h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Great entry WebWitch. Jolly informative.

Pimms

Yes
Very good article. I live on the Gulf of Mexico and am familiar with both the truth and falacies of Vodou. The cinema, I believe, is responsible for so much misinformation in probably every subject under the sun, but especially religions. I think many people formed their mental image of Vodou when they saw "Live and Let Die". Some probably believed some of the things in "Serpent and the Rainbow". But my favorite representation of Vodou in cinema, because of it's lack of malice, playfullness and a beat you can dance to, is the "Papa Legba" sequence with Pops Staples singing from David Byrne's quirky 1986 film, "True Stories". Now I'm not saying it's any more realistic than the others, but at least there's no mention of Zombies.

Webwitch for a very good article.

Very well done. It was so interesting. I've read a little about orisha but this was by far the most informative thing I've seen. Thanks for a job well done!

Thank you all - you're very kind.

I've found researching Vodou to be incredibly interesting, and I'm hoping that maybe a Vodou practitioner might at some point like to write a Guide from their viewpoint. It would be interesting to have a cluster of Vodou-related Guides. It strikes me as a powerful and very beautiful religious tradition, and one that has been dreadfully maligned.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a short series of seminars on Haitian Vodou. As I'm in touch with the Vodouisants who presented the seminars, I'm looking forward to learning more. At some point, I may be in the position of looking back at this article and asking the editors to allow me to fiddle with it to reflect any fundamental changes I feel need making, but at my current level of knowledge, it seems gratifyingly sound.