Paths and Passages

Abstract

This essay decenters notions of centrality and periphery as we aim to delineate the metaphysical elements of Haitian Vodou, a Diasporic religion in the Americas, and the manner in which its metaphysics becomes a national ethos of sorts, rooted in time, both past and present. We aim to use Danbala and Ayida as motif to explore Vodou hierophanies and irruptions of the sacred; as motif of negotiated relationships with divine energies, of ritual lineage and human ancestry, of complex gender notions; and as meditations on the natural world. These themes reveal important notions of oneness of being, of equilibrium and balance, as well as konesans, the all-encompassing wisdom that merges with knowledge—all represented by the great cosmic egg of the rainbow-serpent entities Danbala and Ayida.

Keywords
Vodou, Haiti, metaphysics

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

The study of religion, as with many disciplinary studies, presents very particular challenges when aimed at examining the traditions of African and African Diaspora peoples. Unfortunately, the dominant Eurocentric and “Christiancentric” modes of analysis in religious studies do not allow for the richest engagement with African and African Diasporic traditions. It is therefore imperative that we as scholars, along with our many forebears, recognize that the study of the religious cultures of Black Atlantic peoples requires its own theological analyses and hermeneutics.² Such an important shift in the examination of African and African-derived religions brings critical components of native epistemology and communal identity to the forefront of studies in religion as entities in their own right, as cultural systems with deep structural influence and expansive global significance.

This essay decenters notions of center-versus-periphery as we aim to delineate the metaphysical elements of Haitian Vodou, a Diasporic religion in the Americas, and the manner in which its metaphysics becomes a national ethos of sorts, rooted in time, both past and present.³ Certainly, Vodou permeates many, if not most, aspects of Haitian society, including family life, health, education, politics, economics, and the arts. We consider the ways that Vodou metaphysics grounds itself in notions of community as manifested in the beliefs and aspirations, actions and relational modes of Vodou participants. It encompasses multiple realities and dimensions of this world and the outer world. It provides insights into the nature of life itself and allows exploration of other forms of existence. As in all communities, metaphysics gives form to the religion of the people. It shapes what the community believes about self and other and about the significance of ritual action, as well as how a community attends to gnosis, or knowledge of spiritual mysteries, and handles the mediation of the sacred.

Vodou metaphysics differs somewhat from Western definitions in its earnest communal grounding, which always considers men and women’s person-hood as entailed in an entity larger than themselves and which is rooted in a geographic space, although situated across time. ⁴ Might Vodou metaphysics then be a nonuniversal humanism, one that believes in the centrality of the human form grounded in a particular cosmological understanding? Vodouists probe the finality of existence within a framework of collectivity, ancestors, and wholeness of being, addressing questions such as these: How do we perceive the world and our place within it, not just as individuals but also as collective selves? Where do we fit in the larger cosmos as humans, but also as part of other living systems? What happens before and after this worldly life? Do we come from ancestors and return to ancestors? Why are we here and what is our purpose in this lifetime? What kinds of marks are we to leave for our own lineages and the collective? Are these marks to be portentous or are we to tread softly? Is this life a preparation for the one that follows or a result of what came before? Do we weave vestments in this lifetime that we shall wear in the next? An important element in understanding these aspects of sacredness is reflecting on what we might call essential principles. These include the concepts of being, cause, origin, time, and space, and how these elements may provide entry into alternate realms of knowing and consciousness. These are questions that neither social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology nor Western theological discourses can explain by themselves.

Religion, which Charles H. Long views as a mode of “orienting ourselves in the universe,” yields meaning and insight into these otherwise unanswerable questions.⁵This view suggests that religion is grounded in common sense, with a metaphysical component that allows people to make sense of things that might otherwise be nonsensical. Thus, religion makes order in what might be a disorderly world; it provides direction and anchors the living within their ontological lineages and cultural frameworks. We underscore that Vodou metaphysics is informed not by worldview but instead by a complex worldsense, a term that, as Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí explains, suggests “a more inclusive way of describing the conception of the world by different cultural groups … [such as] the Yorùbá or other cultures that may privilege senses other than the visual or even a combination of senses.”⁶ This Vodou worldsense—which is not Western, but is also more than African—presents a sense of history shaped and reblended in the Caribbean crucible with the particularly turbulent realities that have marked these lands and communities.

