteen to a coven, usually six men and six women, with a high priest or priestess presiding over them. According to some authorities, thirteen has always been the magic number for a coven and records of certain witchcraft trials show that just that number of suspects were involved. Where there were less, it could have meant that the witchfinders simply hadn't caught up with the rest, or that the coven was short-handed. Where there were more than thirteen, it indicated that members of two or more covens were involved. At the roundup of witches charged with raising a storm to wreck the ship that was bringing King James of Scotland home from Denmark, thirty-nine suspects were involved, which meant that three covens were working on the job.

Yet that didn't prove that storm-raising witches were all bad. It just depended on who was to be wrecked and why. After the Spanish Armada was defeated by the English fleet, its ships were scattered and many wrecked by a totally unexpected storm that could have been the wish of English witches. When Napoleon was planning a sea invasion of England, storms helped to ruin his hopes. That bit of history repeated itself on a still greater scale when Hitler planned a similar invasion during World War II, and, in that case, English witches openly took credit for raising the devastating storms that repeatedly thwarted the Nazis from making their attempt.

Still, witches can't be all good, either. In extolling the rites used by the benign English witches, Dr. Gardner added a distinctly dubious note when he stated: "The only man I can think of who could have invented the rites was the late Aleister Crowley ... There are indeed certain expressions and certain words used which smack of Crowley; possibly he borrowed things from the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed expressions from him." - a good point to remember before joining a coven of modern witches in an innocent frolic. It may be just another way of giving the Devil his due.