stories and to exaggerate the influence and power of the vaudou cult. Legends were thus created; and as it is very difficult to uproot the legends of a people, especially when based upon fear, those concerning vaudou are still in circulation.
Traces of this institution can perhaps still be found in the mountains of Haiti; for, after having helped to accomplish heroic deeds, what is called vaudou could not be expected to disappear from one day to the other. But this vaudou never has had, nor has it at the present day, the odious character ascribed to it; in some respects it can be compared to some of the religious sects which exist in the United States.
And the worship of the yellow snake, which the adepts of vaudou are charged with practising, is one of the assertions which nobody has been able to prove. It would not be surprising to see a people brought up in slavery worshipping idols and deifying various reptiles. Nations whose civilization was far from being backward have deified animals. It is a well-known fact that the Egyptians worshipped the crocodile; and the snake in many instances has been worshipped. The Romans adorned many of their temples with Æsculapius's snake, which they held sacred; and, according to tradition, Moses was instructed by the Lord to make an iron serpent, which it sufficed to behold to be cured of the poisonous bite of the snakes sent to chastise the sons of Israel. Consequently, as a fetich, the snake is not of African invention. Without upholding the doctrine of Auguste Comte, I may safely say that even up to the present fetichism is more widespread and more generally practised than people will admit; very often it cannot be distinguished from idolatry. Intelligent men, and the average among the less intelligent ones, will see in images but mere symbolic figures and do not confound with them any idea of divinity; but not so with the great majority of believers, who sometimes worship the symbol like the divinity—thus, without thinking, many people are fetichists.
Be it as it may, I am in a position to affirm that the
