Wade Davis (11:56)

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Tommy Mischke (11:59)

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Wade Davis (12:13)

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Tommy Mischke (12:14)

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Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (14:25)

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Tommy Mischke (14:44)

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a scientific investigation and personal adventure story about zombies and the voodoo culture of Haiti by a Harvard scientist named Wade Davis. Back in the 80s, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate documented cases of zombies, people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had officially been declared dead. Drawn into another world of rituals and celebrations, Wade Davis penetrates the voodoo mystique deep enough to place zombification in its proper context within the culture of Haiti. In the course of his investigation, Wade Davis came to realize that the story of voodoo is the history of Haiti, from the African origins of its people to the successful Haitian independence movement down to the present day, where voodoo culture is, in effect, the de facto government of Haiti's rural countryside. I welcome him to the show now. Glad to have you here with me, Wade.

Wade Davis (15:54)

Thanks, Tommy.

Tommy Mischke (15:55)

I love the story of hearing how you got from the wilds of Western Canada to the steps of Harvard University. Can you tell that story?

Wade Davis (16:04)

Well, you know, Tommy, that's a wonderful story to begin with, particularly given your audience. And your podcast is radiating out from Minneapolis, a city that's on everybody's minds and everybody's hearts these days.

Tommy Mischke (16:18)

Thank you.

Wade Davis (16:19)

And this story tells you all that's great about America. I was a kid growing up, modest family in Canada and British Columbia. I would fight forest fires when I was 15 and work in logging camps. And our fire camps were overrun in the late 60s by American draft dodgers who were fleeing to Canada. And we were sort of obedient Canadian lads. And these Americans had this irreverent charisma. And they would tell our bosses to piss off. When you're 15 years old and someone tells your boss to piss off, you Notice. And one of them, by chance, had the Life magazine with the Harvard student strike of 1969 on the COVID And in a kind of adolescent way, I thought, well, that must be the college you go to to become cool like these guys. And so I applied to Harv. Harvard. And I got in, but my mom and dad didn't have the money to go all the way from British Columbia to Boston with me. So they put me on a plane with my enormous steamer trunk with everything I owned in it. And I arrived at Logan Airport in Boston. And I suddenly realized. And I was. I guess at the time I was 16 or 17. I had no idea where Harvard was. And I saw this guy with a Harvard T shirt. I thought, he's got to know. He didn't know either. And my family didn't take taxis, Tommy. So I got in the subway system, dragged that trunk across Boston, emerged in Harvard Square. At the time, it was a complete madhouse of SDS and Harry Krishnas and people getting high and having fun. And suddenly I realized my mom had made a mistake, and she had sent me down to Harvard 10 days early, and the dorms weren't open. So there I was without a penny in my pocket and nowhere to stay. And I dragged my trunk through the streets of Cambridge until I ran into a church, and I knocked on the door, and a pastor opened the door, and he offered to put me up for a week. And that moment is when I fell in love with the United States.

Tommy Mischke (18:22)

It's a crazy time in the country, a wild time to be at college. But pretty soon, it's time for things to get serious. You have to declare a major, and you don't know what you want to study. In fact, it's the night before you have to declare, and you still don't know.

Wade Davis (18:42)

Came around time to define your major, and I hadn't given it a thought, Tommy. I ran into a friend in the street, and I said, well, Stuart, what are you going to major in? And he said, anthropology. And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you read about Indians. I said, well, that'll do. And so I signed on as a student of anthropology. And I think there's a lesson here for young people who are taught all their lives. You know, life is linear, that you've got to go from A to B and then C and D. If you skip E and F, you never get to the rest of the Alphabet. Well, of course, we all know that life is not at all linear. It's made up of these Kind of crossroads and serendipitous moments when you've got to seize the opportunity and go for it. You know, it's like Jim Whitaker, the great Everest climber, said, if you're not living on the edge when you're young, you're taking up too much space. So I began my studies of anthropology. But after about a year, I kind of grew tired of just reading social theory and reading about native people in books. And I was with a roommate of mine who was a rough cut kid from the west in a cafe in Harvard Square. And there was a map of the world by chance, a National Geographic map of the world. And David, my friend, looked at the map and he looked at me, and he looked at the map and he suddenly pointed to the high Arctic. Well, I had to go somewhere, and I watched my left arm lift and hit the northwest Amazon of Colombia. And had I landed in Italy, I might have become a Renaissance scholar. But having decided to go to the Amazon on a pure whim, and, you know, this was also part of the era of the 60s, I think a lot of us were looking for more authentic life experiences. You know, remember, that was the whole dynamic. Our poor mothers and fathers had endured the Depression, endured the war, in the case of my father, really been broken by the war in the 1950s. All they wanted was calm and stability and predictability, which was their due. But for us growing up in that era, materially spoiled as we were, that wasn't enough. And it provoked this kind of hunger for which the 60s sort of became known. And so hitting the open road in pursuit of one's destiny was not an unusual thing for young people to do. I just picked an unusual destination.

