#fet gede

[conjuremanj]

Some Pictures I Took From Fet Gede.

I enjoyed this years Fet Gede. This Sosyete not only celebrates the spirits here in the city. But respects and honors others Day of the Dead traditions also.

Fet Gede in Haiti is just such a past-honoring event. Known as the Festival of the Ancestors, Fet Gede ( = The Sacred Dead) is the Vodou equivalent of Mardi Gras, the Mexican Day of the Dead, and Halloween, all in one. So everyone dresses up.

But here are some pics I took while I was there. Check back for the video.

Spirit Statue. Gede Statue

Baron Altar. Baron La Croix

Some kind of death mermaid statue.

It's cool.

One of the children of the spirits dancers in the Oufo. Dressed as a spirit of the Dead. Gede.

🖕Me and Ghanaian Priest & Master Drummer Osofo Andrew.

🖕 Me & Mambo Sally.

Taja Nicholle is a Afro-Indigenous Certified Death Doula/Grief Support Counselor. She's does death healing, cleansings readings, Sound Healing, etc.

https://www.therisingroseco.com/

I meet these women and though there costumes were cool.

🖕 the top is of a Haitian Oungan he and Andrew and some others released the Gede spirits after the Fet Gede was over. We told them thank you and then we all sayed a prayer.

This is the Haitian Oungan with the white powder on his face he was dancing and smoking cigarettes the spirits came and jumped a few people that night.

[heartmindalignedspirit]

Herbal and crystal infused inspired by Anubis, Osiris, Anubis, Hekate, Bawon, Brijit, and select Gedes! Check out Aligned Supply’s inaugural Spirit Series on Etsy!

💜🎃🖤👻🧡

[haitianculture509]

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[rockofeye]

Raising the Dead

I've been sitting with what I have learned and experienced this past Gede season and it feels strangely appropriate to write about that on a day given to Lazarus, the man who died and then lived again.

Gede and I have a long, LONG history. It was Gede who stood waiting for me to get myself to a fet and, as he put it, it was Gede who walked with me through my life (even when I didn't know it) and kept me alive to have the opportunity to step into the djevo. It is Gede who has been my foundation and Gede who has worked tirelessly in the background to help me consistently build myself back better than I was before; whether it was before kanzo or before maryaj or even better than I was last week.

Gede was the first lwa I encountered in Haiti, in the head of the houngan who would later become my husband, and that Gede has always been important to me. For quite awhile, I didn't understand and didn't look at the importance of the same Gede coming in the same head at very important times for me....but I get it now. S (my human husband) has a strong, STRONG relationship with his Gede and it was his Gede that gave me the opportunity to make the choice in Haiti before I entered the djevo: was I going to actually do all of it in the way it was intended, or was I going to shrink back and hold myself like and as an outsider?

I didn't totally understand that choice in the moment, but I did know that when Gede dragged me (kinda literally) into the middle of the temple during bat gè and demanded a gouyad out of me, the person who does not dance well at ALL. But, I had decided in the midst of my personal misery preparing for kanzo that I was all in and would do whatever was asked of me because, up until that point, my way of doing things was not helping me. That gouyad changed my life, honestly. The same Gede dragged me back for more gouyad after kanzo, and this time it was a literal dragging because I was very clear on the post kanzo instructions that I was not to interact with the dead for the period of my eprèv and I didn't know what to do. There is video of my sort of gesticulating wildly at my godfather and my friends as Gede took me by the arm, dragged me in front of the drums, and asked for a little more gouyad.

It was also that Gede who came to to my maryaj lwa and placed the rings I had bought for Gede on our fingers, and that same Gede who, when he comes down for his fets, has me running for him. He reminds people on the regular that I married him before I married the chwal/my human husband, and intercedes (without my asking) when other Gede start asking me for things and favors because it is he who takes care of me.

I also relate to Gede in a very different way than I sometimes see others relating to Gede. I find Gede to be very, very serious and I don't often get the dick joke kind of Gede that people most relate to. To me, Gede tells jokes to be able to say the things that people would otherwise be unable to hear, and I am a person who just gets confused by that, to be quite honest, because if I am going to hear hard things and someone is laughing about it, I get lost a bit...like why is it funny? That's not to say Gede has not done that; Gede in my husband's head is notorious for poking fun at me and at times exploiting the fact that, while I speak Kreyòl quite well at this point, I am not quite fluent enough for everything and particularly not for understanding the dialect that S's Gede will speak at times. It always comes with a blessing, even though I may not see it in the moment.

