Goat Moaned, Girl Bleated

THE MAGIC ISLAND--W. B. Seabrook-- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). ". . . in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy." Author Seabrook understood the totality of this abandon following as it did upon ceremonial Voodoo rites of purification. He himself, a white, an American, shared in the rites. At his initiation ceremony, he says, he witnessed the virtual transsub stantiation of girl into goat, at the sacrificial altar. Goat moaned, girl bleated; and when finally the goat was killed it was the girl that cried out in death agony.

Another ritual the author witnessed: garbed as half man, half woman in a ruffled shirt, cutaway coat, silk hat, and cigar stub, Papa Nebo, an hermaphrodite, wrought mysteries with corpses, pronounced the oracle of the dead. Other corpses, zombies, worked in the cane fields, strictly supervised. To a white they seemed rather like gaunt imbeciles with their keeper. But how was it that often blacks had seen their relatives buried, only to find them weeks later in servitude as zombies? In the criminal code Author Seabrook found the weird explanation. Such are the African intimacies that share popularity with Roman Catholicism --even to orgiastic massacres of Judas and Pontius Pilate in effigy. Author Seabrook records these matters with a humble sympathy rather than the traditional amused condescension. His humor he reserves for black naivetes, his condescension for white stupidities. The result is a thoroughly fascinating Voodoo document, interspersed with comic relief. The "Magic Island" is Haiti, four days off the Atlantic Coast.