Voodoo in Black and White : Exhibit: CSUN artist : Dolores Yonker became initiate of the Haitian religion.

Under a full moon, deep in a forest, three women sit on the ground about 30 yards from a blazing bonfire. Suddenly, the women’s bodies become rigid and then intertwine into a ball, which starts rolling toward the fire. The ball stops a few feet from the flames, and the women slowly untangle themselves, then amble dazedly into the darkness.

The women are priestesses of voudon-- or voodoo, as the religion is popularly known. Dolores Yonker, chairwoman of the Cal State Northridge art history department, watched their ceremony during a trip to Haiti in 1982.

Yonker, one of a few foreigners initiated into the religion, has brought this and other voudon rituals to life in a series of 28 black and white drawings on exhibit at the CSUN North Gallery. The show, titled “Ceremonies and Celebrations,” opens Monday, when Yonker will give two lectures about voudon.

Yonker said the women tangled in the ball were “possessed” with the spirit of Marinette, a gnarled, old woman who is one of 401 voudon spirits, or lwa, that derive from a single deity. Some are “sweet and gentle,” relating to fertility, love, and water; others are “hot,” relating to militancy and fire, she said.

During ceremonies, Yonker said, people become possessed with the spirit of a lwa and the results are remarkable. She said she has seen people swallow drinking glasses or razor blades and sit in fire for 15 minutes without getting burned.

“The spirit descends and replaces the individual,” she said. “It’s an ecstatic union with the divine.”

And that’s what Yonker wants to stress about voudon-- the ecstasy and beauty of it. The religion, she said, isn’t about sticking pins in dolls to make people writhe in pain.

“Voodoo is not a malicious, diabolical, satanical cult, as it’s often portrayed by Hollywood,” Yonker said. “It’s a living religion practiced by 5 million people who have managed, despite poverty and turmoil, to maintain their own lives with confidence in the future.”

Many voudon ceremonies take place at lakes, waterfalls and sacred trees, and involve music, dance and fragrances. “It’s a multisensory barrage,” Yonker said.

Yonker’s drawings reflect the hope and intensity of those who follow voudon, as well as the beauty of their surroundings.

In one, a priestess sits authoritatively in a sacred chair, while a woman kisses the ground in homage to her. The crowd behind watches intently as the newly initiated priestess shakes a gourd--the symbol of her new status--to salute the kneeling woman.

Another depicts a woman with two white pigeons dangling around her shoulders; their necks sit precariously in her hands, which are about to squeeze them. The woman, who is possessed, is being blessed by the doves, which symbolize the goddess of love.

Yonker also has captured a special ceremony for twins, to whom voudon attributes special powers. Young twins are assembled before an altar covered with sacred objects--bundles of powerful substances, candles, bells, and vessels of iron and china.

Some of these items can be found in Yonker’s Sherman Oaks home, a virtual museum of voudon and African culture. Her office contains a voudon “shrine,” a table covered with candles, sequined bottles, beaded necklaces, and a stone ax.

The walls of her home are covered with African masks and colorful sequined flags that bear emblems related to the voudon spirits. They also display Yonker’s own art work, including oil paintings, drawings and water colors.

“Dolores is very well prepared as an art historian, and at the same time she’s an artist,” said Phillip Handler, dean of CSUN’s School of Fine Arts. “That’s an unusual combination.”

Also unusual is the depth of Yonker’s involvement in voudon.

Yonker first went to Haiti in 1979 to trace the African origins of the country’s art and culture. Voudon evolved in the 16th Century, she said, when Spaniards imported Africans as slaves. Along the way, elements of Catholic doctrine blended with African religion.

Yonker returned to Haiti several times and became more intimate with its people. But she found that, as an outsider, she could learn only so much. “I had come to the point where I just couldn’t go any further,” she said.

So she decided to become initiated into the religion--a process through which a person is bestowed with certain privileges and accepts certain obligations, she said.

Yonker said her white skin posed no problem for acceptance. “The spirits don’t know skin color,” she said. “I’ve been treated with nothing but the greatest respect. We in the United States have a stronger sense of racial separation than occurs in Haiti.”

Yonker won’t divulge details of her initiation, but she said she lay blindfolded, “with limited movement,” for eight days in a cavelike structure. Twice a day she was given “food that was very strange indeed.”

The experience, she said, was grueling. “It was much more difficult than getting my Ph.D.”

Yonker, who spent the month of January in Haiti working on a book with a voudon priest, enjoys the fact that her study is out of the mainstream.

“It’s a world that is a lot different--it goes against the grain of Western thought, which is based on the material.” And Handler said CSUN is fortunate to have Yonker’s unusual perspective.

“Dolores knows all the traditional scholarship, but she’s obviously into what’s not so traditional,” he said. “It’s not like every campus has someone studying these things like they do French paintings of the 19th Century.”

“Ceremonies and Celebrations” will be open Monday through Feb. 22 at North Gallery, CSUN Fine Arts Building, 18111 Nordhoff St. Gallery hours are noon to 4 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. The drawings are not for sale.