Tommy Mischke (21:00)

So you headed to South America and you dove headfirst into the world of plants and plant medicine and plant mystery and plants as used in religious ceremonies.

Wade Davis (21:13)

For about six years, all I thought about was plants. And I collected probably 30,000 specimens and from some of the most remote reaches of the northwest Amazon and the Andes. And after a while, as I went to graduate school, having spent time with dozens of indigenous groups and written many academic papers on their use of plants as medicines, narcotics, hallucinogens, foods, I was sort of hungry for a more intellectual challenge, you know, and there was always something waiting for you in the fourth floor office of Professor Schultes. And one wintry day, he summoned me to his office and said very casually, would you like to go down to the Caribbean island nation of Haiti, infiltrate the secret societies and secure the formula of a drug used to make Zombies. Well, Naturally, I said yes, thinking that it might be a lark over spring break, but the assignment would end up consuming four years of my life and lead to the writing of two different books, one of which was made into a Hollywood movie.

Tommy Mischke (22:27)

And you would enter the world of voodoo, something you knew very little about.

Wade Davis (22:33)

We think of voodoo as a dark magic, black magic cult. It's not. It's simply the religion of Africa, of West Africa. Voodoo is just the. Like all religions, it's a spiritual worldview that tries to understand the nature of death, what happens to us beyond the grave, if you will. In many ways, it's a very democratic faith because the believer not only has direct access to the divine, he or she actually becomes the spirit through ritual. And zombies are the living dead. An individual who is, by folk definition, an individual who's had their soul stolen and cast into sort of state of perpetual purgatory, often said to involve some kind of servitude. And obviously, the team of scientists who sent me down there, which included some of the great psychopharmacologists of the country, including Nathan Klein, who had won two Lasker Awards, which is the US Equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and they were interested in the reputed existence of a folk preparation that was said to bring on a state of apparent death so profound it could fool a Western trained physician. And they were interested in this drug for its possible application in modern medicine.

Tommy Mischke (23:48)

Tell me about the zombie who seemed to be the first guy doctors were pretty sure had died, and yet somehow he was still walking around.

Wade Davis (23:59)

This man had been pronounced dead in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital run at the time by Larry Mellon, which kept impeccable records. And his death had been witnessed by two American trained physicians. The death certificate had been examined by forensic experts. There were all these lines of evidence.

Tommy Mischke (24:20)

The thinking was this guy had taken something that caused his body to appear to be dead when it was alive. You had a great interest in figuring out what could do that.

Wade Davis (24:32)

Nobody had managed to secure its formula to see if it really had something biologically active that could account for this possibility. And that was my job, was to go down and secure that formula. And I wasn't looking for a preparation that could kill someone. Lots of things can kill. I was looking for something that could fool a physician. And as it turned out, the essential and consistent ingredients in the eight or nine samples that I saw prepared collected in various parts of Haiti, besides human remains that were put into the poison for magical reasons, the consistent ingredient turned out to be a marine fish, which we Knew well because it was a relative of the famous fugu fish of Japan, the culinary delicacy that people eat with great care because the fish has within its viscera and on the surface of the skin a very powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, which blocks sodium channels and brings on peripheral paralysis, dramatically low metabolic rates, and yet consciousness is retained until death. And in fact, in the literature, Japan, completely unrelated to anything going on in Haiti, I found case after case after case of people misdiagnosed, dead, even nailed into their coffins by mistake.

Tommy Mischke (25:57)

Another big question was, what was the point of creating a zombie? What was the point of giving somebody something that made it appear as though they were dead and then reviving them later and keeping them in some addled state?

Wade Davis (26:15)

What the heck is a zombie? Why has someone made a zombie? And if this is true, who's controlling the process? It turns out that the zombie poison was a form of capital punishment, invoked in Haiti, much as the secret societies do in west Africa. Societies that have judicial functions, they have punishments, and they sanction people by the use of poisons. And it turns out that narcisse was not a great man, and his zombification was a form of capital punishment. And that's why a zombie loses their soul. That implies losing your autonomy. And when they talk about enslavement, you lose your physical freedom. And again, the two things, particularly given the Haitian history, combine to make zombification a fate worse than death.

Tommy Mischke (27:05)

You actually got into these secret societies in Haiti where punishments like zombification were doled out. You were the only white guy to ever be allowed into these secret societies. You won your way somehow into their trust.

