Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 160, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1918 — DEVIL WORSHIPING IN HAITI [ARTICLE]

DEVIL WORSHIPING IN HAITI

Hera the Savage Instincts of the Blacks Have Been Fed and Fostered for Centuries. Aside from warlike considerations, people have become so accustomed to being safe that it is something of a shock to learn that only a few hundred miles from the centers of American culture there is an almost savage country. The islands of the West Indies are, as a rule, the abodes of enlightenment where any one, man or woman, may travel without fear of molestation. “But such js not the case in Haiti,” says A. Hyatt Verrill in “The Book of the West Indies.” “Here the shortcomings, the failures, the savage Instincts of the blacks have been fed and fostered for centuries. From untamed jungles they were brought In reeking, pest-ridden slave ships to serve beneath the lash. Debased, untaught, they rose, and in a resistless wave of black swept the dominating whites from the land. Then were loosened all the pent-up hatred, the undying lust for revenge, the suppressed savagery of the African races, and slaughter, rapine, incendiarism, torture and debauchery stalked naked through the stricken laftd.” Haiti has improved considerably since then, but there is yet much room for improvement. “The only wonder is that any vestige of civilization remains, that there is the semblance of rule, of industry, of order in the. republic.” Among the barbarisms now prevalent in Haiti are voodooism and obeah, the former a. kind of devil worship, and the latter a form of witchcraft. “In its most fanatical form voodooism requires human sacrifices, which are accompanied by cannibalistic feasts and unspeakable orgies. . . . Obeah, on the other hand, is merely witchcraft with no religious significance whatever, and in its most malignant form consists of poisoning with devilish ingenuity, and in its commonest and least virulent form amounts merely to a lot of nonsense, hocus-pocus and mummery.”