History & overview · every faith gets one
Serve the lwa well, and the lwa serve life.
The religion Haiti made from Fon, Kongo, and Yoruba inheritances under French Catholic rule: one distant God (Bondye) and the lwa — spirits served with song, drawing, dance, and possession — with the ancestors close and the community's ceremony its cathedral. Long slandered from outside; inside, a discipline of service.
The founding
In the plantation colony, a dozen African nations' spirits learned to share one peristyle. At Bwa Kayiman in 1791, a Vodou ceremony is remembered as the spark of the only successful slave revolution in history.
No single founder — Haitian Vodou accreted rather than began.
What it holds
The divine. Bondye — from the French bon dieu — made everything and does not involve himself in it. There is no cult of Bondye, no prayer campaign directed at him and no expectation that he intervenes; Vodouwizan will say plainly that he is too great to be bothered with a rent problem. What is served are the lwa, who are numerous, named, opinionated, and organised into nanchon — nations — of which Rada and Petwo are the largest. The verb is servi, to serve. Nobody in Haiti says they worship Vodou; they say they serve the lwa..
Death and after. The dead cross beneath the waters; ancestors return in the family.