Wade Davis (27:25)

You have to understand, Tommy, these societies were so feared that when I applied to the national science foundation for a grant to pursue the study of them, I received the money. But the anonymous academic reviewers, all Haitian experts, wrote on the documents that I had to be told that if I did this research, I would be killed. That was literally the perception of these societies. I didn't think it was true, or I wouldn't have done it. But no one had really gone close to these societies. And I was able, through relationships and time and patience and good fortune, to actually be invited to become a member of the societies. And I was actually initiated into the bizango champuel. This was very much African in its roots. And if we go to west Africa, where these secret societies are ubiquitous, they're the most powerful arbiter of social and political life. They have tribunals, they have Hierarchies, they punish people and they do so with poisons. It was as understandable and in a sense, elemental as our own institution of capital punishment and our own tribunals in the judiciary.

Tommy Mischke (28:38)

If living in Haiti for decades, I wouldn't have necessarily run into zombies. I would have heard about them the way maybe in the Pacific Northwest, in the United States, I'd hear about Sasquatch. I'm not seeing Sasquatch, but the stories are everywhere. What fascinates me, though, is that there would be enough evidence for someone to take it seriously. And by seriously, I mean believing that something was happening to these people. It was probably something they're ingesting that mimicked death. Let's find out what that is. And there was a belief, I think you'll agree, that if you could find out what that is, there might be some help for all of humankind for what is learned there. There might be uses for this. It wasn't just, how do you find a zombie?

Wade Davis (29:28)

No, I mean, it was even, you know, anesthesiology is much more complicated than people understand. You know, it's easy to put someone out. It's hard to make sure they come back in one piece, if you know what I mean.

Tommy Mischke (29:40)

Yeah.

Wade Davis (29:41)

And so they were always on the outlook for new anesthetics in general. NASA was interested in the challenge of artificial hibernation for long interplanetary space voyages. What do you do with an active a personality pilot when they've got to sit around for six months to get somewhere?

Tommy Mischke (30:07)

I want you to picture a couple of worlds. They're places you could put your loved one with dementia or Alzheimer's. There's a world out there you find all over the place where staff parks your loved one in front of a television set and that's their day. Treats your loved one kind of like a little child. Those places are all over. And then there's the well shire of Bloomington and Medina, where all they focus on is memory care. And they've realized it's best to break it up into the four stages of memory care. To have four households for those four stages, to have experts in those four stages working to create an environment that's absolutely loving, warm, inviting, vivial, joyful to spend a lot of time with your loved one. Laughing, talking, playing music, taking them to the ice cream parlor on site, the cinema. There are different worlds out there, but you'll never know about them until you tour those different worlds. Tour the wellshire of Bloomington and Medina.

Sally Ann Glassman (31:17)

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Tommy Mischke (31:47)

Jim's grandfather died in 1956. His boiler is still running. Same boiler, same house in St. Paul. The people who live there now, they have no idea. But I know because MSP installed it in 1948. And when Jim sold the house in 2018, he told the new owners, whatever you do, don't touch that boiler. See, there's this thing that happens when a company has been around Since World War I, like Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, heating and Air, they stop thinking in quarters and start thinking in generations. Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, heating and Air doesn't dabble. They don't also do boilers along with furnaces. They've been keeping Minnesotans from freezing to death since before it was called H Vac, since before air conditioning, since before your great grandmother was born. Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, Heating and Air. Still here, still warming the houses their grandfathers warmed. I'm back with Wade Davis, author of the Serpent and the Rainbow and one hell of a lot of other books, frankly. You travel the world, you immerse yourself in different cultures as a means of learning about them. And to do that, you can't come charging in. As a judgmental Westerner, you'd get nowhere doing that. You come in usually without any judgment at all so as to learn what exactly you're looking at. What is this world? Now, sometimes you guys who do this get criticized for being so accepting of all you encounter, good and bad. What's your response to that?

Wade Davis (33:40)

