The one who works with both hands.
Vodou has no devil, so wrongdoing has to be attributed to people. A bòkò is a practitioner who will take money to do harm — and the distinction between the oungan who serves with the right hand and the bòkò who uses both is drawn by practitioners themselves, argued about, and not always clear from outside.
Because there is no devil, the tradition has to locate harm in human conduct, and it does. A bòkò is a practitioner who works with both hands — who will accept payment to injure someone, prepare an ekspedisyon, send a dead person against a target, or make a zonbi. The distinction between the oungan or manbo who serves with the right hand and the bòkò who does not is drawn by practitioners themselves and is a live subject of judgment within Haitian communities, where it is generally known who does what. It is also not a clean line: protective work and aggressive work use the same materials, defending a client may involve turning something back on its sender, and reputations are contested. The tradition's sanction is not prohibition backed by divine punishment but consequence — harmful work is held to return to the sender and to their descendants, which in a lineage-based system is a serious claim.
The same ground, other faiths
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