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A North Carolina man is asking for answers after his mom died while on a Vodou retreat in Haiti.
Dana Jackson, 51, wanted to become a Manbo priestess. A Manbo priestess “is a female ritual specialist in the Haitian Vodou tradition. Like her male counterpart, the oungan (or houngan), she performs ceremonies, initiations, healings, and divinations,” according to an article on the Harvard University website.
Vodou is an African religion and comes from the word Fon which means "God" or "Spirit" and "originated in the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo)", according to an article on the religion by PBS.org. Alternative spellings of the religion include Vodun and Vodoun, but not Voodoo. The spelling Voodoo is considered "the sensationalist and derogatory Western creation," the article continues.
Her son, Timothy Jackson, told USA TODAY that this was something that she wanted to do and had been practicing for a few years prior to her trip to Haiti. “Four years ago, my mom started to do a little bit of research on the African traditional spiritual belief systems and Vodou was a part of that,” he said. “She had kind of been on this path of just kind of doing research and practicing, or at least, just doing her due diligence as far as research is concerned.” Jackson said that his mom left for Haiti on July 1 and was supposed to return to the United States on July 26. His mom traveled with a group of people who had joined a house in order to participate in the Vodou rituals.
“The people that she went down there with, their name is Sosyete and I believe that that means society in the Turkish language and Nago,” Jackson said. “These weren't strangers that she went down there with. These are people that she's built a relationship with.” Jackson said the group recently went on a trip to Boston together in June. “If you do any research about that part of the ceremony, even just on Google, it'll tell you, that's very sacred and things of that nature,” he said. “So she sent me one last message on the 13th, and she said, ‘we will talk on the 21st going to church tomorrow.‘”
Jackson and his mom spoke every day. The no communication part was nerve-wrecking to him, but he wanted to respect his mother’s decision to participate in the ritual. In the last message he received from his mom on July 21 she asked him to, “pray for her.”