Erzulie

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Pinned to the wall of a peristil, side by side, two chromolithographs of the Virgin. On the left she is pale and crowned, her breast run through with swords, her hands and throat weighed down with gold — the Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows, grieving in silk. On the right she is dark, her right cheek cut with three straight lines, a child held against her body, a sword laid along her own arm — the Black Madonna carried out of the monastery at Częstochowa in Poland and set down, by some long road, in the Caribbean. To the Church that printed the two prints they are one woman: the Mother of God in two of her sorrows. To the people who serve in this room they are two entirely different women, and the whole distance between them is a theology of what it is to be a woman in Haiti. One of them arrives in perfume and departs in tears. The other arrives with a blade and cannot say a word. Their name, in Kreyòl, is Ezili.

The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the Polish icon under which Ezili Dantò is served in Haiti; the Virgin’s dark face bears two vertical scars on the right cheek. UnknownUnknown, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The name and its nations

Erzulie — properly Ezili, and never one figure — is a family of lwa, the feminine spirits who preside in Haitian Vodou over love and beauty, sexuality and motherhood, grief and wrath. Vodou (the tradition’s name, not the slur “voodoo”) is a coherent, living religion, worked out in colonial Saint-Domingue by enslaved West and Central Africans and served, today, in Haiti and across its diaspora. Above it stands Bondye, the remote creator, too far off for daily address; the practical work of religion is done with the lwa, the intermediaries who come close, who mount their servants and speak. The Ezili are among the most intimately served of them all.

The taproot runs to West Africa. The lwa of the “cool” ancestral rite are grouped as the Rada nation, a name worn down from Allada, a city of the old kingdom of Dahomey in what is now Benin — the country of the Fon and Ewe, whose word vodun for the deities gave the whole religion its name, and whose sacred water-spirits stand behind Ezili’s own association with rivers, sweetness, and the sea (see West African Vodun and the Fon cosmology of Mawu-Lisa). Ezili Freda carries the honorific “Dahomey” in her full name, Ezili Freda Dahomey, a straight line of memory back across the ocean. She is widely read as the Haitian kinswoman of the Yoruba orisha Oshun, the river deity of love, gold, and beauty (orisha religion) — a relation, not an identity, for the lwa are not orishas and Vodou is its own creole formation rather than a branch of the Orisha traditions.

In Haiti the family split along the two great rites of the religion. Ezili Freda Dahomey belongs to Rada — the cool, sweet-tempered, ancestral nanchon brought from Dahomey. Ezili Dantò belongs to Petwo, the hot rite forged in the New World under slavery, quick and forceful, shaped decisively by the religion of the Kongo (see the Kongo and the BaKongo cosmology of the dikenga); here it is enough to say that Petwo’s heat is the ritual register of enslavement and revolt, and that Dantò is one of its sovereigns. The two Ezili are the same spirit’s two rites and two faces, and Haitians and their scholars alike have read the pair as the two poles of Haitian womanhood — Freda the dream of leisure and romance the world can never deliver, Dantò the laboring, protecting reality that carries the household on her back.

Freda, who leaves in tears

Ezili Freda is served on a Thursday, in a corner given over to pink and pale blue, to white and gold. Her altar is a dressing table more than an altar: mirrors and combs, perfume and Florida Water, jewelry, sweet cakes, champagne and liqueurs, the crème de cacao she favors. Her symbol, traced in her vèvè, is the heart. She is the coquette of luxury — femininity itself in its aspect of beauty, refinement, and desire — and she is Rada through and through, cool and light-skinned and fastidious, the aristocrat of the pantheon. On the Catholic side she is served under the Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, whose printed image shows the Mother crowned and richly robed with her heart pierced by swords; the gold and the grief on that chromolithograph are, to her servants, Ezili Freda exactly.

