"I've got a way to see the spirit.
"Voodoo" woman". Sumter, South Carolina
If I am going any place in the night,
I can walk along the road,
and if anybody died in a house,
and I pass that house out in the country,
and I want to see whoever it was that died,
I can spit on the ground in front of me,
and hold up my arm, and look under there,
and I can see whoever it is that died.
If you look back, you can
always see them hiding behind you.
I have to look under my left arm,
if I want see them before they scare me."
"Voodoo" Spirits" in-spite of harsh laws prohibiting them from
publicly honoring them as was done in Haiti.
As a result, an aggressive campaign was implemented to do away with African traditional religious practices once and for all. Heavy fines were often levied. Brutal forms of torture, severe beatings and even death was imposed on anyone caught practicing any from of the religion. Stringent laws were passed to prevent the Africans from speaking any African languages, building shrines, making ritual drums, or any musical instruments. Vodoun shrines erected in Black established townships were frequently raided by police. Family members and neighbors were encouraged to "report" one another if caught practicing any form of the religion.
It is important to note that these aggressive tactics to destroy the religions of Africa did not begin in America. They are a continuation of centuries of religious persecution and suppression led by the Roman papal, in order to mask their historical usurpation of African matriarchal theology, ritual, and sacerdotal authority, and the Afro-Chaldean mystical sun-priests and diviners prestige. It was their temples that dominated all the ancient world, including in ancient Greece and Rome.
In America, these draconian laws (which continued unabated until well after Reconstruction), included prohibitions against organizing in public; and any other method by which the slave owners suspected they might be "working " their magic.
Many priests and priestess' were murdered, some escaped up North, and nearly all who refused to [later] "convert" to Christianity and could not escape, suffered intense spiritual alienation and anguish due to the neglect of their Ancestors and gods. Thousands resisted and continued their practices underground. Forcing a once historically open and proud religio-culural tradition to develop the underserved reputation of being "dark, and sinister" in the West.
These medieval, and unconstitutional laws were so successful, that in less than one generation, the many priests and priestesses who were not murdered, were forced to practice underground, and the new generations of enslaved Afro-Diaspora had developed a learned afro-hagiophobia: a pathological fear and irrational intimidation of African spiritual and esoteric science, ancestral veneration, and its ritual and cultural expressions. The simplest spirit manifestations that were once understood in their cosmological context, now "spooked" the newly conditioned generations of African-Americans.
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