Facile notions of African retention and continuity that place heavy emphasis on retrieval of the past often fall short of explaining the complexities of Haitian religion.⁷While acknowledging the persistence of key African elements, we draw on the dynamism of Haitian culture to explicate elements of its religious system. Our understanding of Haitian Vodou is not unlike that of other African Diaspora scholars who consider parallel cultural systems across the Atlantic as sites of continuities as well as discontinuities within traditions in the Americas.⁸ Recognizing the bricolage character of the Haitian worldsense also involves acknowledging the forced contact between African religions and Catholicism as well as the complex history of resistance, incorporation, and, more recently, affirmation that characterize Vodou’s evolution in Haiti and its diasporas.

It is in this context that we also acknowledge in this essay the Haitian struggle against colonial and internal powers to keep not only the religion and its rituals and practices alive, but also to preserve its metaphysics. Whereas some in the West continue to view Vodou rituals as macabre, simplistic, and evil, reading their non-Cartesian views as inferior, we regard their complexity and nonlinearity as the very (modern) foundation that shapes how Haitians worship and the ways that they engage both everyday and extraordinary energies at once.⁹ Vodou’s communal underpinning lies at the core of Haiti’s essence as a nation and reinforces our boldness in the face of adversity.

So-called indigenous and Third World religions—in part because of their large pantheon of spirits and differing modes of worship—have long been demonized and devalued by some adherents of Abrahamic traditions.¹⁰ The fact is that these indigenous traditions are serious enterprises that have their own phenomenology and epistemologies which provide important insights different from those in other traditions. Thus, we seek to illuminate the complexities of Vodou as an African-derived religion in order to enter into dialogue with other faith practitioners, to demonstrate the unique pragmatic dimensions of the tradition, and to find common threads in shared themes of praise, community, and worship with other world religions.¹¹

In the course of this essay, we employ the trope of Danbala and Ayida—powerful deities of our pantheon and mythology—because of their dual attributes and association in Haitian society with the most earthly, material planes of humans as well as the most esoteric, celestial realms of spirit. This dyad of female and male—with all of the complexities that it embodies—represents the perfect analogy and the ideal lens to fashion and relay Vodou notions that otherwise remain impenetrable to most outsiders. We aim to use Danbala and Ayida as a motif to explore Vodou hierophanies and irruptions of the sacred; as a motif of negotiated relationships with divine energies, of ritual lineage and human ancestry, of complex gender notions, and of meditations on the natural world.¹² These themes reveal important notions of oneness of being, of equilibrium and balance, as well as konesans, the all-encompassing wisdom that merges with knowledge—all represented by the great cosmic egg of the rainbow-serpent entities Danbala and Ayida.¹³

There are few concretized facts established in metaphysics. In this essay, we use an intuitive, reflexive approach to explore the more elusive, unverifiable elements of Haitian religion. This embodied knowledge gives us the opportunity to offer one layer of interpretation—what the society knows—and to describe certain threads in the tapestry of Vodou religion that we were able to capture in a nonlinear mode. Of course, some of these “mystic revelations” have been documented in Haitian religious history and scholarly accounts, but, until recently, Western academic constructions of religion have dominated too much of the narrative of African existence in the Americas.¹⁴ Our methodological choice also allows us to be identified as scholar-practitioners in the Vodou faith—considering that we are academics, “coming out” is a big step. This is a practical way of reinforcing that there is much more to the study of religion than so-called objectivity. As such, this reflexive approach becomes a message in itself. More importantly, we assert that this mode of learning through embodied knowledge and ritual training is perhaps the way that most suits Vodouists and their cyclical worldsense. Manichean or Cartesian approaches would simply not do the job.

