#kafou

Rituals, Possession, Sacrificial Offerings, Symbolism

from Kafou: Haitian Art and Vodou, the exhibition catalogue

So, over on Facebook and Instagram, one of my siblings started a conversation about what priests in Haitian Vodou see over and over and over again: the internet telling people that Legba is served at the crossroads. My sister posed the question: in what part of Haiti is this traditional? What lineage holds this? Who has legitimate information about this? She wrote a great blog post about the conversation and what a lot of us have had to say about it here.

What she calls out in that post is painfully true: Sosyete Facebook (aka the information shared there and otherwise with little accuracy attached) has taken the place of actual learning in the tradition that is passed within the religion, which is having a specific teacher communicate how things are passed in a lineage that you are committed to learning from. The internet has born out this idea of a pan-Vodou practice that pulls from all different sources outside of the religion, from sources that are blatantly incorrect or misleading about the religion, and/or from people who are not empowered to speak on what they are trying to communicate. 

In truth, the idea of Legba being at the crossroads is based in other practices like Orisa religions, which Esu or Eleggua is perhaps found at a crossroads, in Southern folklore where pacts can be made with the Devil at the crossroads, or in European-based practices where you meet the Devil or the Man In Black there as well. In Haitian Vodou, we have a specific spirit who is at the crossroads and who is the literal embodiment of the crossroads. His name even means ‘crossroads’ in Kreyòl!

The crossroads are a dangerous place. My sister quoted a little bit about what I said in her blog post: In Haitian Vodou, if you are going to the crossroads and you do not have the heat in your hands and on your head (ie, you are not kanzo), you do not have the authority in both right and power to call upon Kafou (the spirit of the crossroads in Haitian Vodou) there and you cannot guarantee that, if something answers you at all, it will be him that responds. You don’t have the skill or authority to discern that, nor can you discern if it is simply something that is happy to be called Kafou (or Legba, if you really insist on trying it there..). A lot of stuff hangs out at the crossroads, and almost none of it is nice. In Haitian Vodou, you can find the wandering dead (not Gede) there, lougawou (essentially souls cursed to cause harm), and all sorts of malevolent spirits that would be happy to make a snack out of you. I mean, Kafou himself is dicey to deal with even for seasoned priests; when things are not done to Kafou’s liking, his response can range from ‘I am not going to allow this ceremony to happen’ to ‘I am going to kill you for your disrespect’. 

For vodouizan, it’s pretty clear where Legba stands: Legba, ouvre barye pou m, ago e. Legba Atibon, ouvre barye pou m, ouvre barye pou m, ouvre barye pou m pase. Legba, open the gate for me. Legba Atibon, open the gate for me, open the gate for me, open the gate for me to pass. Legba states at the gate and decides who comes and goes.

And yet, Sosyete Facebook persists. The desire to claim a narrative that does not fit or respect the religion overrules the desire to meet the religion where it is at--to meet Legba at the gate--and so people go to a crossroads with veve on paper and candy and leave trash there to the point where we have all heard at least one story of someone almost getting hit by a car or hassled by police (In Vodou, we go to the crossroads at night and do our best not to get seen...). I like the internet for a lot of things, but sometimes...

Hello!

As a default, for someone who serves their spirits in a Ginen lineage, the rosary is good for all lwa as an act of devotion as are standard Catholic prayers. You should speak to your teacher if you have specific questions regarding how the lineage you are learning from treats Kafou.

The internet has a lot to say about Kafou as a/the devil, and that’s all a general mis-read and misunderstanding of who Kafou is and what he does, which leads to folks saying that Kafou is never prayed with as you would other lwa. Kafou is exacting and can punish pretty severely for mistakes, so if someone does not have the guidance of a priest it’s better to let Kafou be. 

