Rada

Rada is one of the two principal rites, or nanchon (nations), of Haitian Vodou, the other being Petwo. The name derives from Arada, the port and kingdom of Allada in what is now Benin, and the Rada rite carries the most direct continuities with the religious traditions of the Fon, Ewe and Yoruba peoples of the Bight of Benin.

Rada lwa are characterised as cool, steady, benevolent, ancient, associated with water, with tradition, and with Ginen, the ancestral Africa that functions in Vodou both as a place of origin and as a moral reference. They are approached with their own drums, rhythms, songs, colours and offerings, distinct from those of the Petwo rite, and the two are kept ritually separate; the drums in particular are not interchanged. Among the principal Rada lwa are Legba, who opens the way and is saluted first in any Rada service; Danbala, the serpent associated with wisdom, water and the ancestral; Ayida Wedo; Ezili Freda; Agwe, of the sea; and the Ogou.

The distinction from Petwo is one of the organising features of Vodou practice, and it is normally described as a difference of temperament and origin rather than of moral quality: Rada is cool and Petwo hot, Rada is associated with Africa and Petwo with the Americas and with the conditions of enslavement. Practitioners and scholars alike caution against reading the pair as good against evil, a misreading with a long history in outside portrayals. Many lwa have both Rada and Petwo manifestations, which makes the categories aspects of approach rather than two separate populations of spirits.

Vodou has been among the most misrepresented of the world's religions, and the popular association of it with malevolent magic derives substantially from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing produced in the context of Haiti's diplomatic isolation after its revolution and of the United States occupation from 1915 to 1934, which generated a large sensationalist literature and, in due course, an entire film genre. Sustained ethnographic study, Alfred Metraux's, Karen McCarthy Brown's and Leslie Desmangles' among others, describes instead a coherent religious system with its own theology, priesthood, liturgy, ethics and aesthetics, one that has coexisted with Catholicism in Haiti in complex ways that practitioners themselves describe in more than one manner.

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.