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Haiti’s Pope of Voodoo Dies at 79

by cnkguy
Haiti’s Pope of Voodoo Dies at 79

Haiti's Pope of Voodoo Dies at 79

Haiti's Pope of Voodoo Dies at 79

Haiti’s Pope of Voodoo Dies at 79

Max Beauvoir also known as the Pope of Voodoo has died at the age of 79 on Saturday September 12, 2015 of what is believed to be old age.

If you don’t know who Max was well he’s the man who brought the magical ‘zombie powder’ recipe with the power to resurrect the dead to the world.

Trained as a biochemist at a New York college he graduated in 1958 and worked in New Jersey and later in Massachusetts, but it was in 1973 when he returned to his native country of Haiti that he would change the world.

After his return to Haiti, Max met a voodoo priest who gave him the ‘zombie powder’ which would render anybody who came into contact with it immobile.

Max was caught up in the excitement of a new discovery and delved deeper into the religion of Voodoo, soon becoming a priest himself and later becoming the head of the entire religion, the equivalent of the Pope.

It was in 19983 that the story gets interesting; Canadian Professor Wade Davis heard about the Voodoo powder and traveled to meet Max where the two began to investigate the substance further.

Meeting with the witch doctor, Marcel Pierre, the man who gave Max the zombie powder, they learned that the ingredients were from
the crushed skull of a deceased baby, freshly-killed blue lizards, a dead toad wrapped in a dried sea worm and an ‘itching pea’ an exotic type of vine.

But it was the poisonous puffer fish’s liver that got them excited because the organ contain tetrodotoxin, a powerful nerve poison thousands of times more toxic than deadly cyanide.

Sending a sample of the ‘zombie powder’ to Professor Leon Roizin at the Columbia Presbyterian College in New York, where he carried out some quick tests on rats who very quickly became comatose.

Six hours later, the rats were motionless, and they seemed to be dead except for a faint heartbeat and the lab equipment showed the presence of brainwaves.

Excited about the discovery, Max and Wade set off to find a real life zombie, finally hearing of a story about Clairvius Narcisse.

It was back in 1962 the Clairvius was declared dead by two doctors after weeks of an excruciating mystery fever. His corpse was even identified by his two sisters, Marie-Clare and Angelina, and he was buried in a small cemetery near the town of l’Estere the next day.

Clairvuis Narcisse

But the story doesn’t end there because 18 years later Clairvuis returned to the village and found his sister Angelina.

Naturally she was in both shock and disbelief but Clairvuis was able to convince her that he was in fact her ‘dead’ brother.

Explaining what had happen to him, he said that he had been resurrected by a witch doctor who then enslaved him on a sugar plantation.

Local people accepted his tale but of course scientists were sceptical of his apparent resurrection. As the story grew in a book called the ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’ which had a huge effect in creating the zombie hysteria which we see today.

Donald Cosentino, Professor of World Arts & Cultures at UCLA said, ‘Without Max, Wade could never have written this book. And it wouldn’t have been written and there never would been the craze about zombies that ensued.’



