Come in from the dark. The ounfò — the Vodou temple — keeps no marble silence, holds no pews in rows. It is a household of the spirits, and like any household it is warm with use: wax dripped and hardened on the floor, the sweetness of rum and roasted corn in the air, a rooster somewhere complaining in the yard. What looks to the stranger like a cluttered room is in truth a threshold, one of the thin places where the world of the living presses against Ginen — that ancestral Africa held to lie beneath the waters, where the Lwa and the honored dead abide. The temple is built so that the two worlds can touch.
The Peristil, Where the Dance Is Made
The heart of the compound is the peristil, the roofed and open-sided court where public ceremony unfolds. Here there are no walls to shut out the night; the drums can be heard across the fields, and the neighbors, the dogs, the ancestors all draw near. A packed-earth or concrete floor takes the bare feet of the dancers hour upon hour. Around the edges, benches and the leaning bodies of those who have come to watch, to serve, to wait. The peristil is not a stage. It is a working ground, and everyone in it — singer, drummer, initiate, guest — is part of the labor of calling the spirits home.
The Poto Mitan: Road and Ladder
Rising through the center of the peristil stands the poto mitan, the center post, often painted in coiling bands and ringed at its foot by a low masonry base. Everything turns around it. It is, the tradition holds, the road down which the Lwa descend and the ladder they climb — the axis that runs from the peak of the roof down through the floor and onward to Ginen beneath the waters. It is spoken of as the way of Legba, keeper of the gate and the crossroads, for no spirit crosses over until Legba opens the barrier. On the ground around the post the officiant traces the vèvè, intricate emblems drawn in a slow trickle of cornmeal or ash or gunpowder, each the signature and summons of a particular Lwa. Offerings are set at the base; libations are poured there, three times, to the four directions. When possession comes and a Lwa mounts one of the faithful, it is often to the poto mitan that the horse first turns, embracing the post as one embraces the pillar of one’s own house.
The Pè: Altars of the Nations
Set back in the inner chambers are the pè, the altars, and they are gloriously crowded. Vodou serves many nanchon — nations of spirits — and each keeps its own place and its own things. You will find the chromolithographs of Catholic saints pressed into holy double service: Saint Patrick with his snakes standing for Danbala the serpent, the Mater Dolorosa for Ezili Freda. Bottles line the shelves, some wrapped in beadwork and sequins, some holding the offerings a spirit favors. There are the govi, the clay jars in which the souls of the dead may be housed and spoken with; there are combs and perfumes and mirrors for Ezili, iron and machetes for Ogou, raw white rum burning with pepper and dark glasses and the smell of graves for the Gede. Candles, food plates, coins, a skull. None of it is decoration. Each object is a door held open toward one spirit, kept fed and kept faithful.
The Drums and the Ason
Nothing moves without the drums. The cool Rada battery — three drums, the great manman, the middle segon, the small boula, laced tight and baptized like children — carries the older spirits of Ginen, steady and deep, the iron ogan striking time against them. When the rite turns to the Petwo nation, the drums change and the air changes with them: fewer drums, hands cracking sharp and hot, a fierce Creole fire born of this hemisphere and its suffering, quick to bring the harder spirits down. The drummers do not merely accompany; they call, and the Lwa answer the rhythm made for them alone.
Above it all moves the ason, the sacred rattle — a gourd webbed in a net of beads and serpent vertebrae, a small bell often chiming beside it. To shake the ason is to command the ceremony, to salute and dismiss the spirits. It is placed in the hand only at the highest degree of the kanzo initiation; to “take the ason” is to become houngan or mambo asogwe, priest or priestess who may seat spirits and lead the house. When you see the ason lifted, you are watching authority itself, earned in the dark and carried in the wrist.
All of this is Haitian Vodou, and it belongs to the ounfò. Do not confuse it with the New Orleans Voodoo of Marie Laveau and the old Congo Square dances, which grew its own Creole shape without the poto mitan or the ason; nor with Hoodoo, which is not a religion of temples and spirits at all but a practical craft of roots, powders, and conjure. Here, under this one roof, the post stands and the drums speak, and the room breathes. It is waiting only for the song.