1846: (Saints and Guyons: Voodoo Surfaces as Haiti’s True Faith): By the mid-1840s, during the presidency of old Pierrot, a pair of hitherto secret sects had…

1846: (Saints and Guyons: Voodoo Surfaces as Haiti’s True Faith): By the mid-1840s, during the presidency of old Pierrot, a pair of hitherto secret sects had surfaced openly and were at war with each other — one called “Guyons” (also known as “lougawou”), who were avowed servants of evil carrying wangas, snakes, human bones, and by wide repute human flesh, and the other called “Saints,” fanatic believers who congregated in bands led by self-anointed frères exercising priestly functions in approximate forms of Catholicism intermixed with African liturgies. Whether devoted to light or darkness, both sects professed beliefs and knew mysteries of what would generically be called vaudou, and amid the ruins of the Church, religious practices had sprung up that commingled the rites of Rome and those of old Dahomey — possessing no great churches, no hierarchy, no seminaries, no dogma, Voodoo yet possessed more than all these: it possessed the hearts and, on given occasions, the bodies of its people. Thomas Madiou described what in 1846 may have been the first Voodoo service ever held openly in Port-au-Prince: at eleven at night a dense crowd, howling fearfully to the lugubrious throb of drums, filled the street as a garlanded he-goat led by figures in white emerged from the mob, and men and women swirled in indecent dances with snakelike contortions until the immolation of the goat brought the ceremony to its climax, with even the agents of police dancing and chanting over the sacrifice. Such a ceremony would never have been tolerated by Toussaint, Dessalines, or Henry Christophe — paradoxically, all three great noirs who understood Voodoo in its full ramifications repressed and conceivably feared what would later become Haiti’s true faith. By the time Riché became president, Voodoo’s roots, like those of Toussaint’s tree of liberty, were many and deep.