VOODOO DEATH AND PSYCHIC HOMICIDE Part 1

Voodoo & how it got that way. Plus two surprising uses for chickens. The first of a two-part newsletter.

May 01, 2024

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‘Voodoo death’ – the term conjures up not only hot Louisiana evenings and rich Southern Gothic ambience but also Hammer horror films and New Orleans tourist traps. It may not be the most accurate - or even the most respectful - phrase, but there’s no denying that it’s ever so evocative. Like any other evocative phrase, it has caught on. Even professional psychologists use it. I’ve used it myself for the title of this week’s newsletter because, well, a person could do worse than make a reference to one of the most famous publications in academic history.

‘Seeing is believing’ the adage has it. Psychologists, though, know that the reverse is at least equally true. ‘Believing is seeing,’ we tell each other. We mean that the contents of the mind go a long way towards creating the world that we see, hear, taste, touch, smell. The experiences we have are constructed at least as much by our memories, experiences, and expectations, as they are by what happens to be out there in the world. Just check with the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, author of the bestselling book, Thinking Fast & Slow. He won a Nobel Prize for his research into exactly that.

Let’s bear that in mind as we proceed.

To get an idea of voodoo’s psychological dimension, let’s take a look at this quote from another book - Voodoo: Past & Present, by Ron Bodin (in fact, the author uses the term ‘hoodoo’, but, for present purposes, we can ignore the distinction):

‘FBI Seeks Services of Hoodoo Practitioner

‘In 1971 federal authorities, the state attorney general, and the St. Mary Parish district attorney discussed a complaint of alleged civil rights violation lodged by the Earl Kirt, Sr., family of St. Mary Parish.

‘Mr. Kirt claimed that his neighbor had "hoodooed" the Kirt yard by placing a mound of oyster shells with a cross in its center in his family's backyard. Since the devil now possessed the grass, the Kirt family refused to mow the lawn and unleash these spirits; the yard became an unmanicured mess; the neighbors complained; and the Kirts filed a civil rights action against the neighbor's hoodoo activity. Stumped, local, state, and federal officials approached the New Iberia hoodoo authority hoping that she could conjure a counteragent and satisfy the family's demands for freedom from the evil hand of hoodoo. The "exorcism" was reportedly successful, and the Kirt family dropped its suit.

‘In part, the "uncrossing” may have been fruitful because the "practitioner" made use of those hoodoo elements held in common by various believers in the rural areas of the state. Realizing the psychological dimension to the hoodoo experience, the practitioner's ceremony incorporated what the area’s believers perceive as essential to removing hexes - readings from the Bible, the use of "uncrossing" powder - Van Van incense […] talking in an unknown tongue - Spanish - a language unknown to the family, and self-confidence’.

Note that the hoodoo elements (Van Van incense, for instance) did not really have to do anything in order for the spell to work. It mattered only what the Kirt family believed. Their belief that the spell would work actually created for them a world in which it did. This comes as no surprise for psychologists interested in ‘cognitive heuristics’ – the name we give to those shortcuts our minds use to make sense of the world. They are based on experience and learning. The Kirt family’s experience was of a world in which Van Van incense possessed supernatural properties. Equally, your belief and mine, that sorcery has no power to harm us, is precisely what keeps us safe from it.

Let’s see how certain real voodoo spells might be explained in terms of these cognitive heuristics (again, they come from Ron Bodin’s book. Bodin took them in turn from the wonderfully-titled collection, Gumbo Ya-Ya):

‘For An Immediate Proposal of Marriage - Tie a rooster under the desired person's porch; seat the person in a rocking chair right over the fowl; sit beside the person and wait.’ Perhaps we can guess how a belief like this might have started. That exact geographical arrangement of porch, rooster, rocking chair, and attractive singleton, is probably a fairly rare occurrence in anyone’s life, even if they happen to live in a rooster-rich environment. So too (perhaps regrettably) are proposals of marriage. Those much rarer occasions when the two co-occur are therefore extremely memorable: so much so that they may take on the combined appearance of a spell. This is an example of the heuristic that psychologists call illusory correlation. When two rare events happen together, we tend to suspect that one caused the other. You may be able to think of examples from your own life.

Here are two more spells from Gumbo Ya-Ya:

‘To Get Rid of a Neighbor - Kill a black chicken and throw it over the neighbor's house.’ I reckon this would work, don’t you? Most people would think about moving house if their neighbours kept throwing dead chickens over the roof.

‘Gris-Gris for a Successful Marriage - Join the hands of two dolls with a ribbon. Take some sand and pile it up in a mound. On top of this place nine wax candles, sprinkle the whole with champagne saying, "St. Joseph, make this marriage and I'll pay." When the marriage takes place, put a plate of macaroni sprinkled with parsley near a tree in Congo Square in payment.’[i] A possible explanation isn’t hard to find. The people who practice and believe in voodoo are commonly not very wealthy. Candles, macaroni, and, especially, champagne, constitute far-from-trivial purchases. The sheer effort involved in casting the spell is a long way from trivial, too (especially if you live more than a bus-ride from Congo Square). Anyone willing to put this much cash and effort into their marriage is off to an excellent start. A bias called cognitive dissonance is involved, too: ‘The marriage has to be good! It has to! Look at all the trouble I’ve been to!’

