Baron Samedi

Baron Samedi is the head of the Gede, the family of lwa (spirits) who govern death and the cemetery in Haitian Vodou, and he is the master of the graveyard and the guardian of its dead. He is instantly recognisable: a black tailcoat and a black top hat, dark glasses (often with one lens missing, so that he can see both the world of the living and the world of the dead), and cotton plugs in the nostrils, dressed as a Haitian corpse is dressed for burial. His emblem is the kwa Baron, the cross set at the crossroads of the cemetery to mark the meeting point of the two worlds, and the first man buried in any burying-ground belongs to him. He is at once the receiver of the newly dead, who cannot pass into the realm of the ancestors unless the Baron digs the grave, and a spirit of ribald life, foul-mouthed, lewd, a lover of rum, tobacco and obscene jokes, for in Vodou the grave and the generative power are held close together rather than set in opposition.

No lwa has been more distorted by outsiders than the Baron. The Hollywood "voodoo" of top-hatted death-sorcerers, pins in dolls, curses and zombies is a caricature built during and after the United States occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), when sensational books and films turned a maligned people's religion into a genre of horror; it tells us about the fears of those who made it and almost nothing about the faith itself.

In Vodou the Baron is not a figure of evil but the necessary keeper of the boundary between the living and the dead, turned to for healing as well as for justice, it is said that no one can die unless the Baron accepts them, so that he can also be begged to spare the sick, and he is a fierce protector of children against untimely death. His comedy in the face of the grave is a teaching, not a blasphemy: death comes to everyone regardless of rank, and the honest answer to its certainty is to affirm life, its humour and its appetites. His great festival, Fet Gede, falls at the start of November, overlapping the Catholic days of the dead, when the cemeteries of Haiti fill with the living come to honour the dead. Vodou is a living religion of millions; the Baron who greets the newly dead is one of its most vivid and best-loved spirits, and the leering skeleton of the movies is not him.