You know, sometimes anthropologists are accused of embracing a kind of extreme relativism, as if every trait of behavior has to be defended just because it exists. That's not true. Anthropology never calls for the elimination of judgment. It calls for the suspension of judgment. So the very judgments that are ethically obliged to make as human beings can be informed ones. And voodoo's a good example of that. Naturally, wherever the African people went and the enslaved came from everywhere, from Senegal around to Mozambique, they brought their religious faith. It makes perfect sense. And when the people landed, their religious beliefs became informed by their new situation. And that's why we have throughout the Americas different forms of African religious practice. So you have, you know, in Dominican Republic and Cuba, you have Santeria, you know, which has got a strong Catholic element to it. You have Obia and the revival churches in Jamaica. You have Macumba and Belen and Afro Brazilian parts of that country. And you have Hoodoo in the American south, in New Orleans. And the thing that makes Haiti again so interesting, whereas Jamaica, British colony until 1963, with all the influences that that implies, Haiti's independent 1804. And it's completely isolated for almost 100 years. And that's why the. The African continuity is so strong in Haiti. You know, voodoo is. The essence of voodoo is simply a way of understanding what happens to you when you die, when you engage in ritual. The ultimate moment of African belief is that moment when you summon the spirit. And the spirit momentarily displaces the soul of the living. And one of the things that I found so impressive when I first arrived in Haiti was to visit ceremonies where you saw individuals cast into trance, handling burning embers, you know, burning coals the size of small apples, red hot, glowing hot in their mouths with impunity. A kind of what struck me as an amazing example of how the mind can affect the body when kind of liberated in a state of excitation and ecstasy. And so I remember thinking, my God, you know, I used to walk around Haiti in the early days, you know, always remembering that line from the Dylan song, you know, you know, there's something happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? You know, and I just had a strong feeling that if these physical manifestations coming out of religious practice were so self evident, seeing them before my eyes, I had to not just take the whole thing seriously. I had to accept the possibility that through religious devotion, Haitians, Africans in general, were achieving a kind of a static liberation, if you will, that we might call spirit possession. But whatever it was, was certainly not some sign of mental breakdown, but was rather the sign of divine grace. And when you witness that, and if you do so with an open mind, it's very uplifting, inspiring. And if it provoked anything to me, it would be almost jealousy that in my religious tradition, I don't have that kind of direct access to God.

Tommy Mischke (37:17)

Yeah. I mean, I could relate it to experiences growing up Catholic and then finding members of my family joining a charismatic Catholic community, where suddenly things got very different. And you had the speaking in tong and you had the possession of the spirit. And that was in the rather banal Midwestern world, Catholicism.

Wade Davis (37:40)

Well, you know, I think my goal in all of this, I mean, you know, we often judge harshly cultural practices that we Indulge in ourselves. I mean, so, for example, if you think of Holy Communion in your Catholic Church, remember that the theory of transubstantiation empowers the Catholic priest to turn that wine and that wafer into, not metaphorically, but literally into the blood and body of Christ. That's the whole theory. That's the difference between Protestant faith and Catholic faith.

Tommy Mischke (38:09)

Right, right.

Wade Davis (38:10)

And that means that when you take Holy Communion, bless you. But you are essentially indulging an endocannibolistic ritual. You're eating flesh and drinking blood. By the same token, if you go to the mother church of the cappuccino order in Rome, you can go down as you may have done in the crypts, and you can see the flayed bones of thousands of Capuchin priests. Skulls piled up as altars, tibia bones used as chandeliers, you know, vertebrae as applique on the walls of the crypt and so on. And there's a little sign there that says, you know, that which ye are, we once were, that which we are, ye shall become. And this, of course, is a great admonition of Christianity. You know, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. You know, get ready for death. It's coming. Who are we, then to judge the Haitian use of human remains or the Tibetan use of bones, for example, in musical instruments, when we're doing the same thing in the city of. The city of Christianity, Rome itself?

Tommy Mischke (39:15)

My uncle was a missionary in New guinea back in the 60s. He was the last guy to see Michael Rockefeller alive. And he used to tell me the reason the missionaries were so successful with those tribes there. They practiced cannibalism. And the Catholics would explain their religion to them, and they'd see birds of a feather. I see two different. Almost two different roads that you took. And they probably speak to the two different. At least two different parts of yourself in Haiti. There's one way you could have gone to Haiti where you get the formula and you use that for the betterment of mankind. Maybe in anesthesia, maybe in other ways, maybe it ends up being used by the space program. One way is purely. I want to get at what it is that's making these people seem like they're dead to Western doctors who should know better. There's another way you could take that out of the entire story, to hell with the whole science of it. And you could have just had the story of the way a culture operates and the fascinating world of a religion within a culture and the fascinating story of a people, the first people to ever have A successful slave revolt and all the extraordinary culture that can be found there. So there are these two different stories that seem to some degree to be all part of you.

