The One Who Works with Both Hands

A bokor is a Vodou specialist who is said to work with both hands, meaning one who will undertake work to harm as well as to heal.

The tradition's own moral category

The bokor is set against the oungan and manbo, the priests said to serve the spirits openly and for good. The distinction is not an outsider's judgement but the tradition's own: Haitians themselves separate the legitimate service of the lwa from sorcery worked for hire, and condemn the latter. To name the bokor is a way the priesthood marks the line it does not cross, so the category polices Vodou's boundary rather than describing its centre.

Sensationalism and the real role

The bokor is the figure most seized upon by outside sensationalism, above all through the folklore of the zonbi, the captured will made to labour, which popular culture turned into the cinema's zombie. The historical and ethnographic reality is contested and far narrower than the films suggest. Within Vodou the bokor is a real but marginal and distrusted role, defined by a willingness to cross a line the priesthood proper does not, and its existence is evidence of the tradition's internal ethics, not proof that Vodou is sorcery.