The religion, which is closely entwined with nature, also offers some hope of halting the rapacious harvesting of trees for making charcoal -- a desperate means of making a meager living that has shorn Haiti of most of its forests.
"If the country adhered to voodoo principles, we wouldn't have the crisis we are now facing," says Evonie Auguste, a mambo from the Carrefour suburb of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. "For us, trees are living things that God put here to be respected. Nature is the place where the spirits live."
Not everyone is so enthusiastic.
Haiti's Catholic clergy has reacted with alarm at the moves to empower voodoo practitioners to conduct rituals with legal significance, especially baptisms, which the church contends are an exclusively Christian domain. The bishop of Port-au-Prince, Msgr. Joseph Lafontant, issued a statement shortly after the government decree deeming the status accorded voodoo "excessive" and its application to civil ceremonies "an obvious mistake."
The Roman Catholic Church has for years been losing its once omnipotent hold over Haitians in the face of Protestant and other missionaries who flood Haiti to proselytize while conducting development work. None of the more established churches regard voodoo as a legitimate religion, but they have been more circumspect in their opposition since the constitutional recognition accorded 16 years ago. From the cultural perspective, academics believe that the move to bestow official sanction on voodoo is a rite of acceptance that should free Haitians to practice their beliefs without fear of repression or censure.
"The elite have always regarded voodoo as superstition, as a form of magic or mysticism," says Jean Yves Blot, head of the National Bureau of Ethnology, a state academic office in the capital. But he regards it as the more natural faith of Haitians, as the European religions were imposed by colonial occupiers and fostered by missionaries. Slaves brought from Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries believed their spirit world followed them across the ocean and helped them throw off the chains.
"Voodoo was at the root of our independence and as such has an important place in our cultural identity," says Blot, referring to the Bois Cayman ritual staged on the eve of the 1791 slave uprising. The ceremony that found its place in revolutionary lore was credited with inspiring the slaves to find the courage and stamina to fight French forces for the next 12 years and for eventual success in wresting Haiti's independence from France.