A spirit walking with you also does not mean they are actively speaking or working at all times or needing things from you, it can just mean they are in your orbit. For example, Kafou showed in my spiritual court very early for me but didn’t speak to me for quite awhile..until after my kanzo, and even now he is very particular about his communication. I had questions about this--shouldn’t I have been hearing from him?--and I got good advice that I hold onto years later: the lwa speak when they are ready to and/or when they need to, and some of them will not speak before that moment for any reason. 

I have found a lot of the Petwo lwa are like that--they are not very chatty because they are constantly working and they come with purpose. For me, Kafou is very like that--he says what he wants/needs to be very deliberately, and he says it once and then he is off somewhere else.

Bit of a ramble, but I hope this helps. TL;DR: the rosary is fine as a devotional tool. Speak to your teacher about questions about what you should be doing with/for specific lwa, if anything. Don’t bang on doors if your don’t have a chaperone, and remember that they speak in their own time.

Hi there,

So, that sounds like some internet shenanigans. Legba and Kafou are separate, distinct lwa in Haitian Vodou, and are very often smashed together as one spirit or said to be brothers or that Met Kafou is petwo Legba, and all sorts of stuff. None of it is true.

There won't be full information about anything in Haitian Vodou because the religion is passed orally; we learn directly from our teachers. Unfortunately, the internet has generally decided just to...make shit up about Haitian Vodou to satisfy a desire for knowledge and power that doesn't reflect what the religion actually is.

Veve are passed via initiation; they are given to priests by their initiatory parent and are used only by priests (someone who has not been made to trace veve has no need of them, and can't properly utilize them). Oriki are part of Orisha religions, not Haitian Vodou.

I've written quite a bit about Legba and about Kafou as well, you can check out a previous about them here.

In many ways, all spiritual and religious systems and communities are about confronting thresholds and crossroads; within ourselves, within community, and with the spirits who are near and dear to us. Each threshold marks a point in time and reminds us of who were before we found our feet in that particular spot and who we might become. Each crossroad represents what choice we must make in the moment and what choices are created when we set our feet to one particular decision. We cross thresholds and find that a door may close behind us while others open faster or slower, depending on factors we might find out of our hands. We traverse crossroads and confront desire and self-determination mixed with demand and consequence. We might walk down a road only to find it deeply undesirable or filled with brambles we can't fight through, and backtrack to find the crossroads of our past decision...only that is has changed and the roads stretching out from it are no longer the same as they were.

This is cause and effect, decision and consequence, and this is where we find Legba, Mèt Kafou, and the liminality that Haitian Vodou embodies.

The Western mind has a drive to categorize and create likeness based on our initial understanding of what is in front of us. We are expert puddlejumpers, and we crash in oceans of belief like toddlers in rain boots: we think we know depth and breadth at the initial jump-off and we reach conclusions that might not actually exist, and then are shocked when we find ourselves soaking wet and up to our knees (or over our heads...) in confusion. This is cultural relativism in action and there is really no better example than the Internet Understanding (TM) of Atibon Legba and Mèt Kafou.

This isn't a sometimes cranky houngan throwing shade; it is honest-to-god truth. We are fallible creatures and we approach culture and cultural religion that we have grown up outside of with a flawed understanding birthed from problematic antique anthropological viewpoints that all can be understood inside our own cultural understanding. We do it, and it inevitably throws us for a loop when the spirits show us our lack of understanding.

Happily, we can undo that.

If you Google around or search Tumblr for information about Legba and Kafou, you inevitably come up with a literal mess of information:

You should propitiate Legba at the crossroads

Mèt Kafou is the literal Devil

Legba is just like American Horror Story made him out to be: a baby-eating, coke-blowing, tophat-wearing, red-eyed demon

Legba and Kafou are brothers or twins or the incarnation of the astrological symbol of Gemini

Legba/Kafou is Esu or Eleggua

Mèt Kafou is an evil being bent on destruction...yet can be easily approached by anyone bearing a bottle of rum and a printout of an Internet veve

Legba is the sun, Kafou is the moon

Offer Legba a skull and he'll Do A Thing...

