Unlike Western religions, Vodou rituals are not
weekly occurrences. Most temples hold them
three or four times a year. They can be occasions
requiring elaborate preparations such as the
acquisition of flowers, live animals, foodstuff, and
other ritual paraphernalia to be tended as offer-
ings to the lwas and for the consumption of the
community. Among the significant rituals in
the Vodou liturgical year is the pilgrimage and the
feast that celebrates the apparition of the Virgin
Mary (and, by extension, Ezili Freda Dahomey)
near the waterfalls outside of Saut d’Eau, a village
in the central portion of Haiti. Thousands of
devotees gather at the site on July 16, the day ded-
icated to the Virgin, to attend the celebration of
the Catholic mass in the nearby church of
Mirebalais, a town in the central portion of Haiti,
and to pay homage to the saint near the water-
falls. Devotees bathe in the pool of water beneath
the fall, anticipating spirit possession and spiritual
healing. They also tie blue and pink (Ezili and the
Virgin’s symbolic colors) ribbons about their
waists that they remove and tie around some of
the adjacent trees near the fall as protection from
defilement or as a way of ridding themselves of
diseases and misfortunes.
All Saints’ Day on November 1 is also an
important holy day in the Vodou liturgical calen-
dar. Special ceremonies and offerings are tendered
to Gede (from the family of Dahomean Ghedevi
spirits), Ginen’s gatekeeper. In Vodou mythology,
Ginen (or Guinea) is Africa where the ancestral
spirits of the “living dead” reside in the primor-
dial waters of the abyss far underneath the Earth’s
surface; it is the place whence they are said to
ascend from their sacred abyss to “visit” their
progeny during the rituals. In time, they return to
the world of the living by entering a young
mother’s womb at the conception of a child and
may be reborn in the body of a newborn. Gede is
then Ginen’s guardian, who allows these ancestral
spirits to travel back and forth to the world of the
living. He is the lord of death, but is also identi-
fied with life; his symbols include skulls and
crossed bones, but also the phallus, which repre-
sents life. Gede is the emblematic coincidence of
opposites; he is symbolic of the womb and the
tomb, of life and death, of the beginning and the
end, and of florescence and decay.
The cycle of funerary rituals entails an elabo-
rate set of observances performed by members
of the family to ensure both the passage of the
deceased spirit into the abyss and its reclamation
into the world of the living. This cycle of rituals
lasts an entire year after the death of the person
and is based largely on many African concepts of
the self. As in West Africa, Vodouists believe that
the human spirit derives its existence from sacred
and human sources. Through many rebirths, each
individual is the continuation of the dead father’s
spirit, the grandfather’s, and so on, extending in
retrogression through his or her entire lineage.
Thus, in Vodou, as it is in West African religious
traditions, the individual self does not exist, but
is conceived to be a single-branching organism
beyond the self to enlarge its circle out of sight to
include limbs far beyond this life. One participates
in the visible and invisible worlds simultaneously,
and one’s sense of selfhood is realized by the
acknowledgment of one’s dependence on the visi-
ble and invisible human family.
Vodouists believe that the human body is a
manifestation of the Godhead and that it is consti-
tuted of three principal compartments, character-
ized by their psychic functions in the human body.
The first concept of the human spirit is the
gwobonanj (which means literally “big good
angel”). It is the immortal, cosmic spirit of
Bondye—an internal self-generating life force and
source of divine energy that ensures the vital signs
of life, such as the inhalation and exhalation of
the thoracic cavity, the flow of blood, the beating
of the heart, and the movements of the body in
general. The second compartment of the human
psyche is the tibonanj (which literally means
“little good angel”). It is the personality, the ego
soul that represents the unique quality of an indi-
vidual’s persona and is discernible in one’s facial
expression and general deportment. The third is
the mèt-tèt (which literally means “master of the
head”); it is the guardian spirit that has protected
a person from danger throughout his or her life
and has been the subject of that person’s devotion.
Shortly after death, a special ritual known as
dessounen (the uprooting of life) is performed by
a priest that is designed to extract the parts of the
spirits from the body and dispatch them to their
respective abodes: the gwobonanj and the mèt-tèt698 Vodou in Haiti