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Vodou is one of the official religions of Haiti. It is also spelled Voodoo or Voudou. Vodou was created by Africans who were brought to Haiti as slaves in the 1600s. The…

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not one god/worship passed family members

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not one god/worship passed family members

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The root  Americas Fon, Ewe and oruba people of Africa

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one god Allah

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the most use book in the Islam reigon is
the Quarn

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Prophet Muhammad founded the religon

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Kids and students learn about the religion of Islam including its founder the Prophet Muhammad, the Five Pillars, the Quran, mosques, and interesting facts.

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Islam , transl. "Submission [to God]")[4][5][6] is an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text that is considered by Muslims[7] to be the direct word of God as it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.[8][9] It is the world's second-largest religion with more than two billion followers,

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New Orleans may be home to the loud and sometimes lewd pre-Lenten Mardi Gras celebration, but it's also a city influenced by a long and complicated history of religious devotion. In fact, while other states have "counties," Louisiana still refers to such territorial divisions as "parishes." St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest Catholic cathedral in continual use in the United States, is in New Orleans.

Many also associate the city with Louisiana voodoo, the spiritual beliefs and practices originating with enslaved West Africans that merge ancestor worship, polytheism, and Catholicism. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the burial place of Creole voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, and her tomb attracts hundreds of visitors every year.

When to Go: February to May are the coolest months in subtropical New Orleans. Festive Mardi Gras and the following solemn Lent take place in February, March, or April.

Where to Stay: The French Quarter's Hotel Monteleone is a historic building and one of the most famous haunted hotels in the country. Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner have all visited. No word if they were among the guests to have seen the ghost of Maurice Begere, a child who died at the hotel in the late 1800s and who, the management says, still appears on occasion.

Cultural Tip: St. Augustine Church, the oldest African-American Catholic parish in the United States, holds a yearly jazz Mass during the Satchmo Festival in August. St. Augustine also celebrates traditional Mass with a choir, full band, and piano every Sunday at 10 a.m. for parishioners and visitors alike.

What to Read and Watch Before You Go: New Orleans Noir, an anthology that includes a collection of fictional stories based in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans, is edited by a former reporter and writer. Portions of the book's profits are donated to a program that awards grants to writers affected by the hurricane. Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, is an in-depth look at the impact of the storm on New Orleans.

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Facts About the Holy City of New Orleans, United States

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New Orleans may be home to the loud and sometimes lewd pre-Lenten Mardi Gras celebration, but it's also a city influenced by a long and complicated history of religious devotion. In fact, while other states have "counties," Louisiana still refers to such territorial divisions as "parishes." St.

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Islam, major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century ce. The Arabic term islām, literally "surrender," illuminates the fundamental religious idea of Islam-that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of islām) accepts surrender to the will of Allah (in Arabic, Allāh: God). Allah is viewed as the sole God-creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allah, to which human beings must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures, the Qurʾān (often spelled Koran in English), which Allah revealed to his messenger, Muhammad. In Islam Muhammad is considered the last of a series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus), and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the "revelations" attributed to earlier prophets.

Retaining its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism and a strict adherence to certain essential religious practices, the religion taught by Muhammad to a small group of followers spread rapidly through the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay Peninsula, and China. By the early 21st century there were more than 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. Although many sectarian movements have arisen within Islam, all Muslims are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community.

This article deals with the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam and with the connection of religion and society in the Islamic world. The history of the various peoples who embraced Islam is covered in the article Islamic world.

The foundations of Islam

The legacy of Muhammad

From the very beginning of Islam, Muhammad had inculcated a sense of brotherhood and a bond of faith among his followers, both of which helped to develop among them a feeling of close relationship that was accentuated by their experiences of persecution as a nascent community in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the Qurʾānic revelation and the conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islamic religious practices cemented this bond of faith. In 622 ce, when the Prophet migrated to Medina, his preaching was soon accepted, and the community-state of Islam emerged. During this early period, Islam acquired its characteristic ethos as a religion uniting in itself both the spiritual and temporal aspects of life and seeking to regulate not only the individual's relationship to God (through conscience) but human relationships in a social setting as well. Thus, there is not only an Islamic religious institution but also an Islamic law, state, and other institutions governing society. Not until the 20th century were the religious (private) and the secular (public) distinguished by some Muslim thinkers and separated formally in certain places such as Turkey.

