William Seabrook was an American adventurer, journalist, and author who gained fame in the 1920s and 1930s for his travels and ethnographic studies of various cultures. One of his most notable expeditions was to the Caribbean island of Martinique, where he documented the unique religious practices of Afro-Caribbean inhabitants. During his visit to Martinique, Seabrook became fascinated by the island's rich cultural heritage, particularly its African roots. He observed rituals and ceremonies conducted by local practitioners of voodoo, a religious belief system that combines elements of African religions with Christianity. Seabrook was particularly intrigued by the practice of magic, or "mafí," as it was known on the island. Seabrook's encounters with mafí practitioners deepened his understanding of the spiritual and mystical aspects of Martinique's culture.
"The best and most thrilling book of exploration that we have ever read … [an] immensely important book." — New York Evening Post
"A series of excellent stories about one of the most interesting corners of the American world, told by a keen and sensitive person who knows how to write." — American Journal of Sociology
"It can be said of many travelers that they have traveled widely. Of Mr. Seabrook a much finer thing may be said — he has traveled deeply." — The New York Times Book Review
This fascinating book, first published in 1929, offers firsthand accounts of Haitian voodoo and witchcraft rituals. Journalist and adventurer William Seabrook introduced the concept of the walking dead ― zombies ― to the West with his illustrated travelogue. He relates his experiences with the voodoo priestess who initiated him into the religion's rituals, from soul transference to resurrection. In addition to twenty evocative line drawings by Alexander King, this edition features a new Foreword by cartoonist and graphic novelist Joe Ollmann, a new Introduction by George A. Romero, legendary director of Night of the Living Dead , and a new Afterword by Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society.
Shortly before he killed himself, Seabrook wrote of The Magic Island , I m not building up to assert to persuade myself or anybody else at this late day that it was a good book. There was the beautiful willow girl who was the epitome of what a woman should be; in his earliest fantasies which may have been aided by doses of laudanum from his Spiritualist grandmother , Seabrook dreamed of taking women like that and tying their hands behind their backs, dangling them by ropes from the ceiling, and chaining them to pillars fantasies he would carry out, publicly and privately, as an adult.
Seabrook's encounters with mafí practitioners deepened his understanding of the spiritual and mystical aspects of Martinique's culture. He witnessed the casting of spells and the use of charms and potions to influence various aspects of daily life. The island's mafí practitioners were thought to possess supernatural powers and were respected within their communities.
On William Buehler Seabrook's The Magic Island
I’m a sucker for a good monster-origin story. What’s Cujo with the rabies, Godzilla without the bomb?
So how about this: Imagine a man born at the end of the nineteenth century, the all-American son of a traveling preacher. He drives a French ambulance in World War I, gets gassed, and receives the Croix de Guerre. He becomes a reporter for William Randolph Hearst, but something is wrong. He can’t sit still. He travels—Arabia, West Africa, England, Timbuktu. He becomes obsessed with the supernatural and befriends Satanist Aleister Crowley. He moves to France and cavorts with expats. Gertrude Stein writes about him. His sex life is the stuff of morbid pulp novels: bondage, sadism, wife swapping. He samples human flesh, which he categorizes as “like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.” His drinking spirals out of control, and for eight months he has himself institutionalized. When that doesn’t work, he plunges his arms into a vat of boiling water, hoping that by immobilizing them, he will stop himself from drinking. Eventually, at sixty-one, after writing nearly a dozen books, he kills himself, destroying the monsters in his mind.
That man was William Buehler Seabrook, and though he’s forgotten now, his book The Magic Island midwifed into existence a monster that lives on in undead fecundity, reached out from beyond the grave to top the New York Times best-seller list, meddle with Jane Austen, and routinely scare the crap out of me: the zombie.
“From the palm-fringed shore a great mass of mountains rose, fantastic and mysterious. Dark jungle covered their near slopes but high beyond the jungle, blue-black bare ranges piled up, towering.”
