When Purity Breaks the Tradition

Every now and then I hear people argue that Vodou would be better, cleaner, or more authentic if all the European elements were stripped away. The debate re-emerges every couple of years. They imagine a version of the religion without saints, without holy cards, without Florida Water, without French words in the liturgy - and of course without any European magic influences. It sounds appealing on the surface, as if removing Europe would reveal a pure African heart. But the moment you start to explore what that really means, the picture becomes far more complicated. Because when you pull out the European threads, you are not restoring Vodou. You are unravelling it.

People usually begin with the saints. They imagine altars cleared of holy images and prayers spoken without any echo of the Catholic world. But the saints were not a mistake or an accident. They were part of survival. Enslaved people used them as protective masks but over time those masks and the saints themselves became part of the fabric of Vodou itself. Remove every saint and the altars do not become more African. They simply become less Haitian. Spirits like Brijitte vanish completely because they were born in the Caribbean. Others lose the shape they developed in the New World. Erzulie Freda does not exist in Africa. She is a Haitian evolution with influences from West Africa, Europe, and the world of French colonial society. Remove those influences and she disappears rather than returning to a pure African form.

Once the saint images are taken away, other things fall with them. Coloured candles stay because candles also exist in Africa, but the habit of using glass encased lights marked with certain patterns or colours is deeply tied to Caribbean and Creole life. The rhythm of feast days changes. The way altars are dressed shifts. Even the visual feel of the peristyle becomes unrecognisable because Haiti shaped so much of the style and atmosphere.

Divination changes next. People who dislike European tools often point to the cards. Remove them and you remove a whole cluster of Creole techniques that developed over centuries. Haitian diviners did not freeze in time the moment they left Africa. They adapted to whatever tools became available. The cards, the methods of reading them, and the style of interpretation became part of the living tradition. Once you erase them you can rely on kola nuts, coconuts or natural casting methods, all of which are beautiful and deeply rooted. But to insist on using only African forms is to ignore five hundred years of Haitian creativity. It is not purification. It is erasure.

Perfumes and spiritual waters also change. Florida Water, Pompeia, Reve d'Or and other products are not African at all. Yet they became woven into the texture of ritual life. Once you remove them you must rely entirely on plant baths made with leaves, roots, flowers and bark. That return to the plants sounds more African, and in many houses it already is. But the wide availability of market perfumes shaped the way many people learned to work. Take them away and you have not arrived at a more honest Vodou. You have simply removed the Caribbean layers that help define the tradition as Haitian. Even across the Atlantic perfumes and talcum powder have settled into the ritual landscape, fully adopted yet still unmistakably European in origin. And while catholic saints may not appear in African temples, the faces of Hindu gods have quietly taken their place on altars, showing that iconography always adapts to whatever currents history brings.

Then there are the things people rarely think about. Cigars also vanish. Tobacco is Indigenous to the Americas. The style of smoking work, cleansing with smoke, offering cigars to certain spirits, and sealing spiritual charges with tobacco fumes is completely Caribbean. It did not exist in Africa. And if the aim is to strip away everything that is not African, cigars have no place. Clothing styles would change. The head wraps, the skirts, the cut of ceremonial outfits, the lace, the white cotton, the layered skirts all come from a blend of African, French colonial, and Caribbean influences. The moushwas or ceremonial cloths disappear in their Haitian form. Sacred cloth traditions exist in Africa, but the Haitian style of tying, folding, and using moushwas grew out of the Caribbean experience. Remove the Creole development and they lose their meaning. If we purge everything European, you cannot keep Haitian ceremonial dress as we know it. You would end up dressing people in approximations of West and Central African clothing that do not match what those communities wear today either. It becomes a strange fantasy past that never existed.

Rum is another one that does not survive the purity purge. Rum is a product of the plantation system, born directly from the brutality of the colonial world. African spirits did not drink rum in Africa. They drank palm wine or millet beer. Today, they are given gin, brought to Africa by European colonisers. The Haitian use of rum is not an African survival. It is a Caribbean creation shaped by resistance, culture, and history. Remove rum and the flavour of ritual shifts dramatically. Petro rites, offerings, cleansings, and even libations would look entirely different.

The songs and prayers suffer the most dramatic transformation. Vodou speaks in Haitian Creole, a language created through a meeting of African languages and French. If you remove the French influence, the entire sound of the tradition changes. You lose countless songs. You lose the rhythm of prayer. You lose the ways phrases turn and meanings deepen when Creole carries a memory that spans both sides of the ocean. You cannot simply replace the prayers with Fon or Kikongo versions because those African traditions evolved for five hundred years as well. They do not preserve a frozen original. So without Creole you do not return to an African liturgy. You fall into silence.

The Priye Ginen is the clearest proof of this. The prayer is the backbone of Vodou, at least within the Ason lineage. It calls the spirits, honours the ancestors, and guides the community through the sacred families. But it is written in Creole, shaped by African tones and French phrasing, and stitched together from everything the Haitian people lived through. Remove those layers and the Priye collapses. Whole sections vanish because many spirits that appear in the Priye were born in Haiti. Certain loa would have no place. Brijitte and Guede disappear. They don't exist or manifest in Africa. Filomiz, who joined the rank of loa from Europe disappears. Even Erzulie Freda in her modern forms carries European shaping. She in particular cannot exist without her European courtly and Marian influences. She becomes something else entirely if you strip away the lace, the elegance associated with European romantic ideals, the tole of her skin and the echoes of the Virgin Mary. You would be left with the older Dahomean spirits from whom she descends, but Freda herself would disappear. The way the families of loa are arranged reflects Haitian experience rather than African structures. And the melodies themselves, while rooted in Africa, have absorbed Caribbean and European influences that give them their unique feel. Take all of that away and the Priye would no longer be the same prayer. It would no longer be Haitian Vodou at all.

The organisation of the houses would change as well. The ranks, the roles, the pattern of initiations, the expectations of service and the community structure all grew in Haiti within a world shaped by both Africa and Europe. The Ason lineage in its entirety may disappear because it grew in Haiti, not Africa. It is reconstructed rather than authentically African. If you remove the Caribbean elements you do not get an older African system. You get a system that no longer makes sense in a Haitian context.

And this is the heart of the matter. Haitian Vodou is not an African religion with a few European bits stuck on top. It is a Haitian religion built from African roots that have lived, grown, adapted, and transformed in a new land. Five centuries of separation mean that Haiti and Africa now hold related but distinct spiritual worlds. Dahomean and Kongo traditions did not freeze when the ships left. They evolved in their own lands. Haitian Vodou evolved in Haiti. They are family, not mirrors.

The removal of catholic saints is only the first step. But where do we stop? And who decides? Such considerations usually bring more harm than good. They open the door for change for the worse, rather than for the better. These types of discussions deflect. Haiti has bigger problems to deal with than holy cards. If you remove every European influence, you do not return to a more authentic Vodou. You do not reveal a pure African core. You simply create an empty space where Haitian Vodou used to be. The spirits that grew in the Caribbean vanish. The songs lose their voice. The prayers lose their language. The offerings lose their form. The rituals lose their texture. What remains may be interesting as a historical puzzle, but it is not alive.

Vodou is authentic because it is Haitian. It survived five centuries of unimaginable pressure by weaving together Africa and Haiti into a single living tradition. Purity is not part of the story and never has been. Continuity is. Creativity is. Memory is. And the strength of Vodou comes from holding all its layers together rather than trying to strip half of its history away.