This dual religious and social character of Islam, expressing itself in one way as a religious community commissioned by God to bring its own value system to the world through the jihād ("exertion," commonly translated as "holy war" or "holy struggle"), explains the astonishing success of the early generations of Muslims. Within a century after the Prophet's death in 632 ce, they had brought a large part of the globe-from Spain across Central Asia to India-under a new Arab Muslim empire.

The period of Islamic conquests and empire building marks the first phase of the expansion of Islam as a religion. Islam's essential egalitarianism within the community of the faithful and its official discrimination against the followers of other religions won rapid converts. Jews and Christians were assigned a special status as communities possessing scriptures and were called the "people of the Book" (ahl al-kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious autonomy. They were, however, required to pay a per capita tax called jizyah, as opposed to pagans, who were required to either accept Islam or die. The same status of the "people of the Book" was later extended in particular times and places to Zoroastrians and Hindus, but many "people of the Book" joined Islam in order to escape the disability of the jizyah. A much more massive expansion of Islam after the 12th century was inaugurated by the Sufis (Muslim mystics), who were mainly responsible for the spread of Islam in India, Central Asia, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa ( see below).

Beside the jihad and Sufi missionary activity, another factor in the spread of Islam was the far-ranging influence of Muslim traders, who not only introduced Islam quite early to the Indian east coast and South India but also proved to be the main catalytic agents (beside the Sufis) in converting people to Islam in Indonesia, Malaya, and China. Islam was introduced to Indonesia in the 14th century, hardly having time to consolidate itself there politically before the region came under Dutch hegemony.

The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islam (an estimated total of more than 1.5 billion persons worldwide in the early 21st century) has produced important internal differences. All segments of Muslim society, however, are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community. With the loss of political power during the period of Western colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of the Islamic community (ummah), instead of weakening, became stronger. The faith of Islam helped various Muslim peoples in their struggle to gain political freedom in the mid-20th century, and the unity of Islam contributed to later political solidarity.

Sources of Islamic doctrinal and social views

Islamic doctrine, law, and thinking in general are based upon four sources, or fundamental principles (uṣūl): (1) the Qurʾān, (2) the Sunnah ("Traditions"), (3) ijmāʿ ("consensus"), and (4) ijtihād ("individual thought").

The Qurʾān (literally, "reading" or "recitation") is regarded as the verbatim word, or speech, of God delivered to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. Divided into 114 suras (chapters) of unequal length, it is the fundamental source of Islamic teaching. The suras revealed at Mecca during the earliest part of Muhammad's career are concerned mostly with ethical and spiritual teachings and the Day of Judgment. The suras revealed at Medina at a later period in the career of the Prophet are concerned for the most part with social legislation and the politico-moral principles for constituting and ordering the community.

Sunnah ("a well-trodden path") was used by pre-Islamic Arabs to denote their tribal or common law. In Islam it came to mean the example of the Prophet-i.e., his words and deeds as recorded in compilations known as Hadith (in Arabic, Ḥadīth: literally, "report"; a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet). Hadith provide the written documentation of the Prophet's words and deeds. Six of these collections, compiled in the 3rd century ah (9th century ce), came to be regarded as especially authoritative by the largest group in Islam, the Sunnis. Another large group, the Shiʿah, has its own Hadith contained in four canonical collections.

The doctrine of ijmāʿ, or consensus, was introduced in the 2nd century ah (8th century ce) in order to standardize legal theory and practice and to overcome individual and regional differences of opinion. Though conceived as a "consensus of scholars," ijmāʿ was in actual practice a more fundamental operative factor. From the 3rd century ah ijmāʿ has amounted to a principle of stability in thinking; points on which consensus was reached in practice were considered closed and further substantial questioning of them prohibited. Accepted interpretations of the Qurʾān and the actual content of the Sunnah (i.e., Hadith and theology) all rest finally on the ijmāʿ in the sense of the acceptance of the authority of their community.