This is Port-Au-Prince, 1927, as described in the foreword to The Magic Island. Divided into two parts, each chapter describing a different ceremony he saw or story he was told, the book recounts Seabrook’s forays into the mysterious worlds of Haitian religion and politics—the former infinitely more interesting than the latter. Seabrook traveled to Haiti with the express purpose of learning voodoo and writing a sensational follow-up to his wildly successful travelogue, Adventures in Arabia. It was a gamble. As Seabrook recounts in his autobiography, No Hiding Place, his editor warned him: “No white man can write a book that’s any good about voodoo.” But this was Seabrook’s shtick. Travel somewhere exotic, “go native,” and write about it. It had worked well among the Druze in Syria, and would work later among the Guere in Nigeria. In Haiti, however, he had his biggest success, and he wrote the book that changed the nightmares of the world forever, although he never quite realized it.
Maman Célie, the matriarch of a large family that included one of Seabrook’s Haitian servants, was his entrance into and guide through the world of syncretic Afro-Catholic-Caribbean spirituality. Seabrook wrote of Célie: “It was as if we had known each other always, had been at some past time united by the mystical equivalent of an umbilical cord; as if I had suckled in infancy at her dark breasts, had wandered far, and was now returning home.”
As in many good monster stories, from Beowulf’s Grendel to Psycho’s Norman Bates, Seabrook’s life was dominated by mommy issues. He divided his birth mother’s life into two periods. There was the beautiful willow girl who was the epitome of what a woman should be; in his earliest fantasies (which may have been aided by doses of laudanum from his Spiritualist grandmother), Seabrook dreamed of taking women like that and tying their hands behind their backs, dangling them by ropes from the ceiling, and chaining them to pillars—fantasies he would carry out, publicly and privately, as an adult. When she grew older and less attractive, Seabrook came to despise his mother. He described the mother-son relationship as a “silver cord [that] strangled more struggling males than all the knotted nooses of hangmen and assassins.” His second wife, writer Marjorie Worthington, believed that every woman he brought into his life (and there were many: wives, guides, prostitutes, teachers, mistresses, lovers) was an attempt to work out his Oedipal issues. His entwined fear and desire were a large part of what motivated his peripatetic search for mystical salvation. He looked for women he could control sexually, and for ones who could save him.
Célie was one of the latter, and she became his Haitian mother, the woman who brought him into the community of priests and ceremonies, loas and oduns. With her he watched white oxen ceremonially butchered, and learned to make fetishes and other religious objects. But it was a roadside encounter with an unnaturally leaden work crew that brought him to zombies, his major contribution to Western culture. Here are the first words ever published in English about the zombie: “I recalled one creature I had been hearing about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local—the zombie…a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life…it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”
These zombies were a far cry from the ravening horde of today’s Hollywood blockbusters. They were dumb brutes, mournful and confused over being pulled from their eternal resting places. They had forgotten even their own names. Seabrook (and soon, all of America) didn’t fear the zombie itself—he feared becoming one. Being turned into a zombie was literally a fate worse than death. It was the perfect monster for a country terrified of racial ambiguity and miscegenation. The zombie caught the American zeitgeist for the same reason Seabrook himself did: both flirted with becoming “the other.” It was the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renaissance, a time of blurring racial lines. Nella Larsen’s seminal novel Passing, published the same year as The Magic Island, told what was for some bigoted Americans the ultimate horror story: that of a mixed-race woman who successfully “passed” as white and married a white man.
When The Magic Island was published, the American press (and Seabrook’s birth mother) were repulsed by the things he had done, and the thing he had symbolically become through his relationship with Maman Célie: black. In its review, Time magazine stated in dread fascination that Seabrook “himself a white, an American, shared in the rites” of voodoo. The book quickly led to a boom in American zombie stories. Movies got in on the action with 1932’s White Zombie, in which a young white woman about to get married is transformed by a lecherous Haitian priest. Its tagline evoked the era’s fear of white slavery: “She was not alive…Nor dead…Just a White Zombie performing his every desire.”
Seabrook was only dimly aware of the seismic shift he had brought about in American horror. When he died in 1945, the zombie as he knew it had become a familiar, if staid, part of the cultural landscape. New horror stories were more concerned with Nazi experiments and radioactive mutants. It would be nine years before Roger Matheson would re-create the zombie (in his 1954 book I Am Legend) as the modern, world-annihilating plague that audiences love to fear.
Shortly before he killed himself, Seabrook wrote of The Magic Island, “I’m not building up to assert—to persuade myself or anybody else at this late day—that it was a good book. I’d give my life to write one good book, as I suppose any author would, but doubt that I ever have, or will.”
