Vodou Has a Religion of the Dead, and Death Has a Sense of Humor

Western death tends to dress formally.

Black robes.

Skulls.

Silence.

Perhaps a scythe if the budget permits.

Haitian Vodou has a more complicated relationship with the dead.

Vodou includes families of lwa, spirits served through ritual. Among them are the Gede, associated with death, ancestors and the boundary between the living and dead.

Baron Samedi is one of the best-known figures associated with this world, frequently represented with cemetery and death imagery.

Yet Vodou death spirits are not simply grim.

They can be vulgar, humorous, sexual and deliberately outrageous.

The underlying idea is not difficult to understand.

Death is terrifying.

So humans mock it.

We dance with it.

Give it personality.

Dress it up.

Make jokes in the cemetery.

Turn the terrifying boundary into a social relationship.

Vodou itself is commonly misunderstood precisely because outsiders have repeatedly taken its most visually dramatic elements and detached them from their religious context.

Possession becomes horror.

Spirits become demons.

Ritual becomes black magic.

A religion becomes scenery for somebody else's nightmare.

The real thing is stranger, but also more human.

A culture living closely with death created spirits who refuse to behave solemnly around it.

Frankly, death receives enough dignity already.