Ijtihād, meaning "to endeavour" or "to exert effort," was required to find the legal or doctrinal solution to a new problem. In the early period of Islam, because ijtihād took the form of individual opinion (raʾy), there was a wealth of conflicting and chaotic opinions. In the 2nd century ah ijtihād was replaced by qiyās (reasoning by strict analogy), a formal procedure of deduction based on the texts of the Qurʾān and the Hadith. The transformation of ijmāʿ into a conservative mechanism and the acceptance of a definitive body of Hadith virtually closed the "gate of ijtihād" in Sunni Islam while ijtihād continued in Shiʿism. Nevertheless, certain outstanding Muslim thinkers (e.g., al-Ghazālī in the 11th-12th century) continued to claim the right of new ijtihād for themselves, and reformers in the 18th-20th centuries, because of modern influences, caused this principle once more to receive wider acceptance.

The Qurʾān and Hadith are discussed below. The significance of ijmāʿ and ijtihād are discussed below in the contexts of Islamic theology, philosophy, and law.

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Islam | Religion, Beliefs, Practices, & Facts

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Islam, major world religion that emphasizes monotheism, the unity of God ('Allah' in Arabic), and Muhammad as his final messenger in a series of revelations. As the literal word of God, the Qur'an makes known the will of God, to which humans must surrender (lending the name Islam, meaning 'surrender').

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Vodou, also spelled Voodoo, Voudou, Vodun, or French Vaudou, a traditional Afro-Haitian religion. Vodou represents a syncretism of the West African Vodun religion and Roman Catholicism by the descendants of the Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other ethnic groups who had been enslaved and transported to colonial Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known then) and partly Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries. The word Vodou means "spirit" or "deity" in the Fon language of the African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin).

Vodou is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world. The unseen world is populated by lwa (spirits), mystè (mysteries), anvizib (the invisibles), zanj (angels), and the spirits of ancestors and the recently deceased. All these spirits are believed to live in a mythic land called Ginen, a cosmic "Africa." The God of the Christian Bible is understood to be the creator of both the universe and the spirits; the spirits were made by God to help him govern humanity and the natural world.

The primary goal and activity of Vodou is to sevi lwa ("serve the spirits")-to offer prayers and perform various devotional rites directed at God and particular spirits in return for health, protection, and favour. Spirit possession plays an important role in Afro-Haitian religion, as it does in many other world religions. During religious rites, believers sometimes enter a trancelike state in which the devotee may eat and drink, perform stylized dances, give supernaturally inspired advice to people, or perform medical cures or special physical feats; these acts exhibit the incarnate presence of the lwa within the entranced devotee. Vodou ritual activity (e.g., prayer, song, dance, and gesture) is aimed at refining and restoring balance and energy in relationships between people and between people and the spirits of the unseen world.

Vodou is an oral tradition practiced by extended families that inherit familial spirits, along with the necessary devotional practices, from their elders. In the cities, local hierarchies of priestesses or priests ( manbo and oungan), "children of the spirits" ( ounsi), and ritual drummers ( ountògi) comprise more formal "societies" or "congregations" ( sosyete). In these congregations, knowledge is passed on through a ritual of initiation ( kanzo) in which the body becomes the site of spiritual transformation. There is some regional difference in ritual practice across Haiti, and branches of the religion include Rada, Daome, Ibo, Nago, Dereal, Manding, Petwo, and Kongo. There is no centralized hierarchy, no single leader, and no official spokesperson, but various groups sometimes attempt to create such official structures. There are also secret societies, called Bizango or Sanpwèl, that perform a religio-juridical function.

A calendar of ritual feasts, syncretized with the Roman Catholic calendar, provides the yearly rhythm of religious practice. Important lwa are celebrated on saints' days (for example: Ogou on St. James's Day, July 25; Ezili Danto on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, July 16; Danbala on St. Patrick's Day, March 17; and the spirits of the ancestors on All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, November 1 and November 2). Many other familial feasts (for the sacred children, for the poor, for particular ancestors) as well as initiations and funerary rituals occur throughout the year.

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Vodou | Definition, History, West African Vodun, & Facts

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Vodou, a syncretism of the West African Vodun religion and Roman Catholicism by the descendants of the Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other ethnic groups who had been enslaved and transported to colonial Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and partly Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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Haiti, the saying goes, is "70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou". Vodou is everywhere in the Caribbean nation, a spiritual system infusing everything from medicine and agriculture to cosmology and arts. Yet it is almost nowhere to be seen: ceremonies are not just expensive, but targets of hate crime. Nowadays, some say, Vodou is in danger.

