Vodou

Bondye made the world and does not administer it. That is the premise on which everything else rests. The supreme being is not petitioned directly and receives no cult in the ordinary sense, and the beings who are served, the lwa, stand between the human world and a creator who has withdrawn from it. The verb matters: practitioners speak of serving the lwa rather than worshipping them, and the relationship is reciprocal and contractual.

The lwa are grouped in nations, the Rada associated with Dahomean origins and a cooler temperament, the Petwo hotter and associated with the Kongo and with the conditions of slavery in the colony, the Ghede occupied with death and with a comic obscenity that is entirely serious. A family or a temple serves particular lwa, some inherited through lineage.

The pantheon is not a genealogy and has no generations succeeding one another. It grew instead by absorption, holding together West African, Kongo and Catholic elements under conditions where open practice was punished, and the identification of lwa with Catholic saints belongs to that history rather than to confusion about who is who.

The dead can be raised into it. After a period an ancestor may be drawn up and served as a lwa, so the roster is open at the human end and continues to change.

Vodou is a living religion with living custodians. Its initiation is closed, and this atlas names it as closed rather than describing it.

Vodou has no scripture, no central authority and no founding text, and the written record about it was for two centuries produced overwhelmingly by people hostile to it.

Colonial administrators in Saint-Domingue recorded the practices of enslaved Africans as security threats. After the Haitian revolution, a great deal of nineteenth and twentieth century writing about Vodou served an argument about whether Haiti was fit to govern itself, and the sensational literature of the United States occupation period, which gave the wider world the zombie and the doll, was propaganda before it was ethnography. A reader consulting older sources is very often reading the case against Haiti rather than a description of a religion.

Serious ethnography, from the mid twentieth century onward and increasingly by Haitian scholars and practitioners, is the usable body of work, and it is candid about its own limits, since much of what a sosyete knows is transmitted inside it under obligations of secrecy.

The tradition's own transmission is oral, embodied and initiatory. It passes through songs, drum rhythms, the vevè drawn on the ground, and the training of initiates by an oungan or a manbo. It is not that this has been imperfectly recorded; it is that it is not a text and was never meant to become one.

The atlas therefore states what kind of institution the service is, and what the structure of the pantheon looks like, and reproduces none of the material that is held within the sosyete.