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Haitian Vodou can be a great example of 'many stories, all true', but there are some things that are just not correct.

Where does the misunderstanding come from? Largely, it springs up from false equivocation (Legba is Eleggua, Kafou and Legba are twins/brothers) born from the idea that since Legba and Kafou embody similar 'jobs' they are the same and, in some subtle ways, a colonized idea of what Vodou is, drawing from racist tropes made popular years ago.

Let's start with Legba.

Krèyol sonde miwa, o Legba e!

Legba is sometimes said to be the most important lwa in Haitian Vodou, and there is some truth to that. He is vital to all work, all ceremony, and all priests because it is he who stands at the gate at the end of Gran Chemin/the Great Road and opens it so that other lwa may pass and come down or participate in work or ceremony. He goes by many, many names that denote his standing or the particular 'face'/personality/affinity he is coming with, and he is most often greeted as Papa, an honorific in Vodou that denotes respect and the place a lwa holds in the religion and in the hearts of the sèvitè/servant.

Additionally, there is a Legba for almost every nasyon/nation/family of spirits in Vodou. If someone just says 'Legba', they are likely referring to the more Rada (generally cooler and more stately) Legba called at the beginning of every ceremony, but Legba is legion...there is Legba nan Nago, Legba nan Petwo, Legba nan Ibo, Legba nan Kongo, Legba nan Sinigal, and on for most nations of spirits (Nasyon Gede does not have a Legba...they are their own Legba, which is another topic for another time). There are also numerous Legba that may have specific affinities for particular work or particular places, like Legba Bwa. In all these 'faces', Legba has humanity which translates into a feeling of familiarity.

Legba is served at the door or the gate and, in ceremony, is saluted in a particular way that draws his influence into the temple. He is a rare-ish lwa to see in possession, but when he does come he most often arrives as an elderly man who cannot walk or stand for long and so sits in his chair and is given his accouterments there: a baton or cane, a particular style of Haitian bag woven from palm, perhaps a Haitian hat, and often a bottle of rum. He might enjoy a taste of siwo kàn/a dark sugarcane syrup, or his pipe with some tobacco. He takes a wide variety of colors, depending on region of Haiti the lineage comes from, but he Does Not take black; folks who conflate him with Eleggua often give him red and black, and that's not correct. Likewise, giving him an Eleggua head is inappropriate and he does not come as a child, so giving him toys is likely to get a raised eyebrow and a hand-off to the Marassa.

Legba can be approached by anyone, initiate or not, because he sits at the gate in this liminal state that is both in and out. All people who come to Vodou either pass into the religion through him or through Gede, so all people come under his purview. He can be an excellent resource in opening the door for someone who wishes to participate in the religion, if it is indeed the right place for them. He does whatever work he sees as beneficial or that he can be negotiated into doing by the talents of a learned vodouizan.

He is not without his price, though, and he can be absolutely impossible to deal with if he is displeased or feels he has been cheated or not paid for his favors and blessings. A rather infamous story about Legba can be found in Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown. A party is in full swing but Legba has not been propitiated properly for his blessings. He arrives in possession and sits down on the floor and sobs until his food is quickly prepared and brought to him. He refuses to let the party continue because he says he has been forgotten and no one loves Legba. If he doesn't open the door, nothing happens.

When we move deeper into ceremony, Legba does not fall to the side; he is sung for each time a ceremony moves into a different rite or nasyon of spirits. Consequently, Legba is sung for again when the Petwo rite (when the Petwo spirits are sung for and saluted) arrives and only then do we welcome Kafou.

