The Marassa (Marassa Jumeaux) are the Divine Twins of Haitian Vodou, sacred children who are honoured near the very beginning of every service, just after Papa Legba has opened the way, for though they are children, they are held to be older and more powerful than any of the other lwa. They embody the mystery of the double: the paradox that one is two and that two, with the third child who so often follows a pair of twins, is three.
In Vodou, as in the West African (especially Fon and Yoruba) traditions from which the reverence descends, twins are regarded as extraordinary and sacred beings, bearers of a doubled soul and a doubled power, at once a single force and a plurality. The Marassa stand for that completeness-in-difference: the balance and the tension of the two halves of a thing, the union of opposites, the fullness that is more than the sum of its parts, often expressed in the saying that with the Marassa one and one make three. They are associated with fertility, with children, and with the ancestors, and they are believed to be quick to jealousy and quick to bless, delighting in the sweets and the small offerings set out for children.
In the correspondences with the Catholic calendar they are commonly associated with the twin physician-saints Cosmas and Damian. Vodou is a living religion, and the Marassa are among its most tender and most ancient powers, the holy twins, honoured at the threshold of every ceremony as the sacred mystery of the two who are also one and also three.