Restless Soul - Alex Archer [77]
“You’re rambling, Benjamin.” Annja yawned and sipped at her coffee. It was a strong brew, but she wished it was even stronger and had a little more of an acrid bite to it. She really needed help staying awake.
Anyway, I was at the Florida museum two winter breaks past because of their Voodoo display, not because of the shrunken heads—which it was silly of the locals to protest against in the first place. You know that Voodoo is a special interest of mine. I have a cousin—a second cousin, actually—on my mother’s side of the family who considers herself a mambo, a Voodoo priestess. That’s not why I’m interested in Voodoo, though. I’m just interested.
He capitalized voodoo, giving it respect. Many of the literary sources she’d read through the years capitalized it, too—just like Baptist, Catholic and Lutheran were capitalized.
Annja skimmed through the next few paragraphs, marveling at how fast Vaughan must be able to type and post. Then she got through his ramblings and to the real attention-grabbing material.
Your container looks just like the one that the Florida museum displayed. The spitting image of it, in fact. I remember because it left one of those lasting impressions on me. I found it particularly grisly that they’d lumped it in with the Voodoo display. The skull’s not exactly Voodoo. Not true Voodoo, in any event.
Grisly was the term Annja had used when she’d come upon the skull bowl, as there was something unsettling about the thing. She’d been raised in an orphanage in New Orleans, where voodoo was both a tourist concern and a religion. She’d learned quite a bit about voodoo and hoodoo, and had some friends who’d thoroughly embraced them.
Voodoo meant “God Creator” or “Great Spirit,” and could trace its roots back perhaps ten thousand years on the African continent. Those who really knew about it considered the sensationalized tales of human sacrifices and devil worship laughable and the stuff of bad movies. Practitioners believed voodoo was life affirming and spiritual, and she recalled reading that there were millions who practice it around the world today, though most notably in Africa, South America, Central America, the Caribbean islands and parts of the United States. Undeniably ancient, it had been labeled the “Cult of Ancestors,” and was tied closely to animistic spirits. She remembered Zakkarat mentioning that some of Northern Thailand’s hill tribes were animistic.
Annja had attended more than a few voodoo ceremonies in New Orleans, during her unescorted youthful adventures away from the orphanage. In the back of her mind she relived the music and colorful clothes. In one outing a tall woman went into a trance to communicate with the spirits of her dead relatives. In New Orleans Catholicism was mixed in with some of the voodoo ceremonies, and healing the mind and body was a central message.
Historically, voodoo spread from Africa in the 1500s as the slave trade blossomed. Tribesmen abducted into slavery from Africa’s west coast, now Gambia and Senegal all the way to the Congo, brought their religious beliefs with them. In the Caribbean islands, where they were forced to work on the plantations and their owners tried to turn them into Christians, they kept their faith and continued performing the ancient rituals in secret. The term voodoo, or vodou at the time, came from the African Dahomey tribe.
Annja knew that even in the present day voodoo practitioners believed in one supreme being that ruled over men’s and women’s families, love matters, justice, health, wealth, happiness, work and their ability to provide food for their