Anba Dlo: When Ego drowns

Anba dlo is one of those Vodou expressions people love to repeat without ever truly sitting inside its meaning. It sounds lovely. It feels mystical. It brings to mind mermaids, soft blues, sequinned flags, conch shells arranged on cool altars. It invites daydreams about La Siren guiding you gently through warm waves. But those who have actually been taken there will tell you something far less pretty. Anba dlo rarely feels like a soothing swim. It feels like sinking. It is the moment your feet no longer touch anything that will hold you. It is the shock of realising that fighting the water only drains your strength. It is the quiet, frightening choice to let go and allow yourself to go under.

In Haitian Vodou thought, under the water is not a metaphor. It is a real spiritual region linked to the sea, the spirits, the ancestors and the dead. It is also a way of speaking about depth. The soul of a deceased person spends a season under the water before it is ritually reclaimed and welcomed into the ancestor community. Knowledge itself is described as rising from the deep rather than from any surface cleverness. That old proverb, konesans soti anba dlo, is usually repeated as if it simply meant that the spirits teach you things in dreams. But its older meaning is far more demanding. True knowledge requires descent. Something in you must go down, be submerged, be pressed and reshaped before it can rise with wisdom.

And it is not only La Siren who takes people. Anyone familiar with the older Kongo-rooted side of Vodou knows that the simbi take people too. The Kongo waters have their own pull, their own demands, their own fierce tenderness. There are stories of those who vanished beside rivers and springs and came back with eyes full of things no book could have taught them. Some of these stories are centuries old. Some happened to people we know. My friend Marie Charles, who once ran Mt Carmel Botanica, was taken as a child. By Simbi. She disappeared for days. One moment she was present, the next she was simply gone, taken under in a way no ordinary explanation can satisfy. People searched. There was no sign. And then she returned, carrying something heavy and quiet that had not been there before.

It is important to state this plainly: People can be taken. Not symbolically. Not as a myth. They vanish for three days, seven days, nine days. Sometimes more. They go under the water and remain there until the spirits release them. This has always been part of the tradition. But it is not the whole of what anba dlo means. Not everyone who goes under disappears from the world. The physical vanishing is not the full measure of the descent.

For some, anba dlo happens while they continue to move through their daily lives. It is not marked by being missing. It is marked by letting go, by an inward collapsing of the self, by sinking into the depths of one’s own spirit without the illusion of control. It is the season when you stop pretending that you can hold everything together with sheer will. Something in you gives way. Something loosens. Something falls quietly. You may still be answering emails, cooking dinner, tending to children, showing up at work. Yet inside, you are underwater. Inside, you have stopped fighting. Inside, the shift has begun.

Traumatic events, emotional collapse, sudden illness, losses, heartbreak and even near-death experiences can also fling someone into the depths without warning. Those who have brushed the edge of death often speak of an uncanny quiet, a sense of slipping out of the world, of falling into a place that feels both endless and strangely familiar. This, too, is going "anbd dlo", under the water and into the realms of spirit.

In Vodou thought, these moments are not simply psychological. They brush against the realm of the ancestors, that submerged world beneath the surface where the dead wait, where the spirit loosens from the body and floats close to the gates under the water. Many initiates will tell you that true descent often begins in those moments when life itself cracks open and the spirits step through.

This quieter descent is just as valid as the dramatic one. Sometimes it is harder. When someone vanishes for days, the community knows a mystery has happened. But when the descent takes place within, the person often feels alone with an experience they can barely name. They only know that the ground is gone and they are sinking. They might look perfectly functional while carrying the weight of a sea behind their ribs. They might keep smiling while their inner world is being reconfigured grain by grain. And yet this too is how anba dlo works. This too is a form of being taken. This too is training.

So much public talk around La Siren and the sea spirits stays stuck in the passive voice. I was taken. She pulled me down. They dragged me into the water. There is truth in this. Crises come uninvited. Illness, possession, grief, accidents, visions and spiritual disturbances can sweep someone off the pier without warning. But there is another truth alongside it. The moment you realise you are sinking, you still have a choice. You can thrash, choke and cling to whatever floats past. Or you can make the quieter, braver move. You can choose to sink.

