Vodou initiation ceremonies are never undertaken lightly or routinely. Almost always it is trouble with the spirits, manifesting in problems in the individual’s life, that lead a person to undergo initiation. In the temples of the Port-au-Prince area there are four levels of initiation possible. Each level involves a period of seclusion that may vary from three to twenty-one days, and most temples have a small interior room set aside for such purposes. Persons tend to be initiated in small groups. The men and women in these groups become “brothers” and “sisters” in a special way. Above all, they are committed to helping each other with ritual duties. This is the case even when the groups contain individuals who are seeking different grades of initiation.
All grades of initiation have public rituals that occur intermittently in the exterior temple dancing area as well as rituals reserved for the already-initiated members of the house that occur within the inner chamber. The first level of initiation is called the lave tet (head-washing) and involves cooling and soothing as well as feeding the spirits in a person’s head. The second level is kanzo, a word that refers to a rite in which initiates are briefly removed from the initiation chamber in order to undergo a ritual trial. In the semipublic part of the kanzo ritual, small, hard dumplings are snatched from boiling pots and pressed into the palm of the left hand and the sole of the left foot of the initiate. When this ceremony is completed, the initiates are told: “Now you are kwit [cooked]; no one can eat you,” that is to say, no one can do harm to you. They are also admonished: “Never say hot again, say strong!”.
The third level is called sou pwen, on the point. Pwen is a complex, multivocal concept in Haitian Vodou, as it is in Haitian culture in general. Within the general culture, “singing the point” or “sending the point” refers to a socially appropriatemeans of indirect communication that is especially useful for conveying difficult messages. For example, one young man in Haiti told me this story: he was courting a young woman who came from a family as impoverished as his own. The girl’s mother decided that the match offered neither one any chance of advancement, and yet she was loathe to insult her daughter’s suitor. So when he visited, she went about her household tasks singing a popular song, the refrain of which was “Dč mčg pa fri,” (Two lean [pieces of meat] do not fry). The young man got “the point” and broke off his relationship. In and out of the temples, it is often Vodou songs that are used for the purpose of singing the point. These songs have a sparse, even cryptic quality to them that lends itself to communicating several different, sometimes contradictory, meanings at once. The person who “sends a song” in the Vodou temple, that is, the one who suggests the next song to be sung by the group, is not only following a closely prescribed ritual order in which each important lwa is saluted in the proper order with his or her own songs and rhythms, but quite frequently is also sending the point, pwen, to a person or group of persons present at the ceremony. Such an observation both reveals the extent to which Vodou ritual intertwines with and comments on the life of the community and suggests a preliminary definition for the troublesome word pwen. At a level of abstraction uncharacteristic of the way people who serve the spirits speak, pwen may be said to mean the condensation or pith of something. At a concrete, ritual level pwen are charms or medicines composed of words, objects, gestures, or some combination of the three. They may be drawn on the earth, spoken, sung over a person, placed under the skin, or ingested; they may be buried at the crossroads, in a cemetery, or in the courtyard of a house. When one is initiated “on the point,” the reference is to the condensation of the power of a particular spiritwho has been diagnosed as the met tet.
The fourth and final level of initiation is the one that gives a person license to begin practicing as a healer. It is called assogwe, literally, “with the asson,” the beaded rattle that gives priests and priestesses some measure of leverage in the spirit realm.
In Haitian Creole, the verb kouche (to lie down, to sleep, to make love, to give birth—less commonly, to die) is the general word used to describe initiation. Entering the initiation chamber is like dying. Friends and family members cry as they line up to kiss the initiates goodbye. Shortly after this genuinely emotional leavetaking, the initiates are blindfolded and led through a dizzying dance of spirals and turns before being taken into the small room where they will kouche. As in many other sorts of initiation around the world, to kouche is to be forced by ritual means to regress, to become a child again, to be fed and cared for as a child would be, only to be brought rapidly back to adulthood, a new kind of adulthood, again by ritual means. When the initiates leave the inner chamber after days of seclusion and ritualizing, they have their heads covered. Initiates must keep their heads covered for forty days. Like newborn babies with vulnerable soft spots, new initiates must protect the ops of their heads. The spirits within have been fed and are still changing and strengthening day by day. On an altar inside, the initiates have left their po tet (head pots), residues of the internal externalized, the self objectified, the spirits concretized.
These po tet generally remain on the altar of the priest or priestess who performed the initiation and who will be ever after the initiates’ spiritual mother or father. Thus, through initiation rites, bonds among the living—as well as between the living and the spirits—are reinforced.
