Se bon ki ra. — Good is rare.
Haitian Proverb, closing signature of Mambo Racine Sans Bout
The Group and Its History
alt.religion.voodoo was an unmoderated newsgroup in the alt.* hierarchy dedicated to the practice, history, and theology of Vodou — the Afro-Haitian religion brought from West Africa to the island of Hispaniola by enslaved peoples and developed over centuries into one of the richest living traditions in the Western Hemisphere. The group operated from at least the early 2000s through 2014, preserved in the Internet Archive Giganews collection.
The preserved corpus contains 1,222 posts spanning 2003 to 2014, with a pronounced peak in 2005 (410 posts). The group suffered the same fate as many alt.* groups in this period: by 2008 it was increasingly flooded by evangelical Christian cross-posters and commercial spam, burying the genuine community discourse. Its productive era runs roughly 2003–2007.
Mambo Racine Sans Bout
The dominant voice of alt.religion.voodoo — accounting for at least 98 directly attributed posts and a similar number from her Yahoo Groups mirror — was Bon Mambo Racine Sans Bout Sa Te La Daginen, an American-born Mambo (Vodou priestess) initiated in Haiti who lived and operated her peristyle (temple) in Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast. She is addressed in the Haitian community as "Mambo Kati."
Racine began posting to Usenet around 2003 and maintained a prolific presence in the group and in adjacent forums (alt.religion.orisha, soc.culture.haiti). Her writing is distinctive: warm, practical, theologically precise, rooted in lived daily contact with Haitian Vodou at its source. She was not an outsider describing what she had read; she was a practitioner reporting from the field — the ceremony courtyard, the Vodou market, the beach offering to La Sirene, the peristyle where her initiates served the lwa.
Her posts ranged widely: ceremony accounts from New Orleans and Haiti; teaching units on specific lwa (La Sirene, Ogoun, the Rada and Petwo nations); ancestor service theology; practical ritual technique; defense of Vodou against evangelical attack; and dispatches from her daily life in Jacmel. Together they constitute an irreplaceable practitioner record of Haitian Vodou in the early internet era.
Her house, the Roots Without End Society (rootswithoutend.org), welcomed initiates from the USA, UK, Trinidad, and elsewhere for the kanzo initiation ceremony in Haiti. The peristyle's patron lwa was La Sirene — the Mermaid, Mother of All, Queen of the Seas.
The Lwa and the Theology
Mambo Racine's writing reveals a Vodou theology with several key features:
Monotheism. Haitian Vodou is explicitly monotheistic. God (Bondye — Bon Dieu, "Good God") is supreme, all-knowing, all-powerful. The lwa are lesser spiritual beings who act only with God's acquiescence. The phrase si Bondye vle — "if God wants" — is appended to nearly every statement about the future; to omit it is to tempt God. La Sirene herself sings, "There is nothing greater than God in the country."
The Lwa. The lwa are the spirits served in Vodou — divine intermediaries, powerful and personal, each with specific attributes, colors, foods, ritual gestures, and songs. The Rada nation (from the West African kingdom of Allada) contains the beneficent lwa: Legba (guardian of crossroads), Ayizan and Loko (priesthood), Erzulie Freda (love and beauty), Dambala and Ayida Wedo (the serpent pair), La Sirene and Met Agwe (the sea), and many others. The Petwo nation is fiercer, more martial. Simbi Makaya, Ogoun, Grand Bwa, and the Gede (spirits of the dead) occupy their own ritual spaces.
Possession. In Vodou ceremony, lwa descend into the heads of initiates, temporarily displacing their consciousness. The possessed person is "ridden" by the lwa, who drinks, eats, speaks, and serves through them. This is not distress — it is the central religious event, the moment the divine and human meet. When La Sirene takes Mambo Racine's head, the Mambo remembers nothing; afterward, her initiates tell her what happened.
Ancestor Service. Ancestor reverence is foundational. The dead are not gone; with their new spiritual vision they are more present than in life. They can be called, fed, and put to work. Everyone has ancestors — including adoptees, mixed-race practitioners, and those whose biological ancestry is unknown. Ancestral service requires no initiation; it is the entry point for any person.
The Kanzo. The initiation ceremony (kanzo) takes place in Haiti and involves seclusion, ritual bathing, and a fire ordeal. Initiates who complete it become Hounsi (lowest grade), then Asogwe (highest grade, able to perform all ceremonies). Mambo Racine's house traveled to Haiti for each kanzo, and her field notes on these ceremonies are among the richest documents in this archive.
Other Community Voices
Beyond Mambo Racine, alt.religion.voodoo hosted a broader conversation. Jules, annick, and Traveler were consistent community voices in 2005–2007. Gwo Mango engaged substantively on questions of race and Vodou. Catherine yronwode (of Lucky Mojo Curio Co.) contributed from the adjacent hoodoo conjure tradition. Mambo Racine's own initiates — Houngan Tim, Houngan Hector, Houngan Steve, Mambo Pat, Mambo Carole-Anne — appear in her ceremony accounts.
Relationship to Related Groups
alt.religion.voodoo overlapped significantly with alt.religion.orisha (the Lucumi/Santería/Candomblé tradition, where Vodou's lwa correspond roughly to the Yoruba orishas) and with soc.culture.haiti (the broader Haitian cultural forum). Many posts were cross-posted to all three. The Vodou and Lucumi communities shared practitioners, a West African theological inheritance, and similar debates over authenticity and practice in the diaspora.
Colophon
Introduction written for the Good Works Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026. Source: Internet Archive, Giganews Usenet Collection, alt.religion.voodoo.20140315.mbox.gz.
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