She wears three wedding rings, one for each of her three husbands — Danbala the primordial serpent whose arc is the rainbow (Damballa), Agwe the sovereign of the sea, and Ogou the warrior of iron and fire (Ogou). Three marriages, and still she is not satisfied. However lavish the service — however the room is scented for her, however the woman or man she mounts is bathed, dressed in her silks, and hung with her jewels — Ezili Freda always leaves weeping. The tears are not an accident of a given night; they are her theology. She weeps because no love on earth is the love she wants, because the perfect devotion she is owed cannot be given by anyone living, because the beautiful world she inhabits for an hour is not enough and never will be. Her insatiability is the ache at the center of desire itself, held up and looked at. When she departs her horse, she departs disappointed, and the disappointment is the truest thing she has to teach.

Dantò, who cannot speak

Ezili Dantò is served on a Tuesday, in red and blue and black, and her table is not a dressing table. Her offerings are fried pork — the griyo of the Haitian kitchen — raw unfiltered kleren, the strong cane rum; harsh unfiltered cigarettes; and, at her feast, the sacrifice of a black pig. She is dark-skinned and Petwo, and she is a single mother and a warrior. Where Freda is the dream, Dantò is the woman who works: who raises children alone, who feeds them, and who will take up a knife to defend them. She is served under the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and the match is exact down to the scar: the icon’s Virgin bears two dark lines on her right cheek, and Dantò bears the twa mak, the “three marks,” read at once as African scarification carried across the water and, in the stories told of her, as wounds taken in a fight with her sister Freda over the affections of Ogou. She is almost always shown holding a child, her daughter Anaïs — the Madonna and Child of the Częstochowa panel become mother and daughter in the lakou.

By the legend most often told of her, Ezili Dantò fought in the war of independence and had her tongue cut out — in some tellings by the enemy, in others by her own side, who feared what she might reveal under capture. So when she mounts her horse she cannot form words. What comes instead is a hard, wordless stammer, ke-ke-ke, and it is Anaïs who interprets her mother’s meaning for those who have come to consult her. A spirit who cannot speak and a daughter who speaks for her: the image is of a woman whose voice was taken and who found a way to be heard anyway.

Dantò is the protector of the unprotected. She defends women and children; she is served by, and fiercely guards, those the world pushes to its margins — she is closely associated with women who love women, with the masisi (men who love men), and with transfeminine devotees, and she is one of the spirits most often called on by queer Haitians as a mother who will not turn them away. Karen McCarthy Brown, whose Mama Lola devotes its eighth chapter to the Ezili, read the pair not as goddesses set apart from women’s lives but as their close doubles — the Ezili at once a mirror in which Haitian women see their own loves and labors and losses, and a map by which they find their way through them. Freda and Dantò between them cover the ground: the longing and the work, the silk and the knife.

The vèvè of Ezili Dantò, the ritual signature traced to summon her. Oficinalis, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A note on distance is owed here. The service of the lwa reaches its height in possession — the lwa “mounts” its chwal, its horse, displacing the servant’s own consciousness to speak and act through the body — and the deeper offices of the religion, the graded kanzo initiation and the making of a pwen, a concentrated point of spiritual force, belong to the priesthood of the oungan and manbo and to their societies. These are described here from the outside, as the tradition’s own scholars describe them, and not as instructions; much of the ritual detail, too — a lwa’s exact colors, day, and offerings — varies from one lakou and one rite to the next, and no single form is the canonical one. What is steady across the variation is the double figure: Freda who cannot be satisfied, Dantò who cannot be silenced.

The lwa of the Revolution

Ezili Dantò is not only a household spirit. She is a national one. Tradition holds that she was present at the ceremony in the wooded north at Bwa Kayiman on the night of 14 August 1791, where enslaved people are said to have sworn a blood pact — a pig sacrificed to her — that lit the insurrection. What followed was the only large-scale slave revolt in history to succeed: thirteen years of war that ended slavery in the colony and produced, on 1 January 1804, the first Black republic. For her part in it Dantò is honored as a lwa of the nation, the fierce mother who took up arms and lost her tongue for the cause.

