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Populär Culture Review
o f a Voodoo priestess and priestess herseif. While performing what
Salgado calls the “danse loa,”5 Epiphany sings, utters loud chants,
moves, and lifts and lowers her white robe in order to address the spirits.
As soon as she establishes connection with the spiritual world and
becomes “the vessel through which the gods make their wishes known,”
her body Starts twisting to the extent that she looses control over herseif
and falls on to the ground (Bell 279).
Salgado describes such a spiritual possession as “crise-loa” a
state o f trance. Ethnologist Lilas Desquiron defines this state o f trance in
more detail. She understands it as “un mode de contact maitrise, voulu,
necessaire, [et] p o sitif’ (a form o f controlled, wanted, necessary, [and]
positive contact) (Desquiron 125). “Cette communication religieuse et
benefique est” (This religious and beneficial communication is) between
the medium— in our case, Epiphany Proudfood— and the deities that
speak in the language o f her twisting body (Desquiron 125). To honor
the Bondye and the respective Iwa, Epiphany ends the ceremony with the
sacrifice o f a chicken whose warm blood and flesh she first consumes
then shares with the congregation.
Two things need to be noted: First, according to Brenda Marie
Osbey, New Orleans native and writer in residence at Louisiana State
University, New Orleans’ Voodoo “has never included public ritual or
anything resembling group worship” as illustrated in Parker’s film
(Osbey 4). Osbey also States that “whatever ritual takes place” it is held
between “the seeker and nature” (4), between the seeker and what she
calls “the mother,” to whom historians, folklorists, anthropologists, and
Voodoo followers refer to as priestess or mambo. Second, even though
animal sacrifice is a common custom to honor and to appease the Gods
in Benign, Africa— the birthplace o f the African religion— blood
sacrifice, as visualized in Angel Heart, is “rarely seen or performed by
the W estem ers” and is not part o f present-day Voodoo rituals in America
( Voodoo Rituals 00:19:03). The “drankenness [... ], blood drinking, the
devouring o f live chickens” as shown in Parker’s film and also falsely
declared in Robert Tallant’s book, Voodoo in New Orleans (1984) are
fictional (Long, New Orleans xxxiv). Moreover, they misrepresent what
African Voodoo followers widerstand as one o f the religion’s most
divine rituals, the appeasement o f the ancestral spirits through animal
sacrifice.
According to Osbey, misrepresentations o f the Voodoo religion
should be understood as the remains o f “peculiar prejudices o f the
[French and Spanish] colonial mind” (5). I agree with Osbey in that