This year, I have been reminded just how close to me Gede always remains. That has been drastically underlined since S arrived in the US, and it has been kind of amusing to experience.

I work occasional overnight shifts at a side gig (because what houngan/manbo does not hustle for their lwa...), and more than once I have come home to find S not in our bed but sleeping in lwa room, which is not in and of itself weird. Vodouizan do that frequently as a devotion or to generate dreams or for any number of other reasons. It is, however, kind of strange to stick your head into the lwa room and see your husband laying on the floor like he is in the grave (arms crossed on his chest while he lays on his back) with a black moushwa over his face.

It's even stranger when your husband sits up and you realize it is your Husband who has come to see you and remarks that it is about time that you got back from work because he has been there waiting for you since before the sun came up. Having chats with Gede at 7AM after working all night is certainly a challenge but it is it's own blessing. He has detailed a lot of important stuff for both myself and my husband that needs to get done, and confirmed a lot of things that I had thought about before.

The confirmations are part of the lesson for me. I approach most things spiritual with a critical eye; I look to see if what I believe the lwa are telling me makes sense with what I already know, if it seems supportive of me versus undermining what the lwa have already put in place, and if it is going to harm me or other folks. Those are my basic guidelines for looking at what I hear or intuit, and even then my reaction is, unless it is something that has to be done immediately, I kind of put it on a shelf and just watch how things unfold.

It is absolutely wild to me to sit and chat with one of my lwa and have them declare the same things I have heard on my own and have not shared with others. To me, that reveals that my default is to sort of not believe what I am hearing and not give it the importance that it deserves. Like, Gede sat there and talked about one of my personal Gede whose name I have never spoken to another person--not even my husband--and spoke about them by name. He talked about other spiritual things that I had not brought up to anyone at all and just held to myself and my takeaway is that I need to trust what I hear more.

It reminded me of something I heard at Gede's fet at my spiritual mother's house. Ogou came to speak with his children, and I overheard something he told someone else: you can hear me in your head when I speak, so why do you wait to hear it from my mouth? Over the past decade my lwa have developed and refined me enough that I don't need to speak with them when they are in a head all that often. Sometimes it's useful to clarify something I am not understanding or in a very difficult situation, but by and large I hear them quite clearly, understand what they are saying, and have the tools to communicate with them. The first thing my mother taught me was how to pray and use my table, and I consistently do not give that the importance that it really holds.

The other side is that I sometimes don't pay attention enough to how they speak, in that after a decade of them telling me things, the way they speak has become more streamlined and requires very few grand gestures. Before it was them pulling out all the stops and sending very in-depth and detailed dreams. Now it is the things that occur to me when I sit and pray, or that occur to me when I am sort of contemplating a situation that I or someone else has been struggling with. They certainly do still send dreams when they want to underline something, but it has become much more of a ingrained process. In a way, it's been a manifestation of one of my most long term prayers: I want there to be no distance between myself and my lwa, and I do not want to be able to find the border where they begin and I end because I want them so enmeshed in my life and me so enmeshed in them that I move with them easily and fluidly.

And so it is.

This past season of a reinvigorated death has also got me rolling around with my ancestors again in a different-than-usual way. I have always had a complicated relationship with my ancestors because my relationship with my family is complicated, but they have gotten louder and louder, and that means it's time to take a deep breath and dig back in. In the last year, I uncovered a big giant gaping wound that has led to some of the problems my family currently experiences. Not a generational curse, really, but the reverberations of a massive tragedy that my ancestors were involved in that has never been addressed. Looking at what has happened in one branch of my family since that tragedy, and it's absolutely clear that the damage from that has radically changed the descendants. I don't even think most of my living family from that side have any knowledge of what happened; it took a lot of careful reading for me to get it.

I also visited the grave of a family member I was close to in life and that reawakened him. Standing in front of his grave and feeling his shock that I had come after being away for so long was kind of a shock to my system, and he's come to speak with me since and outline what he really needs.

The bottom line that my ancestors have highlighted is that my family is unwell because my ancestors are unhealed and problems have gone on for generations unaddressed. This has created a poison well of sorts, and here we are. Through probably a mix of accident and ancestral wrangling, I am the only living member of my family who hears (or knows they are hearing) the ancestors and so they have been clear that it is my responsibility to do the work to change things so that there is peace moving backwards in time and peace moving forward.

I am not exactly thrilled about this. It's not a surprise because I have been told this before and purposefully ignored it. However, life circumstances have changed and I am no longer in a space where I can ignore it. When I look at the scope of what must be done, I kind of look at my ancestors and ask where my staff is and how I am going to get paid for this, because it is A LOT.