Wade Davis (40:38)

You know, that's very. Tommy, honestly, it's very perceptive of you because I had some critics who would say, well, you know, if you want to pursue this hypothesis, make me some zombie rats. Replicate this in a laboratory. Make some zombie rats. And. And that was really, to my mind, to miss the entire point. People didn't understand the lengths that I was going to not to get the zombie poison as much as to tell the other story. It wasn't trivial to pursue membership in the Bizan Gauchamp. Well, you know, at one point, I had malaria and hepatitis for a month, and I didn't even know I was sick because I was just living the night shift and going out in the shadow of darkness. And to these extraordinary events with hundreds, if not thousands of people dressed in robes and walking across the countryside with torches, you know, hundreds of pilgrims going to a waterfall. See these extraordinary men and women go beneath the battering water of the waterfall, allowing their rags to be torn from their bodies so that like the snake that sheds its skin to be renewed. They too will be renewed for the coming year. I mean, it's absolutely stunningly, kind of moving and beautiful as your book is.

Tommy Mischke (41:54)

The Serpent and the Rainbow, a wild ride into the mysterious world of the island nation of Haiti. To enter into the world of Wade Davis and take in all the wondrous projects he's been involved in. Just remember the name Wade Davis and flip the words. The website is DavisWade.com. i enjoyed the conversation, Wade.

Wade Davis (42:22)

That's great, my friend. Thanks a lot. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Tommy Mischke (42:31)

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Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (43:36)

Member fdic.

Tommy Mischke (43:37)

Equal housing lender. Okay. For the final segment of this program, I thought I would hearken back to that New Orleans trip from years ago where I grabbed my recorder and went looking for a little adventure. It ties in, in a weird way, to the work of Wade Davis. Here's what that trip sounded like. Actor Matthew McConaughey said just recently. New Orleans is like a giant flashing yellow light. Proceed with caution, but proceed. Well, I proceeded, but what was I going to do with this city? Was I going to dive into the music barrel full bore into the cuisine buttonhole fishermen on Lake Pontchartrain and talk to him? The culture can drown you down here. I mean, it's too much, really. I wanted to go deep, man. I wanted to go exotic. I wanted to go where I couldn't ever go back in Minnesota. I wanted to go in the direction of New Orleans. Voodoo. Yes, voodoo. But even going there, I was headed into a morass. African spiritual influences made mixing with Haitian influences, French Catholic influences. And you also dive headlong into Native American spiritual traditions and Creole traditions. It's a thick, roiling stew, impossible to separate into any individual parts. New Orleans voodoo. Some mystical, magical, foreign, exotic, Southern spiritual realm full of mystery and intrigue. I wanted to throw myself into foreign worlds on this trip. The more foreign, the better. But where could I find this unique world of voodoo made famous in books and Hollywood films and songs and stories and myths? Who would allow me in? Who would give me the time of day? Who would give me the time of day? What I had not realized was voodoo was so common in New Orleans. I could jump in a cab and the cab driver would talk to me about it. The three cab rides I had that particular weekend in New Orleans, all involved people who dabbled in a little voodoo, like this cab driver here. Gotta come to New Orleans if you're gonna do a story on voodoo. That's correct. You ever use it?

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (46:40)

Yeah.

Tommy Mischke (46:41)

And it worked? It worked? Yeah. What did you use it for? I was having problems with this relationship.

Sally Ann Glassman (46:50)

And she gave me. It was a spell wrapped with a bow.

Tommy Mischke (46:56)

She put a spell in a small bag and wrapped it up?

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (46:59)

Yeah.

Sally Ann Glassman (46:59)

She said when you put this in.

Tommy Mischke (47:01)

Your pocket, the person you having trouble.

Sally Ann Glassman (47:04)

With will no longer give you any more trouble. The man was giving me the trouble. He didn't want to let the relationship go. So she gave me something.

Tommy Mischke (47:14)

I don't know if she was a priestess or what?

Sally Ann Glassman (47:17)

She said, what do you need? And I said, well, I'm having problems with a gentleman who won't let the relationship go. And she says, use this. He will get the message.

Tommy Mischke (47:31)

See, he was stalking me.

Sally Ann Glassman (47:32)

That's what he was doing.

Tommy Mischke (47:33)

He was stalking you?

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (47:34)

Yeah.

Tommy Mischke (47:35)

And how long did you have to keep that in your pocket? A few days?

Sally Ann Glassman (47:39)

No, weeks.

Tommy Mischke (47:40)

Oh, you kept it in your pocket for weeks? Mm. How long from the time you put it in your pocket till he quit bothering you?

Sally Ann Glassman (47:48)

About a week.