We also felt that the transmission of these reflections on metaphysics would benefit from us periodically repeating a Vodou invocation emphasizing the knowledge of children—those born and those not yet formed—and their ability to connect more readily with the ancestors, as within the Vodou tradition many children remain close to the spirit realm in their first few years on earth. Deep understanding often channels an openness to knowledge experienced in early stages of life—thus, the recurring leitmotif of children in parts of the essay.

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

With this invocation, we welcome you to join this exploration of Vodou metaphysics.

Orienting Selves

Religion deals with first principles, issues of origin and essence, notions of being and knowing, myth-making, identity, and a sense of belonging within time and space. Religion is above all about regard for what cannot be easily understood, what goes beyond human comprehension, what renders us in awe. It provides a sense of what the world is about and what humans ought to be doing in it. A hunger for contact with the sacred and the seeking of the divine occur in people across populations. Religions unite a person to her or his people, to his or her gods, and to a deeply communal framework in which people unfurl themselves in the world. The behaviors framed by religion lead humanity’s most exalted moments, as well as its most abominable.¹⁵ What distinguishes our species from fellow creatures and inanimate objects is that our species created religion, which has been extant in all ethnicities across the globe.

Vodou is a compendium of human emotions, cognitive insights, and cosmic memory connecting us to divine origins. It uses orality as a significant marker for a discursive, ever-changing yet constant spiritual domain. This religion allows us to make sense of the world and to orient ourselves in the universe, but is also a step for survival, growth, and continuity for our progeny. It brings meaning where there would otherwise be chaos, and, ultimately, it connects us to community as well as with the divine. From Vodou, we derive (and perhaps also create) substantive purpose for our lives.

Our religion and ceremonies, mired in the minutiae of everyday existence and using culturally relevant rituals to bind the community, become gatherings that nourish the collectivity. The “inherent” African connection with spirit and ancestors who involved themselves in worldly matters does not allow for a crisis of faith, as there already exists a certainty about the interconnections of all life. It is not about beliefs; it is about action, it is about doing as in “songs, stories, and recipes” and repeated rituals and gestures that can eventually lead to greater understanding of cosmic forces. Should we not “evolve” our own interpretations, based on indigenous and collaborative cultural traditions, or should we allow ourselves to swallow meanings acquired from others through forms of mimicry?

The appropriation of Roman Catholic symbolic imagery, for instance, seems to have answered a number of imperatives, all plausible. In most slave societies in the Americas, slave owners and colonial authorities were rightfully anxious about practices that could have led to revolt. The use of Catholic saints in Vodou, thus, might originally have been a subterfuge. Equally valid, however, was Africans’ recognition that Christianity had its own asé and that this mysticism ought to be acquired, integrated into existing African traditions, and maybe used one day against the slave master. Indeed, while African religions in Haiti often became weapons against colonial (and internal) forces, these religions did not emerge or evolve for the functionalist purpose of resistance. These traditions existed as profound religious systems before contact with Europeans and remained cosmologically intact afterwards, even if “rewritten” for a different national song.¹⁶

Historically, many in the West viewed Haitians as children of lesser gods. It is important, however, to regain control of such narratives as we redefine ourselves and move deliberately away from princes, popes, and priests.¹⁷ Our religion is profoundly anchored in a cosmological discourse that connects persons to persons, humans to the cosmos, and remains largely outside the mediated arenas of churchly institutions. Instead, there exist a vast number of lakou and sacred temples in the countryside and in urban cities in Haiti with their own local interpretations and particular implementation of the greatly varied Vodou religion.¹⁸ Additionally, we might note that the tenth département of Haiti is said to be the nation’s many diasporas, extending from Cuba to Canada to the Congo, and including its local translations of Haitian Vodou practices beyond the island of Hispaniola. As participants in the Haitian religious system, we wish to emphasize what has been ignored or misunderstood, what many in the West have failed to apprehend: the heft, the intricate complexities, the richness of Vodou as an entity sui generis.

