Christianity and Voodoo: Are They That Different?

Recently, a U.S. television news series told of a serious problem that has arisen with the Haitian-born residents of southern Florida. An astonished news commentator told his audience that the Haitians remained faithful to their voodoo heritage, believing that disease, bad luck, and poor finances were brought about by various demons which can be propitiated by appropriate ceremonies and sacrifices. The newsman then described how the disease AIDS was subject to periodic, temporary remissions, and said that Haitian victims of the disease frequently experienced such remissions following voodoo rites, though no cause-and-effect relationship was implied. Having assumed that the voodoo had been effective, most Haitians were then resuming their sexual lives and thus bringing a serious threat of infection to their partners. What surprised the newsman was that these folks actually believed in the existence and effects of demonic possession. He need not have been surprised. It is not only voodoo worshipers who believe such medieval nonsense; all Christians who believe in the Holy Bible must also believe in demons, devils, and other such creatures, and they must believe that those entities cause disease and that they can be “cast out” by proper ceremonies, simply because it’s in the Book. If they deny the reality of those creatures, they deny the Bible, and thus their faith. It is not a matter of choice, but dogma.

An Early Skeptic

Johannes Weyer, a sixteenth-century physician also known as Piscinarius, was an early skeptic of the belief that ailments were supernatural in nature. He observed:The uninformed and the unskilled physicians relegate all the incurable diseases, or all the diseases the remedy for which they overlook, to witchcraft. When they do this, they are talking about disease like a blind man does about color. Like many surgeons with their quackery, they cover their ignorance of our Sacred Art with the playthings of magic malefactors and they themselves are the real malefactors.

Weyer was, for his day, an unusually enlightened man who vigorously pursued various claims of magic and witchcraft, showing that they had no basis in fact. He met the claimants on their own terms and defeated them. He investigated one of the most famous of all “possession” cases, that of the Nuns of Cologne in 1564. Weyer solved that matter by determining that certain rather robust convulsions entered into by these virtuous ladies had been brought about, not by religious visions, but by visitations of neighborhood dandies who had favored them with their attentions and subsequently induced various raptures in the ladies by their very efforts at negotiating the walls of the convent. The ladies had turned heavy romance into religious exultation. For his labors, Weyer was castigated by the church and his own profession. Complained one well-known physician of the time: Oh, if only such a man had never been born, or at least had not written anything! Instead of which, he gives many people through his books the opportunity to sin and to enhance the Kingdom of Satan.

Johannes Weyer.

  Fear of the truth has often led such people to pronounce dreadful death sentences upon those who dared to deny supernatural claims. It happened often enough during the Inquisition. Weyer, however, managed to survive to the then-surprising age of 73, and was accorded a proper Christian church burial. To many modern historians of medicine, he is looked upon as one of the founders of modern psychiatry; he is certainly one of the first philosophers to record a rational view of various human mental aberrations, many of which are believed even today, by the uneducated, to be caused by demons, witches, and other fanciful inventions. Weyer knew better and had the good common sense, intelligence, and fortitude to say so.