Abstract
Haiti is an underdeveloped and impoverished country which shares an island in the Caribbean with the Dominican Republic. Approximately 85 percent of the people are illiterate, engage in little economic specialization, and function in small local kinship groups. The beliefs and rituals practiced in Haiti today, chiefly Voodoo, were inherited from the ancient religions of the East and from the Aegean world, and were transmitted to St. Domingue by West African slaves in the seventeenth century.1 Voodoo is an amalgam of African animism and the Catholicism of French missionaries. It is an elaborate religion containing a hierarchical structure of gods, saints, and angels; sacred cults; propitiatory rites; temples, and stratified clergy. It is perpetuated in family and small-group cults. Although not highly codified, Voodoo beliefs transmitted orally present a fairly systematic set of ethical and moral prescriptions for living. It has been practiced secretly for many years because of religious and political pres...
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