Where The Voodoo Ends and The Magic begins...

When I was a young boy of eight or nine years old growing up in the West Indies, I was fortunate to assist a few events (more like hide and watch without my mom knowing) . These events can definitely be categorized as being magic. One event in particular comes to mind everytime I think about voodoo or something similar.

First of all, I am not a voodoo expert, but I have known people who practiced voodoo as a religion and they all agree to say that voodoo is a combination or very old wisdoms passed on from generation to generation mostly from people of western Africa.

The purpose is to do good and improve relationship, frienship, learn to live with nature, improve on the harvest, cure for sick people, etc. Unlike the popular Holywood cliché where voodoo is associated with little dolls to harm people or make people sick.

A real voodoo priest is called "Ougan", that priest is very knowledgeable with various knowledge of leaves, to cure various illness and diseases, interpellation (consultation with different spirits) and more. Mind you, there is always the fake "Ougan" priest who is out there to make money. They will collect money from you in order to cast a spell on your nasty next door neighbour :)

As I was saying when I was a young boy, I saw that man, who I assumed knew quite a bit about casting demons out of people, litterally cast out a total of seven different evil spirits from a woman, and she did do many different voices like in the movie "The exorcist".

At first, the woman was tormented by multiple personalities or spirits. She could not live a normal life. She was called crazy, then her family called upon this expert and he did his magic. She became very normal afterwards. The treatment lasted up to a week. The man doing the treatment would come everyday with all kind of different leaves and he would gently talk to her, asking her name and everytime it would be a totally different person.

He would gently ask the spirits to leave the poor woman's body, but sure enough they would refuse to leave. That's when he would use his powers to cast them out. It was quite frightful to hear, specially when the spirits were forced to leave her alone.

Not quite voodoo but very magic.