This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Vodou had been forming gradually since the sixteenth century among enslaved Fon, Bakongo and Yoruba Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, syncretizing their traditions with the Catholicism their captors imposed into a recognizable religion by around the mid-eighteenth century. Its first widely cited public appearance came on the night of 14 August 1791 (one account gives 24 August), when roughly two hundred enslaved people gathered in woods near Le Cap. The Houngan Dutty Boukman presided together with the mambo Cecile Fatiman; a pig was sacrificed to the spirit Ezili Dantor, and the assembly sealed a pact of rebellion.
Within days the Northern Plain was in open revolt, the traditional opening of the Haitian Revolution. French authorities captured Boukman soon afterward and beheaded him, but the uprising his ceremony had begun did not stop with his death, and Vodou's role in that uprising fixed the religion in Haitian memory as a force behind the colony's liberation rather than merely a private faith practiced in secret.
No first-hand account of the ceremony survives; the earliest written record is the colonist Antoine Dalmas's, from 1814, more than two decades later, and scholars including Leon-Francois Hoffmann have argued the episode as commonly told may be a later creation shaped for political unity rather than a precisely reported event. This atlas names that dispute rather than treating the ceremony as settled fact. What Bois Caiman changed for Vodou's spread was visibility: a private syncretic faith stepped into public and political history.