The horse remembers nothing.
People who are mounted report no experience whatever and learn afterwards from others what their body did and said. The community is unsentimental about this: it dresses the lwa, feeds it, asks it questions, and takes notes. It is less a mystical state than an arrangement for having the spirits available in person.
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Being told, in front of everyone.
A lwa in someone else's body addresses you by name in front of your relatives about what you have failed to do. Vodouwizan describe this as uncomfortably precise. A great deal of what a service accomplishes is family dispute resolution delivered by a party nobody can argue with and nobody can accuse of taking sides.
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What happens in the djèvo.
Initiates do not describe it, and hold to that consistently. What they will say is that it involved seclusion, darkness, and more than they expected, and that they came out changed and permanently attached to a house. The reticence is itself part of the institution and outsiders who have pressed on it have generally got nothing.
held by most
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Laughing in the cemetery.
On 2 November the Gede fill the graveyards and are obscene, filthy and extremely funny, at the expense of the priest, the rich, the foreign visitors and the newly bereaved standing right there. A country with Haiti's mortality produced the funniest spirits in any pantheon, and Haitians will tell you the two facts are related.
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