As we illuminate Haitian religious sensibility, we find a parallel between the study of Haitian religion and the study of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which was typically left largely unpacked in former scholarly research; indeed, its radical truths have always proven inconvenient in the history of the West. The Haitian communities that emerged, the nation that formed, and the religion and the revolution that Haitians helped advance, all endured the traumas of insignificance, the stigmata of “blackness,” “Africanness,” and “otherness.” Haiti paradoxically suffered from its success.¹⁹

The (mis)representation of Haitian religion that appeals to Euro-American views continues to consider Vodou a product of other cultural systems rather than a structure unto itself, ultimately rendering Vodou epiphenomenal. Indeed, until most recently, Vodou found no place in the study of world religions in the American academy. While this in large part remains due to the deliberate omissions in constructing the category of world religions and the persistent devaluing of African-derived religious systems, Vodou’s absence in the formal study of religion also speaks to European hesitancy and confusion with a faith tradition that did not fit easily into tropes of centuries-old Enlightenment universalism.²⁰ The opprobrium faced by Vodou came precisely from those Western clerics intent on eliminating all religious systems for their own survival, perhaps out of good intention, but certainly out of an archaic desire to civilize.²¹ Ultimately, we argue that these encounters and juxtapositions could not dislocate, decenter, or replace the ethos that connects Haitians to the source, the essence, and their Lwa.²²

Many of the distinguishing marks of Vodou—notably its bricolage of religious worldviews—are unlike those with which many Western audiences may be familiar. This makes it difficult to rely on the usual methods and tropes of Western religious scholarship. Explicating this Diasporic African devotional system requires investigating Vodou phenomenology, hermeneutics, and epistemologies all together. As Haitians ensconced in the culture, our approach may seem arcane or unorthodox to many Western academics, but we contend that our task is doubly difficult in a context in which everything is sacred though not necessarily revealed to noninitiates. As the Mende proverb explains: “There is a thing passing in the sky; some thick clouds surround it; the uninitiated sees nothing.”²³

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

Returning to Source

The living, the dead, and the unborn that are transitioning, and in constant flux, play significant roles in an unbroken chain. From the smoke of ethereal existence and the miasma of flesh arises flesh of the spirit. And from matter arises the mind. Upon reincarnation, the personality disappears and a new being is formed from matter with mind anew, though still carrying the emanation of a not-so distant ancestor. Danbala and Ayida, the “world egg,” the form of the human male and female, serve as blueprint for all creation.

Tout moun se moun; all humans are equal as divine before God. The actual translation of this Kreyòl saying is even more powerful: “all men are (Wo) Men. ” This acknowledges that all persons are connected biologically to all others as they are linked intimately to all fellow creatures in their very marrow. Léopold Sédar Senghor, in his 1939 essay “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” stated:

Le service nègre aura été de contribuer, avec d’autres peuples, à refaire l’unité de l’Homme et du Monde: allier la chair et l’esprit, l’homme à son semblable, le cailloux à Dieu. En d’autres termes—le réel au surréel par l’Homme, non pas centre, mais charnière, mais nombril du Monde.²⁴ The service rendered by the negro would have been to contribute, together with other peoples, to recreate the unity of (Wo)Man and World: to mesh flesh and spirit, man to his fellow men, the pebble to God. In other words—the merging of the physical and metaphysical through (Wo)Man, not as center, but as connecting piece, as hinge, as navel of the World.²⁵

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

A four-year-old boy once said that religion was about “stories, songs, and recipes.”²⁶ Children are not (yet) deep philosophical thinkers, though they may surprise us by their insights. They act and they do. At some levels, they have true clarity about the essence of things. Children—with one foot out of the grave—step into the material world often with undiluted, even “unadulterated” insight into the “stories, songs, and recipes” that bring flavor to life and also bring understanding. The unabashed joy of a toddler gives us an approximation of God’s love at its purest. Many indigenous cultures embrace the spiritual potency and knowledge that babies and infants carry with them in their journey into the physical realm.²⁷ Their active memories of past lives make unique contributions to the present world, while their ethereal presence and heightened, imaginative visions serve as portals into the sacred. Children have remained close to that infinite state of being and immeasurable knowledge, and, as such, they exist as links between the living and the dead. The unborn, the beloved children of Danbala, source of life, who are nurtured in the netherworld by the Gede spirits, come from the cemeteries. Their lineage remains unbroken. Life ultimately arises from the ashes.

