Vodou introduction

[Introduction] [lwa\the spirits] [practical vodou] [setting up your own alter] [kanzo\initiation]

Vodou originally derived of the African Fon word "Vodu" from Dahomey (now known as Benin) and mean spirit or entity.

Today Vodou is an actual religion that is built on several thousand year old roots in the (original) African beliefs. The religion is about 10000years old, while the ancient belief itself is known to originate from mans birthplace and is therefore considered as the first as and oldest belief system in the world. The version of Vodou as we know it today was formed during the Spanish colonization in Saint-Dominguez (now known as Haiti) in the 1600s and is mainly a mixture of various African peoples, the indigenous Taino Indians and Catholicism.


Catholicism had its share within Vodou at around the 1800's, when French colonists forbade any other religious practice besides their own and imprisoned or murdered Vodou priests. From that point Vodou was mixed with Catholic faith and even the cross and the saints were used as masking for their own spirits.

Many unfortunately confuse Vodou with Hollywood versions Voodoo where the religion is portrayed as devil worship, black magic, stinging of needles in dolls, zombies and other macabre rituals. Like everything else in life Vodou also has its dark elements, but it has nothing to do with the religion itself. This distorted picture is therefor pure manipulation, among others created by Christian fundamentalists who wanted to mark the religion dark and evil, and later also exploited by others for commercial reasons.

Vodou is basically a monotheistic religion, meaning that we first of all believe in a universal creator that in Creole is called Gran Met or Bondye; translated the great master, or good God. This is the same God as other belief serve, although some are not willing to admit it. Simply, we all come from the same place and it is only a life principle that is the definition of the same force of creation no matter what we choose to call it.

Moreover, we believe that God in its entirety is so large and therefore so incomprehensible to us humans that there where created archetypes that involve them directly in earthly affairs. These forces are called the Lwa and are spirits that correspond with the universe and nature, which also act as intermediaries between us humans and God.

In Vodou, we recognize that we are all brothers and sisters, originally from the same place. We also believe that everyone is of equal value regardless of race, religion, ethnic origin, sexuality or the like. Everything has its reason and therefore we try to accept reality as it actually is instead of pushing what is away from us as a problem.


Today there are over 60 million practitioners of Vodou and the number keeps increasing. Most of these can be found in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Benin, Togo, Congo, Ghana and Cuba, but recently our faith has taken root in several European countries and is today a religion accepted and practiced worldwide by people with different backgrounds and ethnic origins.