Meet the real Baron Samedi.

So there was a post a little while ago referencing Baron Samedi and to a lesser extent talking about voodoo (source: http://imgur.com/gallery/YVW3ah6). I thought I would take a minute to talk about Baron and who he is in relation to the practice of voodoo.

In the practice of vodou (or voodoo), practitioners give honor to several spirits, or Lwa. These spirits are are the souls of saints or other revered individuals ascended to a place of honor. Practitioners pray to the spirits and invite them to possess their bodies so that they can manifest in this world. These include spirits of harvest, or of the crossroads, or of death.

This is Papa Gede, sometimes also called Baron Samedi. The name Samedi means "Saturday" in Creole. This is the day over which he has dominion (think Thor and Thursday) and the day on which he is celebrated. Baron is the primary of the Gede spirits, the spirits of the dead. Anyone can become a Gede when they die, but as the first man who ever died, he holds a special place.

He is almost always depicted as thin and gaunt, face painted like a skeleton, or sometimes as a skeleton himself. His colors are black, white, and purple, and he is always seen dressed in his burial finest, almost always with a tall top hat. He wears sunglasses with one lens punched out, to show that he can see and travel through both the land of the living and the realm of the dead. As with much of vodou, there is an element of duality with Baron. He is the lord of the dead, but is also a spirit of life.

While he often looks frightening, Baron is not someone to fear. Yes, he is one who guides to souls of the dead to their final resting place, but he's also a really fun, entertaining guy. The Gede Lwa (Baron especially) are very earthy, rowdy spirits. Since he is dead, he is beyond offense and reproach, and often spends his time drinking, smoking and partying. The cane he carries is actually a representation of his genitalia, which he will often straddle while pelvic thrusting and making dirty jokes. The idea is that since duality is a big thing in this culture and pantheon, the flip side of death is life, specifically sex.

Being spirits that are closely tied to the material realm, many of them require gifts to entice them to come to this plane. Baron, being the rowdy personality he is, likes cheap tobacco and hard liquor. He also likes his gifts of food and drink to be SPICY. The bottle you see on this altar is white rum infused with 21 habanero peppers. When people are being possessed by the spirit of Baron, they can drink this stuff like water and not feel a thing. And if you tried it, you'd feel it for days.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed making it. I am by no means an authority on the subject of Hatian or New Orleans Vodou, but it is something that greatly interests me, and something I've done a considerable amount of research on. If you'd like me to do another one of these with another member of the Vodou pantheon or anything else, let me know.