The statement by this young child about the “stories, songs, and recipes” of religion encapsulates basic elements of Vodou, where “doing” is even more significant than believing. “Believing” and “doing” combined allow us to readily glimpse discourses about metaphysics. “Doing” is a complicated act that involves many layers of our entire being—mind, body, and soul. In the larger order of things, all this is a form of reverence for the sacred. Our religious actions, what Eliade calls a “chaotic mass of actions,” derive from conscious and subconscious decisions to “act” with our speech and our words, ideas and feelings, and thoughts and deeds—a whole panoply of “behaviors” and affects considered significant in Vodou metaphysics to “make up what one may call the religious phenomenon.”²⁸ Through these repeated gestures, one may ultimately arrive at meaning that leads to esoteric knowledge, known as konesans in Vodou. This is in large measure where “magic” comes in and also where it comes from. These ritual gestures derive from a community’s everyday experiences and actions rather than from a typical knowledge base. Everything is affected by one’s own experiences as well as the experiences of others. Principles, on the other hand, are another matter altogether. They are revealed through practice.²⁹

In Vodou, it is almost never (solely) about beliefs. Often an acte de foi (act of faith) in our own prescience guides the actions we carry out in the face of the collective, and that act of faith, in turn, endows us with a sense of person-hood, individual validity, and also ethnic identity.³⁰ While in our daily existence we are held accountable for the consequences of our behaviors, there exists no universal moral canon; in Vodou, life is ultimately about maintaining balance and about “what works” for each person as part of the communal whole. It is always about energy at work. Heat in motion.³¹ In what we call langaj, remnants of African vocables, we say “Zo a li mache, li mache, li mache, lavi nan men Bondye” (Energy works, and works and works again; life is in God’s hands). This notion expresses the inner machinery of the cosmos, as congregants in ritual work their rotating arms counterclockwise, like images reversed in the mirror. We also derive energy from reflections of the deep watery vortex, the abysmal waters, the amniotic fluids that open up meaningful channels between worlds that also sustain us.

Even the Lwa, immortal though they may be, depend on God eternal, on Gran Mèt, Bondye ’s ultimate energy. As mortals, we feed the Lwa and we pray for the spirits: “tout hougan ak manbo priye pou lwa yo” (all priests, male and female, pray for the Lwa). Our singing and dancing demonstrate mutual need and mutual support. This points to the codependency of gods and humans. It is not just humans who need deities. Gods also rely on humans to be nourished, fed, and believed in.

Like other African-derived religions, Vodou does more than theorize— this is why we have stories, songs, and recipes. Intuitive knowledge that is connected to larger cosmic understanding remains the foundation that may or may not be accompanied by principles, formulations, and precepts. This is why followers of the religion are seldom referred to as believers; they refer to themselves as servants of the spirits, sevitè, or practitioners, who “act” and serve in their worship. Here the French verb agir —to act, to act upon, and even to be acted upon—cuts a wider swath. For Haitians, religion goes beyond beliefs; it links thoughts and ideas to practice. It involves praxis informed by worldsense that, in return, informs ethos; knowledge comes from action—it is konesans grounded in wisdom and experience. Unwilling to juxtapose “doing” and “theorizing,” we say that Vodou theorizes in its doing.

Paths and Passages

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

Life is about passages, but it is also a constant exchange between deities and human spirits that result in optimal life opportunities, which ultimately lead to never-ending life cycles and reincarnation. We are our own ancestors. The Yoruba pause until it is revealed through perspicacious observations: Yes, it is grandmother, it is grandfather. Yetunde and Babatunde have returned.