Tommy Mischke (47:49)

About a week. That's some powerful stuff. They say 15% of people in the state of Louisiana incorporate voodoo into their lives in some way, shape or form. The percentage no doubt higher in New Orleans from what I was able to gather during my time in the city. The voodoo there involves a belief in a visible and invisible world with a thin veil separating the two. Like Catholicism, voodoo is monotheistic. But also like Catholicism, there is the veneration of deceased saints or spirits and a belief in the power of a holy spirit. Voodoo practitioners call on the intercession of spirits. Those spirits have names. Voodoo practitioners also have a strong connection to their ancestors and believe they play a role in their lives. And in that sense, they are very much still of this world. And in this world, according to the tradition of voodoo, humans enter into communication with the spirits and in a very ritualized manner, becoming possessed by them. And then in that state, those spirits are able to serve people on the physical plane in various ways. Many of these spirits are capricious, and they will only be of help if one comes into contact with them correctly through elaborate rituals. Voodoo ceremonies embrace music and dance, food offerings, drumming, altars, talismans. I strolled into one voodoo temple near the edge of the French Quarter to speak with a 75 year old woman there known as Priestess Miriam. She's had her temple in New Orleans for years, and people come to her for help in all sorts of areas of their lives. In fact, on the day I walked in the door, there was a businessman coming in right behind me, looking like he just walked out the door of some suburban office complex. Who are you? I had a friend of mine recommend.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (49:57)

That I come and see you because I. I just sold my company and got a lot of life changes. And I'm from Louisiana, I grew up in Shreveport, but it's been over a.

Tommy Mischke (50:13)

Decade since I've been down here.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (50:15)

She was like, oh, you've got to.

Tommy Mischke (50:16)

Go see Priestess Miriam. So Priestess Miriam does not like talking about voodoo to media folk. I was one of the few she's ever allowed to even sit with her. You can dance around the subject of voodoo with her, but you can never really get too close to it. She starts to get too uncomfortable. Or begins talking in a cryptic manner impossible to follow. She grew up in a sharecropping family, picking cotton. Like other voodoo priests or priestesses I would eventually encounter in New Orleans. She knew there was something different about her very early on. My mom always said I was a very quiet child through my childhood. I would be sitting alone, away from all the other kids. I had not the ability to pick cotton. I have a sister who could pick cotton like that.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (51:16)

But I would start off with everybody.

Tommy Mischke (51:20)

And I would get way behind daydreaming. July was always the time that you had revival. Because people are sort of on a break from chopping until the cotton becomes seasoned for picking. Always the first two weeks in July were revival time. So I remember in my mind, I.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (51:48)

Never wanted to get up and just say I had religion. I was sitting, and I asked the.

Tommy Mischke (51:55)

Spirit to not let me just say.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (51:58)

I knew him, but let me truly know him.

Tommy Mischke (52:02)

And somehow in that evening, it was.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (52:06)

Like this electrified energy just penetrated through my soul. It was an electrified moment, and it.

Tommy Mischke (52:16)

Just made me rise and excited. An electric charge of joy. Yeah, it's like making fields shout. It makes you want to dance. This experience of being filled with the spirit in earlier Christian environments Was not uncommon. As I spoke with other people deeply involved in voodoo practices, they reported how this often opened them up to a much larger, grander, more intense, more powerful world of divinity. But when I asked priestess Miriam to take me from that powerful experience into her voodoo practices today. And how she got here and what all these practices involved, well, she changed her demeanor abruptly and once again talked of her problems with journalists. And she began to claim a level of ignorance when it came to her voodoo practice. Telling me she doesn't really know what she does. It was mildly frustrating. No matter what road I went down Trying to get at the heart of her spirituality, she put up a wall. I can't even tell you anything.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (53:31)

I don't know anything right now. I don't know anything right now.

Tommy Mischke (53:36)

You are reluctant, and I wonder where that reluctance comes from. I'm not reluctant to do anything. At this point in the conversation. I heard a noise inside a box that was sitting at my feet, A cardboard box. It was the sound of. It was the sound of something moving around. It turned out to be a mouse that this priestess had brought in that day, Intending to feed it to her serpent. I don't know what that is. Oh, that's the mouse in the box. I forgot. I brought some mouse for my serpent. For your serpent? Of course. Where's the serpent? You might be it now. I'm not a serpent. Well, we all are. What do you do with the serpent? Well, it's what she does. What kind of snake is that? Python. She came to me. She came to me in my sleep.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (54:38)

In 1990 and looked me in my face.

Tommy Mischke (54:43)

And when she came to you in your sleep and looked at you, was there a message? Spirit chooses you. Life can evolve you in many directions. Out of every human's life, God has spoken. St. John says, out of the depths.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (55:09)

Of my soul cometh the light.