Mèt Kafou (sometimes seen as Kalfou or Maître Carrefour in French) is a lwa who is the actual embodiment of the crossroads. It can be hard to conceive of until you meet him, but he is a spirit who stretches across multiple explanations of who he is; a divinity and a place all in one. He is often addressed as mèt/master as a term of deep respect denoting his seat, and expertise. For the Petwo rite, he can be the pivotal lwa in terms of whether something goes well or goes deeply awry. There are specific ceremonies where his oversight is so important that even a mistake in his salute can be so disastrous that the risk is only assumed by the head priest, and if that priest is not available for the salute no spirits will come or be called into possession for the entirety of the ceremony. The community will work but will not risk Kafou's displeasure by bringing spirits past him.

When I was at the very beginning of my participation in Vodou and was trying to understand how Kafou could be grasped (not understood...trying to understand him in totality is a mistake), my mother said something profound: if Kafou is unhappy with you, you have nothing. He can close all things in all ways until he is placated, and that can be a lengthy and costly process. Imagine driving on a road and never really getting anywhere. You find yourself continually passing the same bush on the right and the same abandoned gas station over and over, ala Groundhog Day, because all roads are closed to you and you only have the same quarter mile to drive over and over and over again.

This is Kafou. He is notoriously temperamental, like many of the Petwo lwa, and can be quick to offense and exacting and thorough with his consequences. A mistake in his salute can open the door for him to strike back for care not being taken and proper respect not being shown. A cultural misunderstanding of this says this sort of behavior and personality are evil but that's a deep misread. Instead, it is reflective of the general amorality that Kafou (and the religion at large) can embody; he is neither good or evil but simply is. If you treat him well, learn how to serve him, and are careful to be extra observant in your service, he can be a great ally. Treat him like a divine gumball machine that exists to give you what you want and he will show (and use) his teeth. Hilariously, the previous sentence originally came out as '..to give you what he wants', and that is basically on point.

Amorality trips folks up when they are looking into Vodou, because the Western idea generally is that divine beings are basically invested in your well-being and are your invisible friends in the sky who want to give you stuff and won't ever harm you. This does not apply to the lwa or to Vodou in general, and specifically not to lwa who walk in the Petwo rite. There is pain there, and the lwa can be impatient, fast-moving, and less interested in spiritual handholding and hair-petting. They come to work and to achieve what needs achieving. Even seasoned priests handle Kafou carefully because the crossroads can shift in any direction, depending on how the wind blows.

It is a rarer occurrence to see Mèt Kafou come down in ceremony because he is a force to be reckoned with. He often comes down screaming and throwing his chwal around the peristyle or, most often, around the crossroads where he is most commonly invited into possession. He may be saluted with a flaming log or something else on fire, and he particularly enjoys dancing in a fire set for him. Mèt Kafou rode the head of a brother of mine and threw himself into a huge bonfire and rolled around on the logs and lay there long enough that the gathered crowd thought for certain that the chwal was dead. Perhaps, if Kafou was suitably annoyed, he might have been but Kafou emerged from the flames with his chwal unburned and only smelling slightly of wood smoke.

In some ways, it can be said of Kafou what is said of some of the other Petwo lwa: Kafou has no friends, only acquaintances. I find that this is because of Kafou's lack of humanity because he is the embodiment of something that is decidedly not people: he is the power and depth and breadth of the most liminal of places, where the confluence of stuff and power and people comes together and becomes one thing which, for Vodou, is Kafou. When I have been present for work done with Kafou, it is like feeling this massive...thing just unfurling itself and watching you. When I have seen Kafou in my dreams, he has presented himself almost like a stalker: he stays in the shadows and watches me and tracks me almost like I am prey. He has no cause to eat me, so I don't worry but it can be unsettling because it is a reminder how deeply not human he is.

Knowing all of these things, I cringe when folks who have zero connection to a teacher who can guide them through interacting with Kafou talk about going to a crossroads, tracing what they think might be a veve for Kafou, and then asking him for something. While anyone can talk to Legba and have some manner of assurence that Legba will not rise up and eat them if they accidentally give him something that he may not really enjoy, even a priest is fair game for serious consequences with Kafou if they bring the wrong bottle or buy the wrong goat. Beyond that, if you do not have the license to seek out and ask Kafou for his assistance at a crossroads, you have no way to make sure that what shows up, if anything, is what you are naming it. Lots of things will be happy to take those offerings and muck around in your situation with no ritual obligation to do the work or speak the truth.