In the heart of remote Île-à-Vache of Haiti's southern coast, however, the religion is alive and well. Completely off the grid, the island has only two medical clinics for 14,000 residents and so Jeom Frichenel Sisius, the island's principal Vodou priest, is a spiritual leader, doctor and midwife all at once.

His remedies, which he claims can fix everything from diseases and haunted houses to career and love problems, are kept in a carefully locked shed in a room adorned with skulls and an nzambi (zombie) painted on the walls.

"If someone has a headache and the doctors cannot heal it, I can," he explains, taking swigs of herbal rum from a gigantic bottle as he speaks. "The only things Vodou can't do are radiography and mammography." Vodou is necessary, he stresses, and the only people who fail to understand that are the Christians.

On top of this knowledge and divine healing powers, Sisius also happens to throw the best parties.

Here, Vodou defies cliches of zombies, pins in dolls and black magic. There are none of the cornflour drawings, animal sacrifices or rattles that characterize orthodox Haitian Vodou ceremonies: just a lot of dancing and ecstasy fuelled by rum, drums and divine presence. It's almost full moon, and lured by the music and beauty of it all, the spirits - lwas - begin to arrive.

Only weeks after Sisius's ceremony, a great mapou tree fell. Not literally, of course. In local folklore, the sacred species (silk-cotton tree in English) is the embodiment of someone heroic and Haiti was mourning the death of Max Gesner Beauvoir, the supreme chief of Vodou.

Beauvoir, who stumbled into spiritualism after 15 years as a biochemist in the US, worked tirelessly to protect vodouisants from defamation and persecution. At his home in Mariani, he drank coffee with scholars, seekers, journalists and even Christians, patiently explaining what Vodou was ("the soul of Haitian people and a way of life") - and what it was not.

At a time when Haiti still had tourism, he held spectacles of entranced women, legs akimbo and biting heads of chickens, even staging a honeymoon ceremony for the Clintons.

While perhaps creating some stereotypes of his own, few did more than Beauvoir in battling distorted horror-flick cliches still associated with Haitian Vodou.

"The most popular Haitian word in the world is zombie," explains Richard Morse, a musician and owner of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson (who insists he never met an undead creature). "And that's a reflection of the world more than it is of Haiti."

At a time when "world music" was all the rage, Morse came to Haiti in 1987 for musical inspiration. Growing up in suburban Connecticut to a Haitian mother and American father, Morse never expected to get into Vodou beyond the glimpses of folklore he'd seen at home. In 2001, he was officially initiated.

"I only came for the rhythms initially," he recalls, seated on the veranda of the hotel that became his livelihood and permanent home. "Then I found out that the rhythms don't walk alone. The rhythms walk with dance steps, with colors, with spirits, with prayer. The rhythms walk with God."

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Lunise Morse, lead female singer, and Richard Morse, founder, songwriter and lead male singer of the mizik-rasin (roots band) RAM. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

Every Thursday for the past 23 years, Morse's 13-member roots band - which includes his wife and son - plays fiery, upbeat interpretations of traditional Vodou prayers. Aid workers dance next to local hipsters, elderly couples next to a local LGBT chapter. This is his part in dispelling myths about the practice.

"Most Americans don't know that they don't know what Vodou really is," explains Elizabeth McAlister, scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, specializing in Haitian Vodou. They think Vodou is about sorcery, maybe love magic, usually some sort of sinister practice."

The 1920s and 1930s cinema - the heyday of B-films like White Zombie and pulp fiction - helped reinforce caricatures of Africans as hypersexualized, superstitious and demonic.

"The best thing that ever happened to racism is Vodou," explains Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist, Vodou arts collector and former aid worker originally from New Jersey, who has lived in Haiti for over 40 years. "They made up their stories about it and their stories confirmed every prejudice of every white person in the world. It tells that person from Ohio that they're right about black people as scary and dangerous ... you can actually see on a screen your own racist beliefs justified."

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The west's romance with a misguided understanding of Haitian folklore just happened to coincide with the US occupation of the country - which set out to modernize Haiti, while attempting to systematically erase Vodou.