I know the answer to those questions (I am the staff and the pay comes later), so I guess it's off to work I go? I don't know. I have a lot of personal background working with difficult ancestors, but I am going to be fumbling through how I address the ancestral weight of mass tragedy. People don't write books about that kind of ancestral veneration, but maybe that's also part of this work because I can't be the only one dealing with ancestral mess on a grand scale. Just another opportunity for personal growth and development, I guess.... These moments get tiring as I get older.

Now we are solidly in Makaya season, which closes out our year and dictates what our new year will be like. It is not gentle or nurturing; it is the expectation of rapid change and assertive (an understatement) presence of spirit. In common culture, this is the time of year that commemorates the divine taking on flesh, and in Vodou that is one of the most spiritually hot and spiritually significant events in our day-to-day. The lwa come into heads to bring us direct change, deliverance, healing, and hope. With the mess that the world is today, we need that and particularly the focus of healing and hope. Makaya's healing is not gentle and not without it's own kind of suffering; after all, the poto mitan is on fire and the Petwo lwa arrive screaming.

May the heat of the flames burn away all that I do not need and all that holds me back, and may the leaves and medicine find their way to the parts of me that need healing and wholeness. May I hold onto the hope that comes from the fire, because what is burned away will bear new life. May the soil be rich and may I be receptive.

[bostonfly]

Olvera Street Día de los Muertos, Los Angeles, California October 25–November 2 Day of the Dead, San Antonio, Texas October 25–November 7 Día de los Muertos Xicágo, Chicago, Illinois October 26 Viva La Vida Festival, Austin, Texas October 26 Day of the Dead San Diego, San Diego, California October 27–November 3 Day of the Dead/Fet Gede, New Orleans, Louisiana November 1 Day of the Dead Festival of Altars, San Francisco, California November 2 Muertos y Marigolds, Albuquerque, New Mexico November 3

[haitianartlover]

Grand Cemetery, Port-au-prince, Haiti

[plyrythm]

[dearyallfrommatt]

Extremely interesting read. I got to know some practitioners, including a houngan, when I lived in New Orleans, though the voodoo-inspired faith found there is of a different than what comes out of Haiti. Fascinating topic of study either way.

[rockofeye]

While something popularly written about and, in very few cases enshrined as an almost pop culture reference in some pieces of the Haitian Vodoy community, the theory/rumor the Gran Brigit/Manman Brigit is related to or derived from or really is St Brigid falls from one source that is widely known as deeply problematic and outright fraudulent, and likely made it up as both a religious Mary Sue and a way to draw in folks curious about Vodou who were coming from neopaganism.

There is no history of Irish indentured servants on the island of Hispaniola, at all. The island was colonized by the French and Spanish, back and forth, with some sideline American action in there. The British monarchy was the colonial power dealing in Irish indentured servants, and they had no foothold on Hispaniola. The historical trope of Irish indentured servants gets brought up a lot, likely as a mechanism of trying to create an equality of suffering that historically did not exist. The colonial powers on the island had no need of indentured servants that would have had to be granted land, be paid, and treated reasonably well. They had plenty of enslaved Africans to do all that work for nothing.

Similarly, Gran Brigit is not presented as white. The lwa who embody death, such as Brigit and her husband Bawon Samdi, can often appear pale because they are dead, but they are not white. Some spirits do portray themselves as white or white-passing for many reasons, with many of them being some of the most well-known spirits in the religion; Damballah Wedo, Agwe Tawoyo, Ezili Freda, Ogou Sen Jak, and others. Lwa who often appear with very light or white skin are often lwa who are considered to be or descend from royalty, are largely 'cool', who are concerned with cleanliness and purity. Brigit does not really fit that mold.

Brigit also does not dance or do much of anything in possession. As she is the embodiment of death when she arrives in her chwal, she is laid out as death is; she lays still on the ground wrapped in a shroud with her jaw tied closed, cotton placed in her nostrils, and occasionally her face powdered to give the pallor of death. The family of Gede are the elevated dead who dance; the banda is theirs, as is piman (peppered rum...we joke that it is Haitian tear gas, but it is called piman) and they are who engage in lascivious behavior. Brigit (who prefers sweet drinks) and the family of spirits called Bawon are dead serious (literally). They are the implacability of death, the dug grave, the finality that we all face.

'Tis the season to check your sources on death and the dead in Haitian Vodou!

Maman Brigitte is the only white spirit of the Vodou Lwa. From a folklore perspective she became a part of Vodou through indentured Irish women sharing their stories of St. Brigid who is a very obvious christianization of the Celtic goddess Brigid.