Tommy Mischke (55:11)

Darkness within. And light shines out of darkness, and all things precedeth. New Orleans always seemed to me to be the American city, least like the rest of America. Wildly, wonderfully different. And I wasn't done running into voodoo practitioners. The next day, I met a voodoo priest right where I was staying. Tamu was his name. His ancestors were all from New Orleans, but he had left as a young man and ventured north, joining a Christian church, only to eventually feel the calling to come back to his spiritual roots.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (55:57)

I was called from out of what I was taught, from out of Christianity. I caught a lot of flack for questioning. I'm not one easily sold on a story just because you tell it to me and it's repeated several times. We were invited to a voodoo ceremony. The ceremony had already started. It was already fully in. You know, they were playing music, and people were going into possession. And I was just there assisting, helping to make sure people stayed safe. Nobody fell and got hurt or anything like that. Because when you go into possession, you know, you open yourself up as a vessel, and people have known to do some very supernatural things. It's not evil. It's not the devil. As a matter of fact, you can see all of these different practices being utilized in the church. In the Christian church. Speak in tongues, you know, it's the same thing.

Tommy Mischke (56:53)

Slain by the spirit. You hear that a lot.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (56:56)

Yeah. Slain by the spirit. I'm glad you said that. And so not knowing it, because I'm just new here. I had only been here two weeks, literally 14 days. Two of the godmothers, or the priestesses, as they say in their terminology, yay, yay. They do a head washing and a blessing, similar to being christened, so to speak. So the yeye, she washed my head first, and I could feel a calm, a calming come on.

Tommy Mischke (57:29)

Me.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (57:30)

But then the next line I got into, I had to wait a little longer for the head. Yay. Or the grandmother. And when she washed my head, I had to get on one knee and lean forward, and she started touching my head and doing Santerian prayers over me, and spirit hit me and I fell out. And at that time, what I saw was a line of my ancestors who were waiting for me, and they literally were welcoming me. It was like they were coming up out of the ground and telling me, you have a responsibility to uphold. There are many people who are going to need your healing, your strength. Honor us. To have this experience the way that I did it was remarkable. A doorway was being opened for me ancestrally.

Tommy Mischke (58:29)

Tamu's ancestral mix includes Native American, African American, Creole, and Irish also. Within two weeks of arriving in New Orleans, Temu was asked to join the north side Skull and Bones gang, a group whose roots go back to 1819. They can be found in the Treme neighborhood, just north of the French Quarter. On Mardi Gras morning, dressed in primitive skeleton outfits, going house to house, waking people up and reminding them of their mortality and consequently, their need to live well and live right. It is considered a high honor to be chosen as a Bonesman.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (59:17)

We are the first gang out Mardi Gras, or carnival morning, and we wake everybody up 5:30, creating a lot of fanfare, you know, traditional African drumming, some dancing, and we walk out the door, and you hear, ah, ah. That's the sound of the wild man. The wild man is the ones who protect the people in the village. Try to remind people, one day you too will pass on. So leave a good legacy. We are being watched from the other side, whether we recognize it or not. Ultimately, what every man and woman wants when they come in this world is not only to belong, but to know that they belong to a group that loves them, protects them, will nurture them. Essentially, that, to me, is what we're searching for the whole time we're here. We don't really find our use and our purpose until we find those groups, people like ourselves. And for me, I'm just an average person who wants to see right done in the world. And not necessarily the right that I want to see, but the right that's going to bring healing for everybody. The city of New Orleans is in itself older than everything in the United States. This city's spirit is a lot different than anything else in the United States. You can't compare New York or LA or Cleveland or Atlanta. There's nothing like it. I'm telling you, I've been to some places that have some real energy and nothing like New Orleans. Nothing like New Orleans at all. People have migrated from all over the world. For as long as you can think of migrated here. This is a very ancient worship center.

Tommy Mischke (61:13)

What is the most powerful thing that's ever happened to you within Vodou?

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (61:21)

I would have to say it's possession. There is no higher form of communication with the Creator. I've dealt with possession from the time I was a young child. I didn't know that's what was going on. The first time I actually went into possession was in church. I was in a Pentecostal church. I was 18. In the midst of singing and praising and speaking in tongues, I opened up. And at that time I was kind of scared at first because I thought that it was evil. But then I knew it couldn't be evil because in that state it was such a divine, such an enlightening, such a freeing experience. As I was singing and clapping and speaking in tongues. You can kind of say it's like an out of body experience, but it's not. Because I was there, I was present. I could see the energy that I was harnessing. It almost felt like an angel was holding me. That's the way, the only way that I could try to at best describe it from there was no pain, there was absolute freedom. It changed my thoughts of how I was serving God. Because I felt like I was being limited by what I was being taught based on what I had just experienced.

Tommy Mischke (62:52)

In other words, what you experienced was so far beyond.

Various Interviewees (e.g., New Orleans Cab Driver, Voodoo Practitioners) (62:56)

It was so far beyond all of my life. Being raised Christian, you hear about voodoo and it being evil. And here it is. I'm having an experience that they say that you have in these so called pagan practices in church.

