The items I create in the Vodou category are informed by my personal religious practice. Devotionally, I work in a Franco-Haitian Gnostic Vodou lineage with full consecration as a bishop in several lines of succession, including that of Houngan Lucien Francois Jean-Maine. I am not an initiate in a house of traditional Haitian sevis, though I respect it, study it, have been an invited lecturer at universities and conferences on it, and will say so when the items I create aren't really in line with it.

The stuff you'll find here generally doesn't have anything at all to do with hoodoo, because hoodoo and Vodou are two different things (leaving aside for now the question of contemporary New Orleans Voodoo, which is definitely its own thing, distinct from Haitian Vodou and West African Vodun and hoodoo elsewhere in the United States). Vodou is a religion. Hoodoo as a system of folk magic is not a religion, though it springs from and is informed by a largely Protestant Christian culture (with exceptions in historically Catholic-heavy areas, New Orleans again being a prime example.)

In any case, though my lineage in Vodou is not that of a traditional house in Haiti or the United States, my altars and my spiritual art generally would not seem out of place in them and are made with an eye towards traditional elements and correspondences. I'm pretty emphatic about delineating my sources and approaches with stuff like this (because I'm allergic to mix-and-match BS), so if an item I create is a distinct deviation, I'll say so.

A portion of the proceeds from sales of my Vodou rosaries and shrines goes to Fonkoze, an organization dedicated to tackling poverty in Haiti through community-based education and microbanking services. Its employees are nearly all Haitian, and it does not proselytize or ask participants to renounce or change their religion, culture, or mode of artistic expression. A huge proprtions of Haitians live in abject poverty -- you can see just a few stats here in a blog post I wrote in 2008 -- and I think anybody generating any profit by doing something springing from, inspired by, or related to Haitian art, aesthetics, culture, religion, or tradition should be kicking some of that money back to Haiti.

Erzulie Freda Oil

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