‘Most feared by believers,’ Bodin writes, ‘is the spell that combines a black candle, the 3 of Spades, and the Voodoo doll’. Of course, the most notorious phenomenon in voodoo is so-called ‘voodoo death’. It is the foundation upon which myths – not to mention horror stories - have been built. A sorcerer places a hex on a victim. This victim behaves as if already condemned. They believe not only in the power of the hex, but also its inescapability. So, too, do their friends and family, and everyone they know. Together, they make preparations for death. The victim may simply retire to bed and wait. At length death will inevitably come.

A word about terminology: The term ‘voodoo death’ is actually a misnomer. The phenomenon is not, for one thing, limited to voodoo. Reports have come from all over the world, including isolated places in which the word ‘voodoo’ may never even have been heard. Certain researchers have tried to change the name. They have suggested terms like ‘thanatomania’ and ‘psychogenic death’. Others, emphasising the malicious nature of the phenomenon, prefer to call it ‘psychic homicide’.[ii] None of these substitutes has caught on. We’ll use the term ‘voodoo death’, then. After all, it has a venerable quality. In 1942, it was used as the title of a classic paper by the physiologist, Walter Cannon.

Cannon collected a number of stories from anthropologists, all of which indicated that a sorcerer could, at will, cause an enemy to die (or, at least, that certain groups of people believed they could, which may come to the same thing). In that long-ago time when Einstein was corresponding with his fellow-physicist Max Born about quantum theory, he employed the beautiful phrase ‘spooky action at a distance’. He might as well have been referring to voodoo death. Sorcerer and victim did not need to be in the same room, or even the same town. The hex was as inescapable as it was supernatural: the curse would pursue its victim to the ends of the earth. Once it was made, death was certain. Haiti and Louisiana may be the world’s two great centres of voodoo, but Cannon collected stories from many other places, too. In Australia, for example, ‘sorcerers reportedly carry bones extracted from the flesh of giant lizards, and when these slivers are pointed at a person while a death spell is recited, the individual invariably sickens and […] sometimes dies’. In Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo), a young man was tricked into eating a bird whose flesh was taboo. It was two years before he learnt what he’d done. He began to tremble in fear and was dead within a day.[iii]

Scientists proved sceptical, as you’d imagine. There was some discussion about whether actual voodoo death ever occurred outside the pages of Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft. The anecdotes seemed more plentiful than proper scientific evidence. And so scientists set out to collect some.

You’d be surprised how much ink they devoted to it. The evidence proved – what shall we say? - equivocal. For sure, our scientists discovered plenty of evidence for phenomena that look quite like voodoo death. One researcher managed to collect no fewer than 160 accounts of Sudden Unexpected Death (SUD). The cause of SUD, it seemed, was ‘disruptive life events’.[iv] Even positive ‘life events’, like triumph or reunion, could be fatal. (Imagine dying of ‘triumph’.) In most cases of SUD, you will be unsurprised to learn, victims suffered from chronic depression in the period leading up to their death. Doubtless this left them psychologically ill-prepared to cope with abrupt emotions, whether they looked like anxiety, fear, anger, or even joy. Studies of soldiers who suffer SUD sometimes uncover no explanation at all.[v] One researcher writes about ‘disharmonious responses in the hormonal and autonomic nervous systems’.[vi] We’ll return to that topic in the next newsletter, next week.

SUD can also be linked to haemorrhage, head trauma, even alcohol withdrawal.

Fearsome and tragic though it may be, SUD doesn’t look quite like what we mean by ‘voodoo death’. For one thing, it has the word ‘sudden’ in the name, and voodoo death isn’t sudden. It is prolonged. It lasts for a period of days. If anything, voodoo death looks something like death in a concentration camp. Certain inmates, once they become resigned to their fate, do indeed pass away: but death does not come in a way anyone would call ‘sudden’. Similar phenomena can sometimes be seen after shipwreck or internment as a Prisoner of War.[vii]

You may be wondering what Walter Cannon himself thought. Here is his conclusion: ‘The force that really killed […] was the fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror’. The victim ‘believed in the power of the medicine man so strongly, he literally scared himself to death’. ‘If faith can heal,’ later researchers commented, ‘fear can maim or kill.’[viii]

‘Of course,’ Walter Cannon insisted, ‘it is the victim’s mental state that makes sorcery effective, not bone-pointing or effigy-burning’.[ix]

Is it, though? Recent evidence suggests that Cannon’s explanation may not be the whole story. Intriguingly, there’s more to it than that… But right now I’ve taken enough of your time! Tune in again next week for another exciting episode when we look at…Psychic Homicide! You dare not miss it, Crime & Psychology fan!! Meanwhile, please be brilliant and bop a bright blue button below. It helps to keep this newsletter alive.

VOODOO DEATH AND PSYCHIC HOMICIDE Part 1

Voodoo & how it got that way. Plus two surprising uses for chickens. The first of a two-part newsletter.

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