The religion was born with institutional slavery. Ripped from homelands and heritage, thousands of those who would become Haitians were shipped across the Atlantic to an island, where the indigenous population had already been wiped out, for backbreaking labor in cane plantations.

"They were treated as cattle. As animals to be bought and sold; worth nothing more than a cow. Often less," says Lowenthal.

"Vodou is the response to that. Vodou says 'no, I'm not a cow. Cows cannot dance, cows do not sing. Cows cannot become God. Not only am I a human being - I'm considerably more human than you. Watch me create divinity in this world you have given me that is so ugly and so hard. Watch me become God in front of your eyes.'"

And so Vodou, unlike eastern spirituality which is often focused on the mind, begins in the human flesh: Haitians dance, rather than think, their way to ecstasy; a transcendence into a more beautiful reality.

Divine possessions are reserved for Haitians, who inherit their spirits through bloodlines, explains Lowenthal, who attended countless rituals in mountain villages during his research. Foreigners can never be vehicles - chwals ("horses") - to be ridden by the divine.

"That power is stunning. It's not scary. It's stunning. It shows you what a human being can do. And what we can't do. White people lost their spirits centuries ago. We lost it all. The Haitians believe we used to have spirits, but we were too stupid to keep them."

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Animal sacrifices are still common during Vodou ceremonies. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

Without the lwas, Haiti might never have become a nation at all.

On the night of 14 August 1791, slaves from nearby plantations gathered deep in the woods of Bois Caïman, of what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. By the fire, a young woman possessed by Ezili Dantor, the warrior-mother lwah often iconized as Black Madonna, slit the throat of a large black creole pig and distributed its blood to the revolutionaries, who swore to kill the blancs - white settlers - as they drank it.

With otherworldly strength, the legend goes, the world's richest colony was overthrown and the first black republic proclaimed. Haitian Vodou became a religion with rebellion and freedom at its heart.

Perhaps these are the roots of the west's fear of Vodou, Lowenthal speculates: it is an unbreakable revolutionary spirit threatening to inspire other black Caribbean republics - or, God forbid, the United States itself.

"These people will never be conquered again," Lowenthal emphasizes. "They will be exploited, they will be downtrodden, they will be impoverished - but you can tell not a single Haitian walks around with his head down ... They're more human than the people who enslaved them. They were better than their masters, able to live in another realm. There's no other more articulate response to oppression than that. And that's why Vodou is here - because Vodou is the soul of Haitian people."
***
Ricardo Marie Dadoune (known to friends and worshippers as "Bébé") has known he was homosexual since he was eight years old. He's now 26 and has a boyfriend, though he doesn't broadcast it: several gay men he knows have already been killed.

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Ricardo Marie Dadoune, a 26-year-old gay hougan (Vodou priest) in the Port-au-Prince peristyle where he worships. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

In a bustling neighborhood in Port-au-Price, his peristyle (vodou temple) is tucked away between colorful barbershops and vendors hawking barbecued chicken. On a table in a windowless room, plaster saint statuettes are lined up next to African dolls, perfume bottles, candles and a ram's skull, horns still attached. Ricardo shakes a beaded rattle in all four directions and then pours rum on the cement floor three times: first to his left, then to his right and finally right in front of his orange flip-flops.

"This is a safe place," he explains. "When we have a ceremony here, nothing happens. People like us here, so we're not afraid to come and enjoy."

He may be in a Justin Bieber T-shirt and jeans now, but the peristyle is the only place Ricardo can dress the way he really prefers: with lipstick, earrings, a cloth on his head the way women do in the countryside, and a dress.

While homosexuality in Haiti is not illegal, it is not socially acceptable. To avoid discrimination, violence and even murder, many gays and lesbians lead double lives.

"In other countries the gays are free," he says. "They can wear what they want to wear, but not here in Haiti. After the ceremony I have to take off the clothes because I can't walk the street dressed like a woman here."

Today, peristyles across Haiti have become makeshift religious gay clubs, safe havens where the LGBT community isn't just tolerated but actively welcomed.

The lwas, much like the Haitian ancestors themselves, travel far: underwater, from the heart of Africa all the way to Hispaniola.

While Haitians too worship an almighty God - Bondye in Creole - he is believed to stand above petty human matters. The lwas, not so much. Each with its own area of expertise, lwas have individual tastes: some like champagne and perfume, others five-star Barbancourt rum and animal sacrifices. Spirits only choose those they love, and some prefer to occupy non-straight chwals.

