Word: voodooed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
High in the voodoo hills of Haiti above Port-au-Prince, a big bonfire crackled one day last week. Some 200 Haitians, dressed in their cotton Sunday best, watched intently while an old lady threw object after object into the flames-bottles to bubble when a thief is in the garden, carved wooden bowls from which to feed the gods, wanga bags to protect the traveler, love charms, colored beads, mysterious, headless dolls. Granny Holdeman was having another "burning." Granny's ceremonial burning of voodoo charms and fetishes is a potent symbol in a land where dark gods...
...tiny thatched cailles that dot the ravines and mountains. She told the surprised Haitians about the dispensary and the need to come immediately when they were sick or hurt. She told them about the school. And wherever she could she would wage a persistent Protestant war against the voodoo gods, Papa Legba (who is interlocutor between men and the gods), Maitresse Erzulie (of love) and Damballa Wedo (the good serpent of the sky), and against the houngans (priests) and mambos (priestesses) who served them...
...predominantly Roman Catholic Haiti, this is a novel idea, even to many of those who have been exposed to Christianity. To be on the safe side, a Haitian is inclined to bow to both Catholic saints and voodoo gods. Catholic denunciations of this practice seem to him nothing more than natural loyalty to one's own group of interceders. The Baptist missions' 3,000-odd converts tend to make their break with voodoo complete...
...made of. Echoes of the South Seas. The Stat-singer drawings on exhibition last week seemed as relaxed in composition as her "photograms" had been, and the floating shapes that filled them echoed, abstractly, carved idols and amulets of the South Seas. But the atmosphere of an ephemeral, voodoo-haunted world which her art creates is achieved only by the greatest precision and patience...
Wenner-Gren's associates prudently hired an obeah (Bahamian voodoo) ghost (?10 from a local ghost renter) to assure success at the opening. As any obeah-minded Bahamian could have predicted, this precaution worked; the ghost, one Richard Crotch in life, worked silently and invisibly to bring the necessary luck. Such corporeal visitors as Prince and Princess Alexis Obolensky, Mrs. Winston Guest, Sir Victor Sassoon, Mrs. Bernard Gimbel and Metropolitan Opera Tenor Jussi Bjoerling materialized from amphibians that made 40 nights in and out. Other guests, before and since: Danny Kaye, the Countess of Leicester, Brenda Frazier Kelly...