To sink spiritually does not mean giving up on life. It means letting go of the performance of the self. It means setting down the story that you are in charge of everything, that you know exactly who you are, that you can hold all your responsibilities without ever breaking. When you stop performing, your sense of self dissolves. The shore disappears. The bottom becomes invisible. Your cleverness fills with water. If you are accustomed to being the strong one, the reliable one, the expert, this is painful in a way few words can express. No wonder people claw their way back to any familiar sandbar even when that sandbar has already begun to kill them.

Vodou, with its insistence that knowledge rises from the deep, offers another way of seeing these experiences. It suggests that the heaviness, the slowness and the pressure of the descent are not enemies. They are part of the process. Grief, depression, burnout, trauma and spiritual dryness are never pretty. They are never romantic. Yet within Vodou thinking, they can be seasons when the surface life no longer supports you and the deep begins to reclaim you. The question becomes whether you will spend your energy resisting your own depth or whether you will drop into it and discover what has been waiting there.

In typical Haitian fashion, this insight is often expressed with a Catholic or even biblical echo. The tradition has no problem calling on King Solomon when speaking of wisdom that comes from pressure, silence and surrender. There is a line in the Psalms, Psalm 42:7, deep calls unto deep, that Haitian practitioners quote with quiet certainty. It captures something Vodou has always known. The deepth of spirit calls to the deep in us. The waters speak to what is hidden. The spirits recognise the parts we keep buried. When the descent begins, it is not the surface self that hears the call. It is the older self inside, the one who can survive the depths, who answers.

When elders say someone has konesans soti anba dlo, they are not talking about a peaceful retreat. They are usually describing periods marked by illness, breakdown, terrifying dreams, initiatory ordeals or near-death experiences that strip a person bare. The person is taken because the old structures cannot hold them any longer. Many who have brushed death itself describe a peculiar knowledge that arrives afterwards. The moment of slipping out of the body, the sense of being watched by ancestors, the feeling of being held or pressed or examined. These states belong to the same family as the descent under the water. They soften the self. They break it. They clear it.

Under the water belongs to the water spirits, not only because of the imagery of waves and depth but because of what water actually does. It softens, dissolves, presses, reveals. It smooths stone. It uncovers buried things. It breaks down whatever cannot withstand its pressure. Spiritually, this means old identities, rigid beliefs and borrowed ideas get washed away. The public persona, the one who knows every song and citation, may fall silent while the frightened and honest self finally begins to speak.

There is danger in this. Sinking without support can resemble madness or addiction or self-harm. True anba dlo work is always held in relationship with spirits and within community. A house, a lineage, a trusted elder, or a grounded friend can be a lifeline. The aim is not to drown. The aim is to go deep enough for the water to reshape you and then to rise again with knowledge that is no longer borrowed but earned.

From the outside, people usually notice the return rather than the descent. They see someone who comes back steadier, quieter, less impressed by spiritual fashion, more deeply committed to the real work. Someone humbled. Someone grounded. That is the meaning of knowledge that rises from under the water. It is what remains when all the false parts have been washed away. It often looks gentler than the fantasies people have about sea queens and mermaid crowns. But it carries weight.

In the end, and to speak honestly about anba dlo, we have to step away from the pretty surface and face the harder truth. Under the water is where the dead wait and where the living are unmade. It is the place where initiates learn that control is an illusion, where the grip of the mind loosens and the spirits take over the work that cannot be done by human hands. It is the drowning of Ego. Down there, under the water, the self is softened, stretched, humbled, and squashed. Wisdom is not chosen, it is given, pressed into the bones by those who move through the deep long before us. The descent is slow. It feels heavy. At times it is unbearably lonely. Yet those who sink without fighting and allow themselves to be carried find something rare. They rise not with borrowed light but with a knowing that belongs only to them, shaped by the spirits who led them through the dark.