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J. C. de Graft Roots in African Drama and Theatre In a book on Haiti published in 1929, W. B. Seabrook gives an eyewitness account of a Voodoo substitution sacrifice which I have always found most fascinating, as illustrating the awesome relationship between role-playing and sympathetic magic.1 The worship of the Voodoo god Damballa Ouedo would seem to require periodically the sacrifice of a human being, and in the distant past humans may actually have been so sacrificed. Since it is not likely that the law would connive at such a practice in any modern society, however, the custom may have started of substituting a goat for the human victim. To preserve the essence of a human sacrifice, then, a ritual is performed at the altar of the god in which the priests are able to induce a kind of personality switch between a maiden and the sacrificial goat, under the combined influence of potions, drugs, spells, chanting, and powerfully rhythmic drumming. According to the account, The ceremony of substitution, when it came, was pure effective magic of a potency which I have never seen equalled in dervish monastery or anywhere. The goat and the girl, side by side before the altar, had been startled, restive, nervous. The smell of blood was in the air, but there was more than that hovering; it was the eternal, mysterious odour of death itself which both animals and human beings always sense, but not through the nostrils. Yet now the two who were about to die mysteriously merged, the girl symbolically and the goat with a knife in its throat, were docile and entranced, were like automatons. . . . The girl was now on her hands and knees in the attitude of a quadruped, directly facing the goat, so that their heads and eyes were on a level, less than ten inches apart, and thus they stared fixedly into each other’s eyes. . . . By shifting slightly I could see the big, wide, pale-blue, staring eyes of the goat, and the big, black, staring eyes of the girl, and I could Reprinted from J. C. de Graft, “Roots in African Drama and Theatre,” African Literature Today (Drama in Africa, No. 8), ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones (London: Heinemann, 1976), by permission of James Currey Publishers . have almost sworn that the black eyes were gradually, mysteriously, becoming those of a dumb beast, while a human soul was beginning to peer out through the blue. But dismiss that, and still I tell you that pure magic was here at work, that something very real and fearful was occurring. For as the priest wove his ceaseless incantations, the girl began a low, piteous bleating in which there was nothing, absolutely nothing, human; and soon a thing infinitely more unnatural occurred: the goat was moaning and crying like a human child. . . . While the papaloi still wove his spells, his hands moving ceaselessly like an old woman carding wool in a dream, the priestess held a twig green with tender leaves between the young girl and the animal . . . on a level with their mouths . . . against the hairy muzzle of the goat, against the chin and soft lips of the girl. And after moments of breathless watching , it was the girl’s lips that pursed out and began to nibble at the leaves . . . nibbling as horned cattle do . . . As she nibbled thus, the papaloi said in a hushed but wholly matter-of-fact whisper like a man who had finished a hard, solemn task and was glad to rest, “Ca y est” (There it is). The papaloi was now holding a machete, ground sharp and shining. . . . Neither seemed conscious of anything that was occurring, nor did the goat flinch when the papaloi laid his hands upon its horns. Nor did the goat utter any sound as the knife was drawn quickly, deeply, across its throat. But at this instant, as the blood gushed like a fountain into the wooden bowl, the girl, with a shrill, piercing, then strangled bleat of agony, leaped, shuddered , and fell senseless before the altar. . . . And so the account goes on, almost like fiction! It must be added here for the squeamish, however, that it was the goat that died, not the girl; she was carefully lifted up and carried away unconscious, to be revived by the priests. Seabrook’s The Magic Island may not be easily accessible to most readers of this essay, hence my decision to quote...

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