Legba sits at the gate, but he is not the gate itself. When you leave an offering for him at the gate, he may take or not depending on whether it's something he wants or if it is what he has negotiated as his payment for what you are asking of him. If he doesn't want it, it's just there and he pays it no mind.

Kafou, on the other hand, is the crossroads and whatever is brought there is being left on him. If it's not what he wants, it's still on him. If it's an inappropriate offering, it's still on him. If it wasn't meant for him but it was left there anyways and who it was meant for isn't coming to take it, it's still there. Imagine your unhappiness if someone shoved some peanuts M&Ms into your pocket. They sit there, they melt all over you, you can't put your phone in your pocket, and you definitely do not like M&Ms and may even be allergic to peanuts. If you are having a good day, you may end it at telling everyone around you what a thoughtless bastard the M&M person is. If you are having a shit day, maybe you track them down and punch them in the face a few times to make the point that M&Ms do not go in your pocket.

Kafou, being the crossroads, also stretches from Vodou into Vodou-adjacent rites often referred to as secret societies. Being a liminal amorality, he is happy to stretch into rites that conceive of spirit relationships in different ways that a Ginen-based priest or lineage will. In those rites, he may be worked for things that a Ginen priest does not work for. Folks who research Kafou on the Internet and come up with associations and service for him that rise from those Vodou-adjacent rites may find that Kafou is happy to respond to that form of service and rise to the occasion to behave in the way you are unwittingly communicating to him that you expect. All is fair game when it comes to the crossroads.

Like Legba, Kafou is not Esu or Eleggua. He is served with black and red, but giving him items that belong to Esu or Eleggua is asking for a bad time. He is not willing to speak with anyone that knocks on his door as Legba often is but, if he is annoyed with what amounts to pestering, he might respond in a way that expressed his dislike. He is not a 'level up' in dealing with the lwa in that there is no sort of prestige or badass points assigned for dealing with him. I would never expect a reputable priest to suggest a non-initiate to go deal with Kafou on their own, nor would I expect a reputable priest to easily problem-solve someone's Kafou issue. Like, if someone approached me with a disaster stemming from missteps with Kafou, I am unlikely to be willing to offer advice without at least laying down some cards to see what exactly was done and speaking to Kafou on my own to see if this is something that can be mitigated and if I am the right priest to do the mitigating.

Outsiders tend to be attracted to Kafou because he is a master magician. He can work miracles or mayhem, depending on how he is served, and his skill can be unmatched if he chooses to engage and is paid appropriately. Folks who don't have the backing to approach him for this work routinely get burned. It is pretty self-destructive to approach him without an appropriate guide. After all, kafou a se tè glise.

With all of that in mind, I am not afraid of Kafou—after all, he is key in the creation of a priest--and I don't think people should be afraid of him. For me, I maintain what relationship I have with Kafou by a) not bothering him and b) approaching him on his terms, which is engaging how I have been taught to. I think the most useful tool in relating to Kafou, and Vodou in general, is to forget whatever you are bringing to the door and holding yourself in a position of humility with the understanding that Kafou and Vodou has a different way of relating to the world and, in that world, humans are not the top of the food chain or the center of everything.

It is in both Legba and Kafou that we see liminality: both of them embody 'yes and..' in different ways. Through these fundamental concepts of difference in the religion, we find comfort in uncertainty. When we stand at the door and knock, the answer, if it arrives, is not certain. When we arrive at the crossroads, we can find passage of some sort but what we gain there is not ours to determine or control. We step into a particular uncertainty in that we hand over outcomes trusting that we have been taught well and that we will be received in a manner in line with how we have arrived.