From a metaphysical perspective the goddess Brigid continued to be worshiped as St. Brigid. She then immigrated with the Irish to Haiti & the US. She married Baron Samedi, the chief Lwa of death.

For me as a person of predominantly Celtic decent steeped in the black community I’m very drawn to Maman. Learning more about Maman is helping to learn more about myself, my heritage, & where my place is in the scheme of things.

[conjuremanj]

Making Some St Anthony & Gede Haitian Powder For Some Clients.

Today I made a St Anthony powder for a client to be used in their folk magic...👇

In this photo👇 I made a Gede powder for a client.

This is made Haitian Vodou powder made with specific herbs to be used during Fet Gede here in New Orleans.

It Any One Wants Some Hit Me Up...

[heartmindalignedspirit]

I. Can’t. Wait.

🕶💀🚬

Will you be there???

💜🎩🖤

[vudutarot]

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#fet #guede #ghede #gede #haitian #vodou #voodoo https://www.instagram.com/p/BcECqH5gr-t/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=bin7nanyh47x

[rockofeye]

Y-E-S.

[rockofeye]

What happens to regular food offerings in a house altar? I noticed that the ones served in fèts are eaten (with a few exceptions of burying them, sending them out to sea on a bak, or disposing in other ways) but wanted to know if practitioners ate offerings made to the Rada, Petwo, etc. or had to let them rot and then dispose of them.

Hi,

It depends on what it is and what the purpose of it is. If I prepare food for my lwa at home just as an offering, I don't eat what I place for them. I might eat leftovers from cooking if there are any but what goes on the altar is for them only. Often there is a prescribed amount of time for it to sit there, either as informed by the lwa or as a standard thing, and then food is disposed of. Letting it rot sometimes is a prescription (and a good one!), and sometimes would be wholly inappropriate, like for Ezili Freda, Danbala, and most of the Rada lwa and a bunch of others.

An example of what might happen with food is what Gede asked of me recently. Food was prepared for him for his fet, and he came and ate it and enjoyed it...but he also wanted me to have similar done for him in Haiti and told me I could not dispose of his food here until I had the work done in Haiti. I was to take his food home, place it with his things, and keep it there until the work was completed. It took a minute to coordinate money, seek out what he likes to eat since it is different than what most Gede eat, and then have our folks down in Haiti prepare it in our lakou and deposit it. So, I had a basin of rotting manje Gede that I couldn't get rid of until I received the confirmation that it was done by my adopted son. I was kinda grossed out, this particular Gede was very amused by my distaste. When it could be disposed of, it went into a bag and into the trash.

In Haiti, food that won't be eaten would traditionally get deposited under a tree but that's often hard to do in the US if you don't have a yard. I don't, so what I do is place everything in its own plastic bag and then place it in the trash for disposal.

A sometimes exception is fresh fruit or vegetables. For example, I just did our household service for Kouzen and gave him a bunch of fresh fruit and vegetables. The service is finished, the prescribed period is over, and the fruit/veg is still good so it will go into our kitchen to eat. Kouzen is not going to ask me to sacrifice food I can eat.

Hope this helps!

[realityanddelusion]

“Do you really speak the language? Do you know what your name is?” Vilification, bastardization, and dumbing down black people seems to have been in fashion since cameras started rolling over in the Americas. From the stage to the screen from the white globes of the minstrel shows to the white gloves finding there way onto Mickey and other beloved cartoons if you love it chances are it’s roots go back to chattel slavery. But this video isn’t meant to focus on the bad. This video is a mix of both fictitious representation of ATR and actual real life footage of black people being , raw, real, and powerful. I wanted to highlight key things such as animals that hold some of secrets. Bre’r Rabbit, Li Gran Zombi, Aunt Nancy just to name a few. Ring shouts and catching the Holy Ghost can also be seen in there as well for purposes I was going to go into depth over but thinking about it I believe it’s best if I leave them in obscurity. The presentation before is in no way a full representation of black majick or what hoodoo is but serves as a way of letting you know that like God and water it will take the form of whatever it’s host need them to be. 🎶Exuma the obeah man

📺-Looney Tunes, Wakanda Forever, Ring Shout, The beginnings of the Black Church, Lovecraft Country, AHS:Coven, Alek Wek @ Betsy Johnson 1998, American Gods, Little Rascals, History of Racism in Cartoons(2010), Fet Gede, Looking For Langston, Brujas- Princess Nokia, Dickinson, Praise Break (2018), True Blood, Lemonade(2016), Katherine Dunham and dance company in Casbah(1948)