Invisible powers can be made visible. They can be made visible by action, acts by humans on the great stage of life. In Vodou, the sevitè, women and men who serve the spirits by literally embodying the divine Lwa, les invisibles, manifest themselves during sèvis, the ceremonies and rituals in which trances occur. During the sèvis, the invisible and visible interact with surprising intimacy. Invisible powers can also be illuminated through research. This volume presents the work of prominent scholars in the field of Vodou studies who offer their expansive views of a religious system which has generally been either unseen or misperceived.For most of the past five centuries, Western civilization has deliberately demonized peoples of African descent as an easy justification for their enslavement. Africans were considered to be less than human. Their physical features were declared repulsively ugly. Their cultures, denigrated. Their religions? Nonexistent, or a compendium of heteroclite, ill-conceived notions of noxious superstitions emanating from pre-literate and pre-scientific peoples who never quite rose from practicalities into the rarefied realms of abstract thinking. As logic, sophisticated science, languages, and religion became the apanage of the West, African religions were dismissed with terms such as polytheism, primitivism, paganism, heathenism, and animism, seen through European eyes as impediments to progress and material development. The patronization that informed the "white man's burden" became a liberal notion whereby the little brown brother might be educated and elevated beyond his primitive beliefs. And why not try? Many brown brothers and sisters fell into the trap, abandoning their genetic and cultural inheritances.This predjudice is still common currency in American discourse. "Voodoo economics" or "voodoo politics" are part of a political arsenal in which "black" magic defines the Other from American goodness and munificence. Today, Western powers continue to meddle in others' affairs via government, the private sector, and through missionary workers acting as "agents of civilization." Hollywood, the film industry, and the media perpetuate negative stereotypes. The United States and-by extensionother Caribbean and Latin American republics, justify the military occupation of Haiti using the same "white man's burden" principles. As slaves were denied their full humanity, Haiti is denied its sovereignty.Generations of educated Haitians, taught to speak and write in French, were also taught to embrace the ideals of their imperialist neighbors and the logic of colonial or neocolonial power relationships, individually and collectively deprecating Haiti, its citizens and its unique culture. The chapter by Carrol F. Coates is particularly significant in this regard. He studied a half dozen novelists who, though none admitted to practicing Vodou, have generally given a positive spin to Vodou. One author in particular proudly confessed to interviewing houngan, priests, in his effort at verisimilitude. ...