by Bon Mambo Racine Sans Bout Sa Te La Daginen

Baron — known also as Baron Samedi, Baron La Croix, or Baron Cimetière depending on his aspect — is the lord of the Gede, the spirits of the dead, in Haitian Vodou. He is among the most widely recognized lwa outside Haiti, his image fixed in popular imagination: top hat, sunglasses, purple and black, rough speech and rougher humor. Mambo Racine, posting to alt.religion.voodoo in July 2005, takes that popular image as her starting point and then moves past it.

What follows is a practitioner's theology of Baron: his foods and their proportions, his sacred number, his divination methods, his dance, and his paradoxical nature as both the beneficent chief of ancestors and a wicked sorcerer of tremendous power. The post was part of an ongoing series of teachings Mambo Racine offered on the Vodou Forum and related Usenet groups throughout 2005, addressed to practitioners and sincere seekers outside the initiated community.

Most of you know the basics of Baron — the Big Black Man in the Cemetery. Let me review for a moment — you know that his colors are black and purple, you know that he carries a baton, wears a silly top hat, sometimes sunglasses minus one lens, you know that he dances the banda and uses really indecent language (but never to curse AT someone, always in a humorous way). Right?

Okay, let's go on. Baron in all his aspects is a big eater. Death devours all, right? And he eats vulgarly, stuffing his mouth, but his hand gestures are effete — pinkie finger sticking out, all that stuff. He likes cassava bread (flat bread something like "Syrian bread"), he likes smoked mackerel with roasted unripe banana and other staple foods, rice and black beans, everything with LOTS of pepper. He drinks that fiery raw rum called kleren, in which screaming hot peppers are steeped along with other things.

He does divination, either with cards or by looking into a mirror, or by other means. His number is nine, so he likes things given to him nine at a time — nine big cassava breads, for instance. In Haiti we make a special kind of cassava bread for him, called "bobori" and they are huge! Nine boboris practically have to be carried in with a wheelbarrow.

His baton is black with white rings. He dances with it, and he also puts it between his legs to imitate a phallus. But Baron is a cadaver, and all the winding and grinding he does, there is no sexual arousal FOR BARON. If a man seems to be possessed by Baron, and then starts showing signs of sexual arousal, he's apt to be laughed out of the peristyle!

Now, let me tell you — Baron is beneficent, he's the Chief of Ancestors, and of course our ancestors love us. But he is also a wicked vicious sorcerer, believe you me! And yet and still, he is the judge between sorcerers and their victims.

Colophon

Written by Bon Mambo Racine Sans Bout Sa Te La Daginen (Mambo Racine), an American-born mambo asogwe initiated in Jacmel, Haiti, and the founder of the Vodou Page and Vodou Forum communities. Posted to alt.religion.orisha, alt.religion.voodoo, soc.culture.haiti, and alt.pagan in July 2005, as part of an ongoing series of teachings on the lwa.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

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