Gede

The Gede are the rowdy, irrepressible family of death-and-fertility lwa of Haitian Vodou, the spirits of the dead, headed by the Barons, Baron Samedi, Baron La Croix and Baron Cimetiere, and joined by the mother-figure Grann Brijit. They are at once the guardians of the cemetery and the dead and, in a way that is central to their meaning, the patrons of sexuality, healing, and the protection of children, for in Vodou death and life, the grave and the generative power, are held close together rather than opposed.

When the Gede arrive in a ceremony they are unmistakable: they dress in black and purple, often in the top hat and dark glasses of the Baron, they dance the suggestive banda, they crack obscene jokes and speak with a nasal voice, and they take a fierce delight in puncturing pretension, mocking the powerful and the self-important and refusing all solemnity. This comedy is not irreverence but teaching: the Gede, who know death from the inside, make plain that death comes to everyone regardless of rank, and that the proper answer to the certainty of death is to affirm life, its humour, its appetite, its fertility, without pomp or fear. They are also great healers, and are especially protective of children, standing between the living and the death that might take them. Their festival falls at the beginning of November, overlapping the Catholic days of the dead, when the cemeteries fill and the Gede are honoured in great numbers. Vodou is a living faith, and the Gede are among its most vivid and best-loved spirits, the dead who return not to frighten but to laugh, to heal, to guard the children, and to insist, in the face of the grave, on the goodness and the comedy of being alive.

One of the most influential outside accounts of the Gede comes from the filmmaker and ethnographer Maya Deren, whose 1953 book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, based on years of fieldwork and initiation into Vodou in the late 1940s, remains a landmark study of the tradition for English-language readers and devotes particular attention to the social and psychological function of the Gede's comic, obscene performance during possession.

Deren argued that the Gede's crude jokes, sexual mockery and gleeful puncturing of dignity and social rank served a genuine communal function comparable to license-granting figures found in many other cultures, carnival clowns, court fools, ritual tricksters, who are permitted, precisely because they speak from the position of the dead or the marginal, to say what ordinary social convention forbids anyone else from saying, exposing pretension, releasing communal tension and reminding the powerful of their own mortality and absurdity. Her account, while shaped by her own particular perspective and the era in which she wrote, helped introduce serious scholarly attention to the Gede's dual role, guardians of the dead and irrepressible practitioners of subversive comedy, to a wider audience outside Haiti, and later scholars of Vodou have continued to explore the specific ways this pattern, comedy and mortality intertwined in a single family of spirits, expresses ideas about death, dignity and social hierarchy that are woven throughout Haitian culture more broadly, well beyond the boundaries of formal ceremony.