This entry sits in the atlas beside material on sacrifice because it shows the mechanism working in the open.
The charge against Haitian popular religion was never a single allegation that could be examined. It was a bundle: superstition, sorcery, the sacrifice of animals, and, at the far end, the sacrifice of people. The first three were real and describable, the last was not, and the bundle let the last one borrow credibility from the others. Anyone arguing that Vodou needed suppressing could gesture at a drum and imply a corpse.
The bundle was assembled over a long period and by several hands. Nineteenth-century foreign writing, above all Spenser St John's account of the Bizoton trial, supplied the atrocity. The occupation of 1915 to 1934 supplied the administrative apparatus, and American popular writing of the occupation years, William Seabrook's The Magic Island above all, supplied the register in which Hollywood then presented the religion to a world audience. By 1941 a Haitian priest could invoke all of it without arguing any of it.
Two things are worth holding at once. The persecution was real and the objects burned are gone. And the religion was not what its persecutors said it was: the ethnographic record, from Alfred Metraux onward, describes a religion of service to the lwa in which animal offering has a place and human sacrifice does not.
Describing a living tradition through its accusers is the failure this entry exists to name.