The pairing of lwa with Catholic saints is systematic and its interpretation is contested. Ogou appears as Saint James the Greater on horseback with a sword; Danbala as Saint Patrick, on account of the snakes; Ezili Freda as the Mater Dolorosa; Ezili Dantò as Our Lady of Częstochowa, the Black Madonna, whose image is thought to have reached Haiti with Polish troops sent to suppress the revolution who deserted and fought for the Haitians instead — and the two facial scars on the Częstochowa icon are read as Dantò's. The standard older interpretation was camouflage: enslaved people forced into Catholic observance concealed African spirits behind permitted images. Later scholarship and many practitioners describe something less strategic — a genuine perception of correspondence, in a system whose entire logic is that spirits have many names and faces. Practitioners asked to choose between the readings generally decline to.