Blessed Be!
Source | New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum |
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D | |
Veves |
Agwe Ayizan Damballah Baron Samedi Table Prepared to serve Gede The Dead: Baron, Brijit and Gede Some of the most interesting Lwa!
Ogoun Erzulie Legba Marassa Maman Brigitte Simbi Miscellanious |
A Veve or Vévé [alternately spelled bey
bey or vever] is a religious symbol for a vodou (voodoo) religion's "loa" (or lwa) (spirit) and serves as their representation during rituals. In the past, it was believed that the veve derive from the beliefs of the native Tainos but more recent scholarship has demonstrated a close tie between the veve and the cosmogram of the Kongo people.
From Milo Rigaud 'Secrets of Voodoo' (c1969; City Lights, NY): "The veves represent figures of the astral forces... In the course of Voodoo ceremonies, the reproduction of the astral forces represented by the veves obliges the loas ... to descend to earth."
Every Loa has his or her own unique veve, although regional differences have led to different veves for the same loa in a few cases. Sacrifices and offerings are usually placed upon them.
The veve is usually drawn on the floor by strewing a powder-like substance, such as cornmeal, wheat flour, bark, red brick powder, or gunpowder. The material depends entirely upon the rite.
Maya Deren. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston: Documentext, 1953.
ISBN 0-914232-63-0
When I first heard about this book, I was surprised to hear Maya Deren's name; I first ran in to her work in a film class on avante-garde cinema, and her film, Meshes in the Afternoon, was one of the most comprehensible of the whole class.
Divine Horsemen is quite a tour de force, and contains fascinating opinions about many aspects of Haitian Vodou. Joseph Campbell's work on myth has clearly been an influence, and Deren talks at great length about the mythological features of the lwas. This book is, oddly, not available from Amazon, but you can get it directly from the publisher.
The methods of the houngan not only respect the essential wisdom of the psychosomatic mechanism, but -- and this is the most remarkable feature -- use it therapeutically. The diagnosis of "unnatural" or "unphysical" illness is not simply a negative judgement, as it seems to those who conceive only in terms of physical causes. On the contraty, the houngan's main job is to discover the non-physical or unnatural cause. This may be either an act of aggressive evil magic against the person or a punishment for his failure to serve his loa properly. In either case, there exists the possibility of a resulution through action of some sort. Instead of the hopeless finality of absolute, abstract despair, the man is immediately involved in the idea of promising action. [pp.170-171]
Veve of Ayizan | Veve of Baron Samedi | Veve of Maman Brigitte | Veve of Damballah Weddo |
Veve of Papa Legba | Veve of Ogoun |