Voudou (an older spelling of voodoo)--a pantheistic belief system developed in West Africa and transported to the Americas during the diaspora of the slave trade--is the generic term for a number of similar African religions which mutated in the Americas, including santeria, candomble, macumbe, obeah, Shango Baptist, etc.
Since its violent introduction in the Caribbean islands, it has been the least understood and most feared religion of the New World--suppressed, outlawed or ridiculed from Haiti to Hattiesburg. Yet with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston's accounts more than a...