E. A. Koetting and Baron DePrince - The Spider and The Green Butterfly

E.A. Koetting/Baron DePrince
The Spider and the Green Butterfly
they now resonate with an awkward silliness to the aspiring
serious practitioner. This erroneous mindset is instantly
overcome when real experience washes away the daydream
spell cast by the illusionists working on the various stages
of literature and media. These combinations of matter with
spirit deliver a blow so powerful to this "concrete and
unchangeable reality" that they could not possibly be real.
Perhaps that which is "real" is more malleable than we had
assumed.
Blowing Powder -
When I first read over one of the chapters that
Baron DePrince had sent me which included a few different
blowing powders, my eyes stared at the pages as if they
were empty. I had heard the myths of Voodoo Magicians^
blowing powders on their victims to cause immediate
unconsciousness, like a tribal version of chloroform, and
had possibly seen some malnourished, loin-clothed man
doing something of that sort in a bad horror film at some
point in my life, but what I read was beyond the
superstitions that I had imagined that real Haitian Vodoun
would contain.
My first question for DePrince was quite unoriginal,
and in shocking contrast with my usual reliance on the
spiritual: does the power of the powders reside in their
psychotropic qualities alone, or is it a combination of the
psychotropic and the metaphysical which cause the
powders to work as they do?
DePrince laughed, as if I had just told him a wellknown
and well-worn joke. When he realized that I was
not laughing along with him, he collected himself and
informed me that none of the powders contained any
ingredient which possesses a high enough concentration of
psychotropic chemicals to have any effect.
"There is no toxicology involved, my friend," he
said. "There is much more to Vodoun than meets the eye.
We're just getting started."
Quite a few scientists have traveled to Haiti, armed
with American dollars and the names of a few popular Portau-Prince
sidewalk Houngans in attempts to procure these
mysterious powders and concoctions, with the hope of
synthesizing the formulas in well-lit laboratories safe
within the United States' borders. Paying a Ti Houngan, or
a "little Houngan" to introduce them to another, more
powerful Sorcerer, and then paying that Houngan to help
him collect the ingredients for the blowing powders, or
even to hand them a bag full of the stuff, the scientists
return home to their laboratory ceremonies only to discover
that none of the ingredients, alone or in combination, seem
to have any substantial effect.
There is a substance within the substance which
cannot be seen, however, despite the magnification of the
microscope, but which is felt in the deepest and most
ancient parts of the human being. It is in this invisible
substance that is carried upon the particles of powder and
delivered into the system of the human organism, where it
will grow, infest, and override the entire natural system.
We here must offer a disclaimer of sorts, in that
certain ritual and facilitative activities that take place in
Haiti, while illegal, go unnoticed or at least ignored much
more easily than in the United States and Europe. Grave
robbing, dismemberment of the bodies of the dead, theft of
personal property, and various other illegal and unethical
activities that might be employed in procuring the physical
ingredients of the concoctions given in this chapter are not
condoned by the authors. While some, if not many
practitioners of Haitian Vodoun, both in Haiti and
throughout the world, do indeed disregard the laws of the
state and country in which they reside in order to serve the