Haiti Earthquake & Voodoo: Myths, Ritual, and Robertson
Haiti Earthquake & Voodoo: Myths, Ritual, and Robertson
A human being has both a physical body and a soul or spirit, and at death the two dissociate. The spirit of the individual slips away and must be ritually reclaimed by a priest in a ceremony at a certain time after death, usually a year and a day in Haiti.
The spirit initially associated with a particular relative, a father or grandfather or whatever, in time becomes reclaimed and is placed into a vessel, which is placed into the inner sanctuary of a temple.
In time the vessel becomes part of a vast ancestral pool of energy, and out of that pool emerges the archetypes of the spirits of the voodoo pantheon, which are seen as multiple expressions of the greater god.
In ritual these spirits, or lwa, can be summoned. Responding to the power of prayer, they momentarily displace the soul of the living such that human being and God become one and the same. This is spirit possession, the moment of divine grace.
As a Trek fan, this sounds like someone in the fashioning of the Vulcan rituals of katra researched voodoo.
Placing the spirit which has been sheltered by another, in a vessel, to become a part of an ancestral spiritual "pool of energy"...this cannot be a coincidence.
This gives the katra idea an extra dimension of depth to me. I have read some of Voodoo before,long ago, in a book I read-Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy. This article makes me want to reread this. I read it sometime around the late 1980's.
I am sure there are parts no outside will know to the Voodoo rituals-as is should be.
Honoring the varying boundaries between levels of religious knowledge and respecting what people are willing to talk about to scholars, friends, outsiders, et al can be often, in my mind, the only way to get to a truth that can help the outsider at all levels of closeness and distance from someone's faith/religion/life/culture understand and empathize with smeone from another culture/religion etc.
I am grateful for what insight is offered, and an increase in knowledge.., even if I do just understand through a glass darkly.
And "fascinated" that someone in the Trekverse was influenced by Haitian, Voodoo culture.