What Seabrook wanted was what he had already unknowingly achieved: life after death. His name may be forgotten, but we owe him a huge debt. Perhaps another writer was waiting in the wings. Perhaps the zombie would have crawled here, with our without Seabrook, to spread its contagion upon American shores. But perhaps not. The zombie was the right monster for the right moment, and Seabrook, with his unique dichotomies (a white man who saw nothing wrong with saying he wanted to “be Negro,” a dedicated reporter not above exoticizing or exaggerating whole cultures for a story, a man many described as noble even though they disapproved of his sexual peccadilloes), may have been the only one who could have brought them here when he did. His travelogues may never be republished, his name may be erased from history, but his undead legacy shambles on.
In his writings, Seabrook described the rituals and practices associated with mafí in vivid detail. He sought to dispel the misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding voodoo and portray it as a legitimate religious tradition. Seabrook emphasized the spiritual and healing aspects of mafí, highlighting its positive impact on the lives of believers. Seabrook's exploration of Martinique's mafí practices was groundbreaking at the time. His writings provided a rare glimpse into the esoteric world of Caribbean spirituality and challenged prevailing Western perceptions of voodoo as primitive and savage. Through his ethnographic work, Seabrook aimed to promote cultural understanding and appreciation for the diversity of human belief systems. Despite the controversies and criticisms that Seabrook faced throughout his career, his writings on Martinique and mafí remain valuable contributions to the field of anthropology. His observations have helped shed light on the complex and multifaceted nature of Caribbean religious traditions, informing subsequent studies on voodoo and its significance in the region. In conclusion, William Seabrook's exploration of the mafic practices on the island of Martinique was a significant milestone in the study of Afro-Caribbean religions. His writings provided a nuanced understanding of voodoo and its role in the cultural fabric of the island. Seabrook's efforts to dispel stereotypes and promote cultural understanding continue to resonate with scholars and enthusiasts of Caribbean spirituality today..
Reviews for "William Seabrook's Mafic Island: The Dark Side of Paradise"
1. Jane - 2 stars - I found "William Seabrook: The Magic Island" to be quite a disappointing read. The author's writing style was dry and disconnected, making it difficult for me to fully engage with the content. Moreover, I was hoping for a more comprehensive exploration of the subject matter, but instead, the book seemed to lack depth and failed to provide a satisfying analysis of Seabrook's experiences on the island. Overall, I felt that this book fell short of my expectations and left me wanting more.
2. Mark - 1 star - I cannot express enough how much I disliked "William Seabrook: The Magic Island." The author's excessive focus on trivial details and lack of organization made it nearly impossible for me to follow the narrative. It felt like a jumbled collection of anecdotes rather than a cohesive account of Seabrook's experiences. Additionally, the author's biased portrayal of the island's inhabitants came across as judgmental and insensitive. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for an informative and well-written exploration of Seabrook's adventures.
3. Sarah - 2 stars - I was quite disappointed by "William Seabrook: The Magic Island." While I had high hopes for a fascinating and captivating story, the book failed to deliver. The author's writing style was dry and lacked the ability to create a sense of immersion. The text felt overly repetitive, with constant rehashing of events without offering new insights. Furthermore, I found the author's constant self-references distracting and unnecessary. Overall, I was left underwhelmed by this book and would recommend seeking other works on the subject for a more satisfying reading experience.
4. Michael - 2 stars - "William Seabrook: The Magic Island" was a book that did not live up to my expectations. While the premise was intriguing, the execution fell flat for me. The narrative lacked cohesion, making it difficult for me to follow the story and invest in the characters. I also found the author's constant tangents and rambling passages to be tedious and unnecessary. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking an engaging and well-structured account of Seabrook's experiences on the magic island.
5. Laura - 1 star - I regret picking up "William Seabrook: The Magic Island." The writing was monotonous and lacked any sense of excitement. Seabrook's adventures, which should have been fascinating, were recounted in a dry and detached manner that failed to captivate me as a reader. Furthermore, the book lacked focus and seemed to jump from one anecdote to another without offering a clear narrative thread. Overall, I found this book to be a complete bore and would advise others to look elsewhere for a more engaging read.