Erzulie Freda is the lwa of love, beauty, luxury and refinement in Haitian Vodou, a spirit of romantic longing, sweetness and grace, and of the sorrow that attends an ideal love which can never be fully satisfied. She belongs to the Rada rite, and she is imagined as a beautiful, elegant and flirtatious woman who delights in fine and sweet things: perfume, jewellery, sweets, flowers, and the colour pink, with which she is closely associated. When she comes to a ceremony she is offered these luxuries and treated with courtesy and tenderness; she is fastidious and easily moved. What gives Erzulie Freda her depth, and distinguishes her from a simple goddess of pleasure, is the note of grief that runs through her. She embodies not only love and its delights but the yearning for a perfection that the world cannot give, and it is characteristic of her that, however she is honoured and however lavishly she is served, she is at last moved to tears, weeping that no love and no gift are ever quite enough, that the ideal she represents cannot be attained. She thus expresses something profound and universally human: the ache of longing at the heart of love, the gap between the dream of love and its always-imperfect fulfilment.
In the correspondences with the Catholic saints she is associated with the Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowful Mother of Sorrows, whose image, richly adorned and weeping, suits her exactly, and she is sometimes shown wearing three wedding rings for her three spirit-husbands. Vodou is a living religion, and Erzulie Freda is one of its most beloved spirits, the lwa of love in both its sweetness and its inconsolable longing.