Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
The ounfò.
A compound built around the peristil, a roofed open floor with the potomitan — the centre post the lwa come down — in the middle. It belongs to the oungan or manbo personally. There is no hierarchy above the house, no synod, no bishop and no body anywhere that can tell one house what to do.
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The sosyete.
The ceremonial family around a peristyle: the houngan or manbo at its head, the drummers its engine, the lwa its purpose.
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The lwa you inherited.
Lwa rasin come down the family line and are not chosen. A person may live their whole life as a Catholic, never attend a service, and still be the one in the family responsible for a particular spirit — which is why the religion cannot be left in the way a congregation can be left.
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What it costs.
Consultations, treatments, initiations and ceremonies are paid for at negotiated rates, and a full service feeding sixty people with three drummers is expensive in a country with Haiti's income. Families save for years, borrow, and receive money from relatives abroad specifically for it. There is no collection plate anywhere in the religion.
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Catholic and Vodouwizan at once.
The overwhelming majority of Vodou practitioners are baptised Catholics who go to mass, use saints' chromolithographs on their altars and hold services on saints' days. The Church has periodically demanded a choice, most brutally in 1941, and has never obtained one — the standing Haitian formulation is that Haiti is seventy percent Catholic and a hundred percent Vodou.
⚖ contested within
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The Protestants.
Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have grown very rapidly in Haiti and, unlike the Catholic Church, demand an actual break — the lwa are identified as demons and renunciation is the condition of entry. After the 2010 earthquake some preachers publicly blamed Vodou for it, and Vodou ceremonies held for the dead were attacked by mobs.
⚖ contested within
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Illegal, then official.
Banned under the Code Noir, restricted after independence, prosecuted under the penal code's provisions on superstitious practices well into the twentieth century, and periodically the target of state and church campaigns. In 2003 a presidential decree recognised Vodou as an official religion of Haiti, allowing oungan and manbo to perform legally registered marriages and baptisms.
⚖ contested within
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Brooklyn, Miami, Montreal.
Around a million and a half Haitians live outside Haiti and the religion went with them. Ceremonies happen in basements and apartments with drumming muffled or recorded, animal offerings arranged within local law, and initiations taken on trips home. Karen McCarthy Brown's study of a manbo in Brooklyn is the best-known account of how it works.
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