Houngan Asogwe

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The asson is a gourd rattle wound with strands of beads and sometimes small bones, and receiving one is what separates an ordinary houngan from a houngan asogwe. Below that grade, a priest can serve the spirits, lead ceremony within a house and treat the sick, but cannot initiate another person into the priesthood or found a new peristyle on independent standing; both of those powers travel with the rattle itself. Manbo asogwe, the equivalent grade held by women, carries the same authority within Vodou's parallel and largely symmetrical treatment of male and female priesthood. Because the asson is conferred rather than inherited, a houngan asogwe's standing is portable in a way a family title is not, and it is this portability, an initiate carrying full priestly authority wherever the lineage recognizes the initiation, that let Vodou's priesthood spread through Haiti and later through diaspora communities in North America without a central seminary or ordaining council of the kind other traditions use to certify clergy. What the kanzo initiation itself involves, the specific steps by which the asson is conferred, belongs to the tradition's closed material.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Vodou has no equivalent of a bishop, a synod or a national seminary that certifies who may hold the asson. Each houngan asogwe answers instead to the lineage of the priest who initiated him, and to the standing his own peristyle and sosyete (temple congregation) give him within his own community; two houses can differ in practice, emphasis and even in which spirits they serve most closely, and neither has authority to correct the other. This is not disorganization so much as a different organizing principle, authority carried person to person through initiation rather than issued downward from an office, and it is one Vodou shares in outline with other African diaspora traditions that formed under conditions, slavery and later state suppression under Haiti's twentieth century anti-superstition campaigns, that made a centralized, registerable clergy dangerous to maintain. The absence of a single governing body has made estimating the number of practicing houngan asogwe difficult and has left oversight of ethical conduct, when it happens at all, a matter for individual sosyete rather than any wider institution.