Saturday, February 11, 2012

Vodoun Culture

Vodoun Culture has its own lingo. In fact, a lot of seemingly incomprehensible words that are part of vodoun culture come fom the sacred, the religious. It is the language of the ancients, what we call langay or langaj. These are the objects or actions that our ancestors found no other word to describe.
Some of these words can be recognized today by people from West Africa, but we must bear in mind that the meanings have shifted over the centuries and that - foremost in our minds - vodoun is a seventeenth century medley of the cultures of different african nations mixed with that of the surviving american aborigenes. All they had in common was that they had lost their freedom and that their ancestors and gods could not be honored in the open. The common ritual language they elaborated is a "creole" of the original ritual languages. It is Vodoun very own. It is LANGAJ!

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