Tommy Mischke (63:13)

Sally Ann Glassman has been immersed in the world of voodoo for over 40 years. She's one of the very few white Americans to have been made an ordained priestess through traditional Haitian initiation. She's lectured extensively on voodoo and has received international television, radio and press coverage, including a front page article in the New York Times and a feature on World News Tonight. She's also been written about in the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and Washington Post.

Sally Ann Glassman (63:54)

I was brought up in an absolutely atheistic family. Ukrainian, Jewish, second generation US and my older brother was born the year World War II ended. So my dad was a little disappointed in God. He and my mother were both absolute atheists. I would sneak out of the house to go to religious Services in different places. Instead of going to bars with my friends, I would sneak out to. To an Easter celebration or a Passover Seder. I just like being in the environment of spirit. I liked being in sacred ground, Soaking up that atmosphere.

Tommy Mischke (64:38)

Why did you like it?

Sally Ann Glassman (64:39)

Well, for me, I did not see the world the way everybody else did. And it took me a very long time to realize that not everybody saw it the way I did. For me, the physical, material world. Just looked and looks like a mirror reflection over energy flows. And so I didn't explain that to anybody. Because I didn't know they didn't see it that way. And ultimately, I started to put together that adults were a little taken aback by me. They were uncomfortable around me. They would describe me as a scary little kid. And trying to have conversations with people. I slowly realized that I was seeing more than they were telling me. And that they wanted to show they present themselves in a certain way. And I was not seeing that. I was seeing something very different. That got to their core. And I realized that that was really invasive. And that I needed a way to turn that off and on. So I ultimately became aware that I had a mystical bent. In high school, people called me the mystic wonder. And I didn't know why they called me that, except I would find myself being asked questions. That I certainly had no business giving the answers to. And my mouth would be open, I'd be talking. I'd be telling people things I didn't know what I was was saying. And they would be affected by it. It would be helpful to them. And it took me a very long time to realize that I was having conversations with people. And they didn't know what I was talking about. That we just didn't have agreement on it. But I came to New Orleans in 76. And started actively looking at Vodou. Then I had the same fears about it. That everybody else has instilled in them. I thought it was evil, and I was jeopardizing my soul by even saying the word. And I finally wondered why I was so afraid of something that I didn't know anything about. And I'd had enough experience to know that I'm often afraid of things that are offering me tools to my own freedom. And so in 95, I went to Haiti and initiated and discovered a country where everybody saw the world as a mirror image. Overflows of energy. And that that energy has intelligence. And that there are methods for setting up formulas. For reaching into that invisible world of energy. And that's why Vodou, I think is really challenging for people, for a lot of people. And why it's frightening. First of all, that belief that there is an invisible world that is more powerful, it's more beautiful, it's more full of potential. And, you know, that was a lifesaver for the slaves, and it was really unnerving for the slave owners. So that's part of it, that there's this access to an invisible power that's greater than any earthly power, and the slave owners couldn't control it. So, you know, there was a definite campaign that was intended to divorce people from the practice of the religion, to disempower them. But I think also all of us as humans, you know, the implications are so vast. If your identity can be moved aside and something much greater than you can inhabit you for a time being and can do these extraordinary things, including know things about people that you don't know, it really challenges our sense of reality. I think for most people, it's much easier to say to me, you're nuts. My whole approach to Vodou is to be of service. That is it. There is nothing I want to get from the spirit. When I was initiating, all kinds of ngans and mambos, pre and priestesses came into the chamber where I was initiating and said, don't think this is going to make your life any easier. It's not going to get you a rich husband. It's not going to get you a nice car. Also, never forget that this was a religion of people who were enslaved and they lost everything. And instead of feeling like their spirits weren't worthwhile or that they had failed them, they held on to their beliefs. And that's really humbling. Slaves built the city, and they brought Vaudoux with them. New Orleans had an influx of people from Saint Domingue, Haiti, around 1810. After the revolution, 10,000 people came into the city, and it doubled the population and certainly reaffirmed the presence of that worldview. And you see it traced throughout our culture in the city. You know, New Orleans remains unique in an increasingly generic world here in the US and part of that, I think, is our location in the swamp. And part of that is just that the very same factors that went into creating Vaudoux in Haiti were present here. We had Native Americans, we had French European Catholics, we had masons, we had African slaves, and it just brewed here. And the whole history of New Orleans has been so tumultuous and so exotic, and there are all these spirits floating around. When my papa from Haiti would come and visit. He'd say he'd found it pretty unnerving because he kept bumping into spirits here and it was hard to walk down the street. It's just what New Orleans is.