Vodou has no book. The corpus is a body of hundreds of songs, in Kreyòl and in langaj — fragments of African languages, chiefly Fon and Kongo, preserved phonetically and no longer translatable by the people who sing them. Each song belongs to a lwa and to a moment: songs to open, to salute Legba, to call each nanchon in order, to greet a lwa on arrival, to send it away, to accompany specific acts. They carry the theology, the history, the complaints and the humour, and they are how children learn the religion. A manbo or oungan's competence is measured directly by the number of songs held and by knowing the correct order, which cannot be improvised. Since nothing is written, the death of a senior practitioner removes material, and the tradition has no mechanism for recovering it beyond another practitioner who happened to know the same songs.