wordsVodou and Vodún — and the spelling this atlas does not usevodún

The word is older than any of the arguments about it. The Fon Vôdoun is first recorded in 1658, in the Doctrina Christiana, and in the kingdom of Dahomey it meant a spirit or a deity. Ouidah was a major slave embarkation point from the 1670s to the 1860s, and Vodún practitioners were among those shipped; with Kongo religion, theirs became one of the two main influences on what formed in Haiti. Many Haitian terms, the word Vodou included, come out of Fon.

What happened to the spelling in English has a date and an address. The United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and the occupation produced tourist shows and a literature — Faustin Wirkus and William Seabrook wrote the books that reached American readers. Seabrook's The Magic Island was published on 3 January 1929 by Harcourt, Brace & Company; it is described as the first popular English-language work to describe the concept of a zombie, which Seabrook defined as “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life”. Time said it “introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech”. The book inspired the 1932 stage play Zombie and fed Victor Halperin's 1932 film White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi — the first feature-length zombie film, and the one that “originated several fictional tropes”, chiefly the zombie as a mindless henchman under an evil magician's spell. Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie followed in 1943. The film “London Voodoo” of 2004 is named on the same list of works that sensationalise the religion.

The doll most people picture belongs to that literature and not to either religion. Wikipedia's article states it plainly: “The voodoo doll is not prominent in either” Haitian Vodou or “Louisiana Voodoo”.

Who objects is on record. Scholars describe Vodou as one of the world's most maligned and misunderstood religions; Christians in Haiti have presented it as Satanic, and in Anglophone and Francophone writing generally it has been tied to sorcery and black magic, attitudes “sometimes linked with anti-black racism”. In U.S. popular culture Haitian Vodou is usually portrayed as destructive and malevolent, and the absence of any central Vodou authority has made those representations hard to answer. Practitioners answered anyway: after attacks on Vodouists following the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, they formed the civil rights groups Zantray and Bode Nasyonal. Haiti's 1987 constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide granted Vodou official recognition in 2003. Hostility did not stop: Protestants blamed Vodou in part for the 2010 earthquake, and mobs attacked Vodouists afterwards.

So this atlas's word list bans the two-o spelling outside quotations and proper nouns, and the validator fails any record that uses it loose. The reason is not squeamishness about an old spelling. That spelling reached English through an occupation and an entertainment industry, and what it names in English is a thing those industries built — a zombie, a pin-stuck doll, a film villain. Calling a religion with clergy, liturgy, a constitution's protection and six million estimated practitioners by the name of its own caricature is the error the rule exists to stop. The exceptions are real and stay: “Louisiana Voodoo” is the proper name of a distinct tradition, and a quotation keeps its speaker's words.