Baron Samedi

Also Known As: Haitian Creole Bawon Samdi; also Baron Samdi, Le Baron-Samedi; French for “Baron Saturday”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He owns the cemeteries and the earth inside them, and no death can be worked without his consent.
Role in Mythos: He is the head of the Gede, the family of lwa who hold the dead, and the gatekeeper every sorcerer and every mourner has to get past.
Relation to Humans: People go to his cross to ask permission, to send sickness, and to hear from relatives they have buried. He is greedy and rude and will ruin a ceremony for sport, but he gives straight answers when asked properly, and Haitians greet his arrival with delight rather than dread.

A black cross stands on a low masonry platform in a Haitian cemetery, two shallow steps up from the dirt, and somebody has set a silk top hat on the arm of it. At its foot the wax of last night’s candle has run down the stone and gone hard. Three small holes have been cut into the nearest tomb to catch whatever gets poured for the dead. This is the place where permission is asked, and the one being asked is in no hurry at all.

Baron Samedi owns the cemeteries. He is the head and the father of the Gede, the great family of lwa who live in the graveyards and take on the trappings of mourning, and when Émile Marcelin wrote them up for the Journal de la Société des Américanistes in 1947 he counted the family into a hundred and seventeen nachons. The Gede are numerous, loud, filthy-mouthed and impossible to shame. The other lwa want nothing to do with them.

That is why they arrive last. The Gede come rolling in late in the evening, once every other spirit has been greeted, and the room is glad to see them. They sing obscene songs with perfectly blank faces, one finger raised, holding certain notes far longer than the tune wants. Their dance is the banda, all violent rocking of the hips. Alfred Métraux, watching in the 1950s, noticed what the joking was for: the cynicism and the filth take the edge off the fear these spirits would otherwise bring into the room with them.

Baron himself expects to be summoned properly, with three dry strikes on the Rada drum and the Credo. He does not always wait. Marcelin describes him turning up in the middle of somebody else’s feast, uninvited, insulting the guests in the coarsest terms available and demanding things nobody can possibly provide. Three dances in his honour will usually settle him, except that he then insists on the same courtesy for every spirit in his escort, and there are so many of them that he swallows the whole ceremony and the other lwa go home without their songs. You can try buying him off with a service held for him alone. It does not always work, because wrecking a rival’s party is one of his pleasures.

The look is fixed and it is not African. Métraux says the popular imagination gives him the appearance of an undertaker, and his emblem is a black cross planted on a false tomb with a top hat and a black coat laid on it. William Seabrook, in Haiti in the 1920s, watched a woman lead a graveyard rite dressed in what his informants called Baron Samedi style: a man’s long-tailed black coat, a tall silk hat, dark glasses. Skulls, crossed thighbones, spades and tombs are his signs, and they turn up drawn on the altars of the temples. His colours are purple and white, and the Gede as a group take purple, white, black and green.

His vèvè, the ground-drawing that calls him, is stranger still. It is built from a Christian cross and coffins, studded with eight-pointed stars, solar crosses and the all-seeing eye set between compass and square. Freemasonry reached Saint-Domingue early. Two lodges were authorised in 1749, a Provincial Grand Lodge followed in 1778 under the Grand Orient of France, and by some counts one French colonist in three was an active Mason. Vodou took the furniture and kept it. Bondye, the remote creator, is addressed as Gran Mèt, which is a Masonic title. Maya Deren, writing in 1953 after four years in the country, could find no trace of Baron Samedi anywhere in Africa, and only doubtful traces of the Gede. He was made in Haiti, out of European parts.

