Beyond the character and lineage of the Rada lwa described in the main entry, Vodou ceremony follows a recognizable liturgical order, and describing it shows the rite as a formal, patterned ceremony rather than the improvised spectacle popular depictions suggest.
A service typically opens with prayers combining Catholic elements, the Lord's Prayer among them, with African-derived invocations, reflecting Vodou's long coexistence with Haitian Catholicism. The ceremony proceeds through the drawing of veve, intricate ground drawings made with cornmeal representing the lwa invoked, each having its own recognized design. Legba, who opens the way between the human and spirit worlds, is saluted first in any Rada service, without whose permission no other lwa can properly be approached. Drumming, using rhythms specific to Rada, together with call-and-response singing, builds toward the point at which a lwa may mount a practitioner, a possession in which the lwa displaces the person's ordinary consciousness and speaks, dances and interacts with the congregation in its own recognizable manner.
Offerings appropriate to the specific lwa are presented, and the service concludes with the lwa's departure. Anthropologists including Karen McCarthy Brown, whose extended fieldwork with a Vodou priestess in New York produced one of the most detailed ethnographic accounts of the tradition available in English, have emphasized that this structure, invocation, offering, possession, departure, is a coherent liturgical form comparable to the structured worship of any major world religion, rather than the disorganized chaos long assumed in sensationalist outside accounts.