Voodoo — more rightly Vodou — is a living religion born in Haiti of West African faith and Catholic saint: a way of serving the spirits called the Lwa, honoring the ancestors, and walking with the sacred. Meet the spirits, learn the rites, and see the religion clear of the shadow cast upon its name.
Calling the spirit of the day…
Begin Here — The Living Religion
The Foundations
The Loa — Spirits of Voodoo
Gatekeeper of the crossroadsPapa LegbaOld man at the meeting of the roads, he leans on his crutch where the seen world touches the unseen, and no spirit crosses until he lifts the latch. He is the first saluted and the last released, the tongue that carries prayer to the far side of the veil. Papa Legba, open the gate: without his key, every door stays shut.Primordial serpent; creation, the sky, and fresh waterDanbala WedoThe great white serpent, oldest of the mysteries, coils through the waters and hangs his body across the heavens, having spun the whole of creation from the first coiling of his flesh. He does not speak in words but hisses and whistles, moving in ripples upon the ground, cool and ancient and clean. Feed him only what is white and without salt, and he will bless the house with peace.Rainbow serpent, fertility, renewalAyida WedoWife and mirror of Danbala, she is the rainbow arched over the storm's end, the serpent of many colors who binds sky to earth. Where he is the coiling waters, she is the light that plays upon them; together they turn round one another forever, and creation holds. She is the promise renewed, the fertile hush after rain.Love, beauty, luxury, longingErzulie FredaThe Rada lady of love comes wreathed in perfume and the shimmer of gold, three rings upon her fingers, weeping even in her sweetness for a world that can never hold beauty enough. She is desire made holy and grief made luxurious, adored without measure and never satisfied. Set her the finest of everything, and still she will shed a tear.War, iron, fire, sovereigntyOgou FerayThe warrior-smith wades from the forge in a fume of gunpowder and rum, his machete flashing, his tongue sharp as the blade he keeps. He is the fire in the iron and the iron in the blood, patron of soldiers and the courage that breaks tyrants. Ogou clears the road with steel where prayer alone will not move it.Sovereign of the oceanAgweAdmiral of every water, he rules the sea from his palace on the ocean floor, gold-braided and grave, and the sailors and the drowned are alike his people. His salute is the boom of the cannon and the blast of the conch; his feast is a small ship heaped with offerings, rowed out and given to the deep. When the barque sinks clean, Agwe has taken his due.The mermaid, wealth, music, the deepLa SireneThe mermaid rises with her mirror and her comb, wife of Agwe, singing the song that draws the living down beneath the waves and returns them changed, wiser, or not at all. She keeps the treasure of the drowned world and the secret music that only the deep remembers. Follow her too far and you may live seven years under the water; some come back with the gift, and all come back marked.Serpent of fresh water, magic, secretsSimbiThe snake of the sweet waters keeps the springs and the pools and the marsh, a spirit of two waters standing where the fresh meets the salt, shy and shrewd and steeped in Kongo magic. He is the great messenger and the keeper of charms, the one who carries the dead beneath the water and teaches the secret leaves of sorcery. Seek him at the still spring in the green shade, for Simbi hoards the mysteries that others fear to hold.The sacred twins, doubled powerMarassaThe divine children, twinned and inseparable, hold the mystery that two are stronger than one and that the child is nearer to God than the grown. They are served before nearly all others, in matched dishes, for they are jealous and quick to quarrel like the children they are. In the twins lives the whole of a thing and its shadow, this world and its double, and the sacred third born after them completes the mystery.First mambo, initiation, the marketplaceAyizanThe first of all priestesses, wife of Loko the first houngan, she is the sacred palm whose torn white fronds veil the newly initiated and purify the ground they walk. She guards the threshold of the temple and the commerce of the marketplace alike, mother of every mystery of consecration. Where her palm is shredded and hung, no evil passes; Ayizan makes clean what she touches.Death, sex, resurrection, the ancestorsGedeThe rowdy nation of the dead comes in dark glasses and nasal voices, dancing the lewd banda upon the very edge of the grave, for those who have died no longer fear anything at all. They are filthy-mouthed and howling with laughter, yet they are tender healers of sick children, standing as they do at the crossing of death and new life. When the candles burn low at the feast of the dead, the veil worn thin as a moth's wing, the Gede crowd close and the ancestors draw near to the flame.Lord of death and the cemeteryBaron SamediTop hat and dark glasses, cotton in his nostrils and the grin of the grave, he stands at the first tomb of every cemetery, master of the crossroads of the dead. No soul enters the earth and none is dug back out without his leave, and it is his spade that first breaks the ground of every grave. He laughs at the powerful and drinks his rum burning with peppers, for Death fears no man.