He was also made recently, and the record catches him in the act. In Seabrook’s account of the 1920s, a rite his own informant insisted was not Vodou and that Vodouisants despised, the oracle of the graveyard is Papa Nebo, and Baron Samedi is only the spirit of the cemetery whose leave you have to get before the pick goes into a grave. Twenty years later, in Marcelin, Baron Samedi is the father of the whole family and Nebo has been demoted to Nibo, minister of the interior in Baron’s government, a mad politician who traffics in demagoguery and needs watching. A decade after that, Métraux finds the three Barons, Samedi, La Croix and Cimetière, so thoroughly fused that nobody can say whether they are three spirits or three faces of one. Thirty years turned a graveyard doorman into a lord.

His wife is Grande Brigitte, also called Manman or Mlle Brigitte, and she has her own authority over cemeteries, particularly any burial ground where a woman went into the earth first. Something like thirty Gede came out of that marriage.

The power that matters is narrow and absolute. A sorcerer, however skilled, cannot kill anyone until Baron has traced the outline of the grave. Everything else runs through that permission. The worst working in Haiti is the expédition, the sending of the dead: the boko strikes his machete three times on the stone consecrated to the Baron, saying his name each time, until the spirit rides him and dictates the terms. Go to the cemetery at midnight. Put bananas and raw potatoes, chopped small, in front of the cross. Take one handful of graveyard earth for each dead soul you want to send and scatter it across the road your enemy walks. The victim need not even notice the dirt. He thins, he spits blood, he goes fast. Cattle are not exempt, and a farmer whose animal has been sent for cannot sell it, only kill it.

Against all that, his weaknesses are almost domestic. He is vain, touchy, grasping and easily flattered, and three dances will generally do it. He is also, increasingly, useful. Where Métraux found the Gede marginal and avoided, they now hold the balance in ceremony: where two flags are paraded for opposed spirits, a Gede flag makes the third and mediates between the cool and the hot. Phyllis Galembo, photographing Haitian shrines and their servitors, records them as keepers of the ancestors’ knowledge and guardians of children. They preside over Rara, the Lenten street festival. They give good advice when anyone thinks to ask. Between 1957 and 1971 François Duvalier, president-for-life, styled his public persona on an impersonation of the Baron, which tells you how far into Haitian public life the figure had reached.

One of the songs Marcelin recorded has Baron Samedi, Baron Cimetière and Baron La Croix each announcing in turn that they are more powerful than Bon Dieu. It sounds like blasphemy and it is really arithmetic. Bondye is too far off to petition and does not take requests. The Baron is at the end of a short walk, under a cross, on two steps of masonry, and he answers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baron Samedi?

Baron Samedi is the Haitian Vodou lwa who owns the cemeteries and heads the Gede, the family of spirits associated with the dead. His name is French for “Baron Saturday”. He is usually pictured as an undertaker in a long black tailcoat, a tall silk hat and dark glasses, and his emblem is a black cross set on a tomb.

What powers does Baron Samedi have?

Baron Samedi controls who dies. Even the most capable sorcerer cannot kill a target until Baron has traced the outline of the grave, so every act of lethal magic in Haiti depends on his consent. He also grants or refuses permission to open graves, and he is petitioned in the expédition, the sending of the dead against an enemy.

Is Baron Samedi an African god?

No. Maya Deren, writing in 1953 after four years of work in Haiti, could find no trace of Baron Samedi anywhere in Africa, and only doubtful traces of the Gede. His imagery is Catholic and Masonic, drawn from the crosses, coffins, compasses and all-seeing eyes that arrived with French colonists, and he appears to be a Haitian creation built largely from European material.

Who is Baron Samedi’s wife?

Baron Samedi’s wife is Grande Brigitte, also called Manman Brigitte or Mlle Brigitte. She holds her own authority over cemeteries, especially any burial ground where a woman was the first person interred there. Roughly thirty Gede spirits are counted as their children.

Why are the Gede so rude?

The Gede joke, swear and dance obscenely because it works. Alfred Métraux observed that their cynicism and filthy humour blunt the fear that spirits of death would otherwise bring into a ceremony, which is why their late arrival is greeted with pleasure rather than dread. Their favourite dance, the banda, is deliberately lewd.