Adjassou-Linguetor

Beside a spring in the hills of northern Haiti stands a mombin tree, and under it, according to the people who served it, lives a spirit with bulging eyes who is never in a good mood. Water moves over stones a few feet away. The shade is cool, and the company is not. The spirit’s name is Adjassou-Linguetor, and almost everything anyone can say about it comes from one anthropologist’s notebook.

That anthropologist was George Eaton Simpson, who gathered the beliefs of Vodou practitioners around the village of Plaisance and published them in “The Belief System of Haitian Vodun” in *American Anthropologist* in 1945. The article was reprinted in his *Religious Cults of the Caribbean: Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti* (Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico, 1970, with later editions) and again in Caribbean readers in 1971 and 2001. It contains two things about Adjassou. One is a long list of lwa names, each tagged with the initials of the informants who gave it; two informants named Adjassou-Linguetor. The other is a table of the spirits’ habits, and that is where the eyes come from.

The table reads like a landlady’s register. For each spirit it gives an appearance, a robe, a dwelling, favourite foods, favourite drinks and colours. Adjassou’s row is brief and unfriendly. Protruding eyes. Always in a bad humour. No special robe. Lives under the mombin tree near a spring. Eats duck, turkey, pigeon and goat meat. Drinks vermouth, rum and cognac. No colour preferences, which, beside neighbours who ask for red, is almost a personality in itself.

The service the table implies is easy to see: a household carrying a duck and three bottles to the tree by the water, setting them down in the root-dark shade, and leaving before anyone has to meet those eyes. That is the whole of what the record lets anyone see of Adjassou at work. It is fed, and it is fed well.

The neighbours in that table give the scale of the world it lived in. Papa Pié, linked with Saint Peter, wears red and grey, never laughs and lives at the bottom of rivers and ponds. A spirit called L’inglésou looks fierce and haunts abysses and large rocks. Another is described as very ugly, its body covered with sores. Simpson also found that Plaisance people held more than one view of how such spirits related to the Catholic saints, one of them being that a spirit “under the water” answers to each saint in Heaven. Adjassou, dwelling by a spring, fits that watery company without being given a saint of its own.

There is no myth. No birth, no quarrel with another lwa, no story of a devotee rewarded or punished. The table never even says whether Adjassou is male or female. Later writers split on the point: a 1998 English compiler’s dictionary calls the spirit “he”, while a 2011 popular spellbook and the online summaries that copy it say “she” and promote the dwelling by the spring into rule over spring water. Neither detail is in Simpson.

Where the name came from is a harder question, and Simpson himself pointed at the answer he suspected. Beside Adjassou-Linguetor in his list he set cross-references to three earlier writers: Harold Courlander’s Adja or Adja Bosu in *Haiti Singing*, Melville Herskovits’s Agasu, and Dorsainvil’s Aguasu. Courlander, in a catalogue of Haitian lwa printed in the *Journal of Negro History* in 1944 and reprinted in 1955 as “The Loa of Haiti”, treated Adja Bosu as a Dahomean spirit, probably the same as the Akadja Bosu or Kadja Bosu known in Dahomey as well as in Haiti, and noted that the Twi word for a spirit is *bosum*. The Vodou scholar Benjamin Hebblethwaite, working through the old lists in 2021, repeats that Courlander called Adja Bosu Dahomean and notes that the name is missing from the modern list he compares it with. Whether all of these names mean one spirit is Simpson’s equation, not a settled fact.

Simpson recorded a second spirit with a near-identical name, Adjassou-Miroi, and printed a song to it. Its singers insist that God exists and the saints exist, whatever anyone says: “Adjassou-Miroi, live in God,” in Simpson’s translation. Whether Miroi and Linguetor are two spirits or two faces of one, the song does not say.

What Adjassou-Linguetor could do for the people who fed it is not written down. The temper is the only power the record admits, and the only protection against it that the record offers is the menu: the birds, the goat, the three bottles, and a path back from the spring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Adjassou-Linguetor in Haitian Vodou?

Adjassou-Linguetor is a lwa, or spirit, recorded in northern Haitian Vodou. The anthropologist George Eaton Simpson listed the name from informants around Plaisance and published it in 1945. His table describes the spirit as having protruding eyes and always being in a bad humour.

Where does Adjassou-Linguetor live?

According to Simpson’s informants, Adjassou-Linguetor lives under the mombin tree near a spring. That dwelling is the source of later claims that the spirit rules spring water, which Simpson himself does not say.

What offerings does Adjassou-Linguetor receive?

Simpson’s table lists duck, turkey, pigeon and goat meat as Adjassou-Linguetor’s foods, and vermouth, rum and cognac as its drinks. The spirit wears no special robe and has no colour preferences.

Is Adjassou-Linguetor male or female?

The original record does not say. A 1998 compiler’s dictionary calls Adjassou-Linguetor “he”, while a 2011 spellbook and the online summaries that follow it say “she”, so the sex of the spirit is not fixed by any early source.

Is Adjassou-Linguetor the same as Adja Bosu or Agasu?

George Eaton Simpson cross-referenced Adjassou-Linguetor to Harold Courlander’s Adja or Adja Bosu, Melville Herskovits’s Agasu and Dorsainvil’s Aguasu. Courlander regarded Adja Bosu as a spirit of Dahomean origin. The identification of all these names as one spirit is Simpson’s suggestion rather than an established fact.

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