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Historically, Vodou arose out of the brutality of plantation slavery; Vodou was a conflation of West-African deities and Roman Catholic Christianity. African people from all walks of liferoyalty, priests, artists, teachers, healers, farmerswere forcibly brought to the Americas by Europeans, and upon arrival in Haiti were christianized by Catholic missionary-priests. Haitian slaves both saw and constructed correlations between Catholic saints and African deities, which in Haitian Vodou are called Loas. For instance, images of St. Patrick casting serpents out of Ireland and were read as signs of Danbala, the serpentine spirit of life force. In the Virgin Mary they saw different faces of Ezili, the powerful female divinity. Adherents of Vodou do not see themselves as members of a separate religion; they consider themselves Roman Catholic.
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