by Mambo Racine Sans Bout Sa Te La Daginen

In online Vodou communities of the early 2000s, a recurring argument held that Vodou must "modernize" or die — that its initiation requirements, its insistence on the kanzo ceremony in Haiti, its passwords and protocols, were obstacles that would drive away Western practitioners and doom the tradition to irrelevance. Mambo Racine Sans Bout heard this argument often, and found it precisely backwards.

This post from the alt.religion.voodoo newsgroup in July 2005 is her counterargument: what would kill Vodou is not refusing to change, but changing too much. She points to the historical record — fourteen separate periods of persecution in Haiti, all survived — and attributes that survival to the very rigidity her critics wanted to dismantle. When the passwords are standardized, when the kanzo ceremony is performed the same way in every house, when every Mambo and Houngan comes through the same djevo, the tradition is one thing, not a thousand.

The post is brief but pointed. Mambo Racine does not argue that Vodou must never change in any respect — she acknowledges room for creativity and individual variation. But on the structural core, the ceremony of initiation, she is unyielding: drift there, and in a few generations there is nothing left to drift from.

I've seen a few assertions here to the effect that "if Vodou does not change it will die."

Nothing could be further from the truth! It is the supportive framework of Vodou that has kept it alive through fourteen separate periods of persecution in Haiti!

Yes, there is room for creativity in Vodou. Yes, one Houngan may serve one lwa more than another. But the rules of initiation, the process by which we produce our clergy and our initiates, does not change — in fact it is the same everywhere in Haiti. If one house had a particular password and the next house had a different password, what would be the use? Or if, in each generation, Houngans and Mambos each changed the kanzo ceremony a little bit, or declared themselves "self-initiated," in a few generations the Vodou tradition itself would no longer exist. THAT is what would kill Vodou.

An initiate must undergo the kanzo ceremony in Haiti. Period, end of statement! And there is nothing in modern life that makes this requirement anathema to the continued existence of Vodou. On the contrary! With airplanes and internet and online communication, it is now much easier for international initiates to conform to the regulations of the Vodou religion than it ever was in the past.

Colophon

Written by Bon Mambo Racine Sans Bout Sa Te La Daginen, a Vodou Mambo based in Jacmel, Haiti, and leader of the Roots Without End Society. Posted to the alt.religion.voodoo, alt.religion.orisha, soc.culture.haiti, and alt.pagan newsgroups, July 26, 2005. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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