"Many, many gays and lesbians are valued members of Vodou societies," explains McAlister, who has devoted years to researching LGBT in Haitian religion. "There is an idea that Vodou spirits that are thought to be gay 'adopt' and protect young adults who then become gay."

"Vodou 'does gender' totally differently than the Christian tradition," McAlister explains. After all, Vodou has gender fluidity at the core: men might become mediums for female spirits, women for male spirits. "But Christians, especially evangelicals, have zero flexibility for this; they see homosexuality as a sin, period."

Stigmatized as a primitive, or even wicked religion, Vodou is inherently progressive and inclusive, McAlister continues.

"Vodou tends to be radically unjudgmental," she explains. "The alcoholic, the thief, the homeless, the mentally ill, all of these people are welcomed into a Vodou temple and given respect."

In reality, McAlister emphasizes, Vodou is far more similar to a close-knit church community than most Americans could ever imagine. Or as Morse puts it: with food-centered rituals to please spirits, it's sort of like Thanksgiving - just several times a year. And it's feminist too, advocating equal status for male and female priests.

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Mireille Ain, a French manbo (Vodou priestess), in front of her peristyle in Jacmel, on the southern coast of Haiti. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

For missionaries and churches already hell-bent on demonizing Vodou, the religion's progressive outlook may be just another nail in the coffin. Throughout history, Christians have often identified Vodou as the root of all Haiti's problems.

As 2010's earthquake killed perhaps 230,000 and displaced 1.5 million people, US reverend Pat Robertson asserted that Haiti had brought it upon itself through a "pact with the devil", referring to Bois Caïman's uprising. The subsequent cholera epidemic, most likely caused by leaked sewage from a UN camp, was also blamed by some on vodouisants, triggering mobs to murder dozens across the country.

It is perhaps not surprising that a religion born out of colonial subjugation and the trauma of slavery would irk Christians - who also happened to be the slave-masters. On arrival, slaves had eight days to convert - though their native faith was often later on blended with Catholic practices, resulting in today's wildly eclectic pantheon of African spirits alongside Catholic saints "creolized" to walk among them.

In fear of a rival power base, the church repressing Vodou became a recurring theme in Haitian history, McAlister explains.

"The Christians humiliate us by saying that Vodou is evil," Ricardo says. "It's not true. Vodou is not a bad thing. They have their faith, we have ours."

Two days earlier, evangelicals came to his temple and interrupted his ceremony to preach the gospel. They told him he must embrace Jesus as his personal savior, as he continued to perform his rituals, unfazed. This time, it didn't turn violent.

For a long time, even Haiti itself shied away from a religion so quintessential to its national identity. While President Michel Martelly described Beauvoir's passing as a "great loss for the country", the government itself wasn't always so sympathetic, with Vodou officially outlawed until 1934. Even though it became an official religion in 2003, no one knows how many vodouisants Haiti has today.

Vodou is still something many Haitians, including the diaspora, keep underground. Peristyles, even sacred mapou trees, are regularly targets for vandalism and arson. Worshippers risk harassment and violence, with lynchings not unheard of.

Countless attacks against it have forged a newfound solidarity among priests and worshippers as they carve out a political voice. And slowly, things are changing: a new statute is allowing Vodou leaders to perform funerals and weddings, and university courses are now researching the religion. While Beauvoir's successor is yet to be announced, his legacy may be only the beginning.

Ricardo is cautiously optimistic: one day, Vodou may be a catalyst for a more inclusive Haiti. He's waiting to go abroad - anywhere - where he can open about who he is ("This is my life, this is who I am and I will be gay forever").

But until then, he'll be in the peristyle. "There is a lot of love inside the Vodou: it is our heart and blood. So we will not back down. We have an important and strong force with us. Without it, we could not exist today."
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Vodou is elusive and endangered, but it remains the soul of Haitian people

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Haiti, the saying goes, is "70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou". Vodou is everywhere in the Caribbean nation, a spiritual system infusing everything from medicine and agriculture to cosmology and arts. Yet it is almost nowhere to be seen: ceremonies are not just expensive, but targets of hate crime.