Showing posts with label vodun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vodun. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

When the Spirits call on the Living......

Tonight I looked at my pictures of a Vodun ceremony in Africa. Vodun is the religion of Togo and Benin and other parts of West Africa. It is the religion that was carried to the Americas by the slaves and transformed into Voodoo in the Creole and Haitian cultures.

It is an old religion... some say it dates back 5000 years....making it older than Christianity. It is animistic, full of spirits and souls and the dead waiting to communicate.

Many of my pictures are blurry....logically I know it was the light and the lightening speed of the worshippers moving in the shadows. I was disappointed...but now...many months later..I look at these pictures and wonder if the faces....softened, saddened and sometimes contorted by the spirits that possess them....show an intimate and intense form of communication which has been lost in our culture.

We are so neat and tidy and crisp.....what spirits would want to visit us?



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