For hours on end the ritual chants are repeated to the incessant beat of the wood and skin drums. The rhymes become faster and faster. Perspiring dancers, visible in the night by a glowing fire and candles in the forest clearing, are exhausted. But still they whirl around, arms flailing, eyes glazed with excitement, mouths contorted with exertion and ecstasy.
Suddenly, all activity ceases. Only the flames from the fire and candles flicker. A figure in black clothes and wearing a top hat emerges from the shadows of the trees. His face is painted white, and in his hands are a rod and a skull.
He lifts his head up and screams a name into the night: ?on Samedi, Baron Samedi.??e drums end their silence. The dancers spark into action. The chants continue their weird message.

Lord of the underworld
This is how a tourist would see a Voodoo ritual on one of the Caribbean, in some parts of Brazil or in certain areas of Deep South in the United States.
The contortions of the dancers are caused by the Voodoo gods possessing their subject. The man in the hat is the high priest, and the name he has screamed is that of the lord of the underworld, king of the Voodoo cemetery spirits.
The word Voodoo comes from the African word Vodun, which means sacred object, spirit or god. It was taken to Haiti by African slaves from Guinea and Dahomey in West Africa.
Voodoo is a blend of beliefs derived from the West African religious cults, Catholicism and the debased ceremonial magic in France of the 18th century.
The wood and skin used in the drums during the rite, in which Baron Samedi?ame is shrieked, are primarily symbolic of resurrection. Such is the hypnotic effect of this frenzied worship that participants have later been genuinely unable to remember what happened.
One of the more gruesome facets of Voodooism is belief in zombies, or the walking dead. Such ?ngs?e very real to many of Haiti?uperstition population. They believe that a magician can restore the dead to life- as slaves. The zombie belief made many converts during the great labour shortage in Haiti?ugar plantations in 1918. To cash in, sorcerers were alleged to have exhumed corpses, revived them and sold them as slaves.
But some authorities believe that these ?ves?re people who had been drugged into a coma, taken for dead, buried, then dug up again and revived with other drugs. Before selling their victims, the sorcerers first cut out their tugs, so that they could not reveal their origins. The practise was so wide spread that a law was introduced treating the administration of soporific drugs as murder. Several so-called sorcerers were allegedly tried and hanged.
A form of community ?il dancing?till practised in some remote villages in southern India, seems akin to the dark rites of Voodoo. But it has only one distinct purpose- to ?rm?ay the dreaded disease of smallpox.
People infected by smallpox were believed to be transformed into devils; a superstition strengthened by the hideous pockmarks and delirium- charicteristic symptoms of the disease.
Professional devil dancers are hired by families to induce the ?il? switch to one of the dancers. These ?rcists?e people who have developed immunity by contracting smallpox and surviving.

Masks with tusks
The dancers usually wear a costume of leaves and a brass mask with tusks, and features exaggerating the symbols of smallpox. They drink large quantities of a locally brewed liquor called arrack, and dance with violent contortions to the beat of drums.
At the climax of the dance, the chief dancer severs the head of a goat with his sword- and drinks the blood gushing from the animal?eck. Other dancers will bite off the heads of cockerels, gyrating with the birds still dangling from their clenched jaws.
Once the dancers believe they are possessed by the ?il?hey run off into the countryside- taking the disease away with them.