Matter/flesh and mind/spirit are one in a closed system, a cosmos from which we arose but which we create in tandem. Death is just the beginning. It is at once transition and transcendence. The cross of the Gede, “enshrined” in all their vèvè, relates to the new birth of cleansed babies returning to earth. This is a multilevel experience in which God, the deities, ourselves, and the world of nature all interact in daily circumstances, good and bad and indifferent—not good or bad, as if it were a Manichean dichotomy. In our particular condition as Haitians, life is also a conversation between “Old World” and “New,” a transcontinental transfer of cultural traditions of African, European, and Amerindian sources, about iterations and willful survival, and about human agency at the pedestrian level.

Life and death are thus part of the same circuitous continuum and components of the same reality, uniting at the crossroads a metaphysical axis that pierces a physical axis. Legba Atigbon of the Rada and Bawon Samdi of the Gede family unify physical and metaphysical existences. Though often juxtaposed, these entities are not polar opposites, embodying at once the effect and the cause of nondichotomous thinking. Danbala and Ayida similarly represent a dynamic pair of spirits. As the coils of the serpent, an organic being of the earth, joins with the arc-en-ciel (rainbow), a sky phenomenon, two bio-energetic forces merge in complementary fashion through physical arching properties. Together, their wisdom signifies unfurling possibilities and opportunities to learn from our animal existence, from nature itself, and from each other. Death is of grave significance in the religious construct, largely because it serves as the gateway to the road traveled by all spirits, ourselves included. Indeed, Legba, Danbala, Ayida, and Gede are spirits, and so are we. One does not seek eternal life; life is eternal already in its spiritual import, while the world of nature serves as a constant expression of the divine. As the Kreyòl saying goes, nothing, none and no one is wasted: “Fòk nan pwen pou n pa jwenn” (all would have to be annihilated for us not to be able to find what is needed to sustain ourselves—or, all that we need already exists). We inhabit our bodies: the kò kadav. The minerals found in the sun, other planets, and astral bodies are embedded in our flesh. In this way, we are all comprised of stardust. The forces of nature render the divine principle tenable in this biocentric universe we inhabit.

African religious and philosophical systems, being anchored in nature and its multiple and logical processes, have never had a “beef” with the scientific establishment, never had to contradict modern science at its best. In fact, the African spirit has argued that all things are energy and as such require feeding, thus opening the door to the very idea of sacrifice, of reciprocity, of a quid pro quo in the use (and misuse) of nature and its elements. The issue of sacrifice is to be seen literally as well as nonliterally as we tread softly upon the planet and the stars. What we have done is assign consciousness to nature and its constitutive elements as purposeful and deliberate, as fellow passengers in the vast enclosed cosmos we created—literally!

Foremost, African spiritual systems are described in the literature as anthropocentric and humanist; the human being, male and female—not God—is at the center of the universe.³² While people may not be the rulers of creation, in Vodou they exist at the center of it.³³ In such a construction of reality, there is no place for the concept of sin—yet alone an Original one. “There are no sins below the equator” is one of our favorite Brazilian sayings about sex—sex that is so dear to the Gede, sex that differentiates us in its deeply visceral sensations from the spirits, the angels, the mystè, and the Lwa.

Vodou as a religious, spiritual, and intellectual system highlights processes, fluidity, and dynamism rather than fixed conditions and oppositional states.³⁴ This system carves out paths and passages from the cosmic reality we come from to the cosmic reality to which we shall return. It offers possibilities and the flexibility that the mythic Danbala and Ayida pair represents. The tradition also includes male and female entities that jointly create life, that exist at the beginning and exit at the end in perfect step, and that regenerate life itself.

Vodou embraces nature and the larger cosmos that validates our existence as part of the material world. We live in a biocentric universe in which we create the universe and are created by it. We exist as organic beings in line with all other energetic forces, including spirits.³⁵ So part of us is divine as well. Danbala and Ayida serve as archetypes that remind us how to be divine but also earthly in their respective masculine and feminine modes of being. The Marasa, the male and female children, the essential twins, come from this union of flesh and spirit.

The small child knows; we spend the rest of our lives aiming to recapture what we already knew as infants: that intuitive knowledge transmitted via the cosmic nonbrit, the umbilical cord that unites life to life, child to the mother lode, child to cosmos.

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