Bokor

Midnight, and a man is riding the wrong way round on his horse. He sits facing the tail, and the animal picks its way down a lane toward a house where everyone is asleep. At the door he gets down, puts his mouth to a crack in the boards and draws in a long breath. Then he rides home. Inside the house a healthy person wakes up sick.

That is how a zombie begins, according to an account taken down in Haiti in the 1930s. The rider is a bokor.

The word is older than Haiti. In the Fon language of what is now Benin, a bokono is a diviner, the trained reader of the Fa oracle, and a respected man. The name crossed the Atlantic in the slave ships to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. There it kept its sound and lost its good standing. In Haitian Creole a bòkò is a sorcerer.

He is not a spirit, and he is not a monster. He is a man with a trade. Vodou has its priests, the houngan and the mambo, who are initiated, who keep a temple and who serve the lwa handed down in their families. The bokor stands a little to one side of all that. Often he has never been initiated at all. He works for a fee, for anyone, and the saying about him is that he serves with both hands. One hand heals. The other does harm.

The line between the two is thin, and Haitians know it. The anthropologist Alfred Métraux, who studied Vodou in the 1940s, found that the same man might be called houngan by his friends and boko by his enemies. A priest has to know sorcery in order to undo it. So every priest is open to the suspicion, and a good many are happy to leave their clients wondering.

By day the work is small and practical. A woman comes to his yard in the heat of the afternoon and sits on a low chair under the mango tree. She tells him her market stall is failing while her neighbour’s does well. He listens, names a price, and ties up a little packet of leaves, powder and thread for her to carry. Such a charm is called a wanga. He makes them for luck, for love, for protection and for a neighbour’s ruin, and the same hands tie all four.

His spirits are his own business. The lwa of a family are inherited, and they ask to be fed. The bokor’s spirits are said to be bought. He deals in baka, small evil spirits that guard a man’s money and get him more, and that want payment in return. The price goes up each year. In the stories the last thing a baka asks for is someone the owner loves.

His most feared piece of work is the sending of the dead. For this he must first have leave from Baron Samedi, lord of the cemetery. He goes to the graveyard at midnight and lays an offering of food at the foot of the Baron’s cross. Then he takes a handful of earth for every dead soul he means to send, and scatters it where his victim will walk. The dead fasten on. The victim grows thin, spits blood and wastes away, unless a houngan can be found in time to drive them off.

And then there is the zombie. The rider who sucked a soul through the door keeps it in a corked bottle. His victim sickens, dies and is buried. On a later night the bokor comes to the tomb with his helpers and calls the dead person by name, and the dead person has to answer, because the caller holds the soul. The body is taken out, struck, chained and led past its own house so that it will never know the place again. After that it works. It hoes another man’s field in the sun and says nothing. A second kind of zombie has no body at all. It is the captured soul alone, kept in its jar and sent on errands.

The law took this seriously. In 1864 Haiti added a passage to article 246 of its criminal code. It treats as attempted murder the use of any substance that, without killing, puts a person into a long lethargy. If the person is buried as a result, the charge is murder.

One case made the bokor known to the world. A man named Clairvius Narcisse was pronounced dead at a hospital in Deschapelles in 1962 and buried. In 1980 he walked up to his sister in a village market and gave her a childhood nickname that only the family knew. He said his brother had sold him to a bokor over a quarrel about land, and that he had worked on a plantation with other zombies until the master died. The ethnobotanist Wade Davis went to Haiti to investigate. He bought zombie powders from several bokors and argued that pufferfish poison in the powder brought on a false death. He also argued that the bokor did not act alone. In his account, secret societies called Bizango passed sentence on a person who had wronged the community, and the bokor carried it out. Toxicologists who tested his samples found too little poison to do anything, and the argument has never been settled.

The bokor’s power is knowledge. He knows leaves and powders, the names of the dead and the right hour to visit a grave. He has the nerve to go where others will not. He can catch a soul, lay a sickness on a road and set a spirit to guard a strongbox.

His limits follow from the same facts. He is a man, and he dies like one, and when he does his zombies walk away. A zombie who tastes salt wakes, knows what it is, and makes for its grave. Families defend their dead against him. They watch the tomb until the body has had time to spoil, or bury it face down, or leave it a needle with no eye to thread, so that it will be too busy to answer when its name is called. What he sends, a priest can send back. And his own spirits are creditors. A bokor who cannot pay what he promised is the next thing they take.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bokor?

A bokor is a sorcerer in Haitian Vodou. He is a human ritual specialist who works for a fee, makes charms, deals with bought spirits and is said to raise zombies. He is known for serving with both hands, meaning he works both to heal and to harm.

What is the difference between a bokor and a houngan?

A houngan is an initiated Vodou priest who keeps a temple and serves inherited family spirits. A bokor works for hire, is often not initiated, and uses spirits that are said to be bought. The line is thin, because a priest must know sorcery to undo it, and the same man may be called houngan by friends and bokor by enemies.

How does a bokor make a zombie?

In the traditional account, a bokor steals a person’s soul and keeps it in a corked bottle, and the victim sickens, dies and is buried. The bokor then goes to the tomb at night and calls the dead person by name, and the body must answer and follow him. The zombie is then put to work as a silent labourer.

Where does the word bokor come from?

The word bokor comes from the Fon language of what is now Benin. A Fon bokono is a respected diviner of the Fa oracle. The word reached the French colony of Saint-Domingue with enslaved Africans, and in Haitian Creole it came to mean a sorcerer.

How can a bokor’s zombie be freed?

A zombie made by a bokor wakes if it tastes salt, and it then returns to its grave. Zombies are also said to go free when the bokor who owns them dies. Families try to prevent the theft in the first place by watching a new tomb or by burying the body face down.

Related Entries

Zombie, Baron Samedi, Lwa, Damballa, Adjassou-Linguetor, Obia, Soucouyant, Lagahoo, Ogun