In August 1791 a gathering is said to have taken place at a place called Bois Caiman in the north of the colony, at which a pig was sacrificed, an oath was sworn and a rising was agreed. The insurrection that began days later grew into the revolution that ended slavery in the colony and produced the independent state of Haiti in 1804, the only state in history created by a successful revolt of the enslaved.
The historical questions about the ceremony are real. The earliest detailed accounts were written some decades afterwards, by authors with strong views about the revolution's character, and the details vary between them. Whether an event of this kind occurred is generally accepted; the specifics, the names of those present and the words spoken, are much less secure than their frequent repetition suggests.
What is certain is what the story has been used for. In Haiti it stands as the founding act of the nation, in which the religion of the enslaved is the medium of their liberation. Outside Haiti it has been used in the opposite direction, most persistently in the claim that the country was dedicated to the devil at its founding and that its later misfortunes follow from that, a claim revived publicly after the 2010 earthquake.
Kate Ramsey's history of the Haitian state's laws on Vodou traces how the practice was criminalised, tolerated and prosecuted in turn under successive governments.