bocor

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Haitian Creole bòkò, from Fon bokono.

Noun

bocor (plural bocors)

  1. (voodoo) A voodoo practitioner who deals with malefic as well as beneficial effects; a sorcerer.
    • 1985, Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Simon & Schuster, p. 47:
      “The bokor who knows the magic can make anyone a zombi—a Haitian living abroad, a foreigner.”
    • 1989, James A. Michener, Caribbean:
      The corpse is buried in all solemnity, and two days later, at dead of night, the bocor digs it up, stops feeding it salt, and has himself a zombie.
    • 1995, Elizabeth McAlister, in Cosentino (ed.), Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, South Sea International Press 1998, p. 305:
      A bòkò is an entrepreneur, and has a reputation as a man who will “work with both hands,” that is, for healing and revenge.
    • 2017, Salman Rushdie, The Golden House, Jonathan Cape 2017, p. 180:
      It seemed to him that he was […] surrendering all agency and becoming hers to command, as if she were a Haitian bokor and he at lunch at Bergdorf Goodman had been administered the so-called zombie's cucumber which confused his thought processes and made him her slave for life.

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