Ritual Goat Sacrifice in Haiti

Haiti, a democratic country for more than one hundred and fifty years, is a markedly underdeveloped and impoverished agricultural society. The annual per capita income is fifty dollars and the population density is greater than any other country in the Western hemisphere. In this essay we shall examine the phenomenon of goat sacrifice which seems to be one method of social control used by the native religious leaders to perpetuate the status quo and oppose the growth and development of this society. More specifically we shall examine the Voodoo ritual of goat sacrifice in the light of the psychoanalytic theory of repetition and commemoration of the primal murder of the father and more recent suggestions of a relationship between the act and the individual's relationship to the deity as well as the father. It is our hypothesis that the ritual sacrifice is relevant to the immediate reality situation as well.

The subject of animal sacrifice known to mankind for ages, has provided students of social science with much puzzlement and cause for theorizing and speculation. In sacrificial rites there is usually a god, a spirit or a supernatural being who is either the victim, the recipient or the beneficiary of some offering. The specific custom of sacrificing a divine animal and consuming the flesh as sacrament is one of the more common patterns of sacrifice. Common to the theories on sacrifice is the notion that human problems such as evil, sin and illness can be transferred to the animal. Thus for Tylor sacrifice was based on the animistic principle of mistaking an ideal connection for a real one and was as such an effective procedure for injurying an enemy (12). Whatever was done to an effigy was expected to happen to