The night itself is genuinely debated, and the debate should be named rather than smoothed over. The fullest early account of the ceremony comes secondhand and hostile, from the colonist Antoine Dalmas, and that provenance has led some historians to treat Bwa Kayiman as more founding myth than event. Haitian scholars have pushed back hard: the ethnologist Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique marshaled August 1791 arrest testimony and field investigation to argue for the historicity and credibility of the gathering against its dismissal as pure invention. The scholarly settlement, insofar as there is one, is that a religious gathering and a national origin-story have grown together and cannot now be fully pulled apart — an event and a myth at once. Dantò stands inside that knot, and the question of exactly what happened at Bwa Kayiman is treated at length elsewhere; here she is invoked only as the spirit the tradition remembers being there.

The slander and the living faith

Against all of this stands the thing the religion has most had to endure: the “voodoo” of the horror film and the tourist stall — the pin-stuck doll, the shuffling zombie, the “black magic” of pulp and Hollywood. It is worth saying plainly that this is not the religion. It is an appropriation and a slander, assembled largely in the era of the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and the sensational travel books it fed, and kept alive since by an industry that found the caricature profitable. The zonbi of the tradition — a Kongo-rooted idea of a soul captured or a body emptied of its soul — is a somber matter its own scholars treat with care, not a monster; and the sèvis, the vèvè, the possession, the nations of Rada and Petwo are a liturgy, not a spookshow. Where the “voodoo” label or the more recent evangelical reframing of Bwa Kayiman as a “pact with Satan” appears, it should be marked for what it is and set aside.

The Ezili have also drawn serious study, and the religion has produced and inspired a real literature. Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1953) brought the possession-rites of the lwa to a wide readership; Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991) followed one manbo and her family from Haiti to Brooklyn and made the Ezili central to its portrait of Haitian womanhood; Joan (Colin) Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995) read the lwa as a memory of the colonial past. A good general overview of the tradition and its spirits is now available in the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology’s account of Haitian Vodou. The Polish icon under which Dantò is served has its own scholarship, too: the standard account traces the Black Madonna’s arrival to the Polish legionnaires Napoleon sent in 1802–03 to crush the revolution, some of whom defected to the insurgents and left their Częstochowa Virgin behind them.

The religion has been attacked from within Haiti as well as from without. A wave of Catholic-and-state hostility peaked in the rejete renunciations from around 1939 and the “anti-superstition” campaign of 1941–42, when drums, flags, peristyles, and sacred trees were burned; the ethnologist Jacques Roumain founded Haiti’s Bureau d’Ethnologie in 1941 in the teeth of it, to defend the heritage the campaign meant to destroy. The Duvalier dictatorship (1957–86) later bent the religion to its own ends, cultivating oungan and folding some into the Tonton Macoutes — an abuse of Vodou, not an expression of it — and after the 2010 earthquake the old slander returned in the mouths of foreign preachers. The fuller history of that long punishment belongs to the story of the Haitians themselves. Through all of it the service has continued: the Ezili are still called on a Thursday and a Tuesday, and each July the pilgrims climb to the falls at Saut-d’Eau, where the Virgin and Ezili are honored together in the falling water.

Back in the peristil, the two prints hang where they have always hung. A woman comes on Thursday for Freda, is bathed and perfumed and hung with rings, and weeps when the spirit leaves her — because the love she wants is not in the world. She comes back on Tuesday for Dantò, drinks the raw kleren and eats the griyo, and is answered in a stammer her daughter has to translate — because the mother who defends her had her tongue cut out and speaks anyway. The same Catholic Virgin looks down from both pictures. The woman who serves needs them both: the dream and the mother, the silk and the knife, the one who cannot be satisfied and the one who cannot be silenced.

→ Related: Papa Legba · Baron Samedi · Damballa · Ogou · Bwa Kayiman · Saut D Eau · Souvenance · Lakou Soukri · The Haitians · The Maroons · The Kongo · West African Vodun · Orisha Religion · Fon Cosmology Mawu Lisa · The Fon · Bakongo Cosmology Dikenga · Taino