In voodoo, death is an extension of life and not be feared

Just a year ago, Professor Delices had met Max G. Beauvoir. Beauvoir was one of Voodoo's highest priests (Ati Houngan) and most venerated supreme servant (Supreme Servitur). Professor Delices was amazed at Beauvoir's wisdom because it surpassed every graduate course he had ever learned in universities. He had taught Professor Delices something which he never heard before-- the secret of life, not to fear the death. The wisdom of Max Beauvoir was supreme as his humility along with his humanity was sublime. In Haitian Voodoo, the ancestral-spiritual realm is understood to be Africa, where the humanity was born and where our souls, after death return to live. Haitian voodoo teaches that death is a process of reborn whereby the soul gets released from the body to bring out the God within us for the greater good of humanity. Life and death are complimentary forces that transform one into the other-- death is not a frightening thing; it is an extension of life. However, this thought differs from western philosophy which says that life and death are not same; they are separate entities where death is a fearful object which is never welcomed.

Max G. Beauvoir was a chemist from City College of New York (1958), a biochemist from the Sorbonne (1962) and had worked as a biochemist at Cornell Medical Center. After his return to Haiti in the early 1970's, he founded Le Péristyle de Mariani, a voodoo temple at his home in 1974 where everyone was welcome, and established himself as the public face of the religion. His home had served as a local Haitian Voodoo temple and healing center.
When he was accused of his association with Duvalier, he and his wife fled to Washington, D.C., where he founded the Temple of Yehwe, a nonprofit group promoting Afro-American religious thought, in 1996. The Voodoo supremo chief, died on Saturday, September 12, in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince after an illness at the age of 79.

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