Daily
The candle and the glass of water.
A candle lit in the morning, water poured on the floor for Legba and the ancestors, the Our Father and the Hail Mary, then the lwa greeted by name. Almost all Vodou is this — a household practice conducted in a corner of a room — and not the drum ceremony that outsiders photograph.
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Yearly
A year and a day.
At death the desounen separates the gwo bonanj from the body. It then goes to Ginen, under the water, and a year and a day later a second ceremony draws it back up and seats it in a clay govi where the family can consult it. Poverty is the enemy of this: a family unable to afford the second rite knows the spirit is still down there.
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Fèt Gede.
The first two days of November, in the cemeteries, in black and purple. The Gede mount people by the dozen, drink rum steeped with scotch bonnets, dance the banda explicitly, and mock everyone including the priest and the bereaved. It is the largest religious event in the Haitian year and it is very funny.
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Saut-d'Eau, and the pilgrimages.
In July tens of thousands walk to the waterfall at Sodo, where Ezili is said to have appeared in a palm tree, and bathe under the falls, leaving their old clothes behind in the water. It is a Catholic pilgrimage to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and a Vodou pilgrimage to Ezili at the same time, made by the same people.
held by most
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Feeding the lwa.
Each lwa eats specific things: Danbala a raw egg on flour, Ezili Freda cake and champagne, Ogou rum and grilled meat, Zaka cornmeal in a straw sack, the Gede rum with peppers. The items are exact and substitutions are noticed. An unfed lwa becomes insistent, and Haitians describe a run of bad luck as a bill arriving.
held by most
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Once in a life
Kanzo.
Initiation: seclusion in the djèvo for a week or more, the washing of the head, ordeals initiates do not describe, and emergence in white with a new name and a permanent tie to a house. It costs a great deal. A large majority of Vodouwizan never take it and are not regarded as lesser for it.
held by most
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Seating a spirit in a pot.
A lwa or a spirit can be fixed in an object — a pot, a stone, a wrapped packet — which then lives in the altar room and is fed on a schedule. The obligation transfers with the object and cannot be walked away from; getting rid of one requires a ceremony of its own, and families inherit them.
⚖ contested within
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Ongoing
The sèvis.
Drums call the rhythm of the lwa being served, vèvè drawn in cornmeal, songs in order — until the lwa arrives in person.
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The Priyè Ginen.
An hour or more at the start of every ceremony: the rosary, the litany of the saints and French Catholic prayers, then a chanted roll call of African nations and the lwa in Kreyòl. Nothing else can begin until it is done and until Legba has opened the gate.
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Drawing the vèvè.
Cornmeal trickled from between the fingers into an intricate symmetrical figure — every lwa has one, and it functions as both signature and summons. It is drawn on the floor at the start of the service and destroyed by the dancing within the hour. Nobody preserves them.
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Three drums.
Manman, segon and boula, interlocking, with each nanchon of lwa having its own rhythms and each lwa its own within them. The kase — the deliberate break in the pattern, aimed at a particular dancer — is the technical instrument of possession, and a drummer who cannot place one is not a drummer.
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Being mounted.
The lwa displaces the person's gwo bonanj and uses the body: it is dressed in its colours, given its food and drink, and it dances, diagnoses illnesses, settles disputes, scolds relatives and gives advice. The person is the chwal, the horse, and remembers nothing. This is the purpose of the ceremony rather than an unusual outcome of it.
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The consultation.
People arrive with something specific — an illness, a court case, a visa application, a husband, a debt — and the practitioner works out which lwa is involved and what will settle it. Payment is negotiated openly. The practitioner's reputation depends on results, and Haitians talk about a good manbo the way they would talk about a good lawyer.
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The bath.
Leaves crushed into water with rum, perfume and other ingredients set by the lwa, poured over the body from the head down at a particular hour, sometimes for a set number of days. Every serious practitioner is a herbalist, and the plant knowledge and the ritual knowledge are one subject.
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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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