Hi y’all!
Today we’re going to talk about Manbo Ayizan, the primordial Vodou priestess and the spirit of the Womb and the Marketplace.
The first thing I will tell you is that unless you are initiated in Vodou, you really don’t have to worry about Ayizan. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Legba, who is open to everyone, she deals with initiates only. I bring her up here mostly to emphasize the importance of initiation in Vodou.
Ayizan is the first Manbo and the guardian the djevo or initiation chamber, and of ritual purity. Unlike the Marasa, who are young because they are old, Ayizan is old because she is old. As with calling the Marasa “the kids,” Ayizan is called “the old lady” in my house. Sometimes, she’s even equated with Nana Buluku, the West African androgynous crone spirit who gave birth to the divine twins.
Ayizan is treated with extreme respect. She’s addressed politely as Manbo Ayizan, and is sometimes called Grann Ayizan, or Grandmother Ayizan.
In my house she is saluted after the Marasa, along with Danballah Wedo, the ancient, generative serpent Lwa, and Papa Loko comes after. You see variations in the order of Marassa, Ayizan, Loko, and Danballah in different houses.
Vodou is an initiatory tradition. In order to enter into it, you join a sosyete, or society, which is like a family. That sosyete is the living end of a lineage down which the tradition has been passed. In that family, you will have a godparent, who acts as your spiritual parent, your main elder, who passes the tradition down to you. Typically, your commitment to that sosyete in particular and to your godparent is made through a lave tèt, which means head washing. This is still pre-Ayizan.
Not every sevitè, person who serves the Vodou Lwa, or every member of a sosyete, is called to move further into the ranks of initiation. In asson lineages, there are three: hounsi kanzo, manbo or houngan sou pwen, and manbo or houngan asogwe, the highest level within asson lineages (we’ll talk about what that means later.)
A Manbo is a priestess and an Houngan is a priest in Vodou. The genders have different names but not different roles. The priesthood’s job is to preserve the tradition, initiate, lead and perform ceremonies, call down the Lwa, lead and serve the community, to heal. An hounsi kanzo is a ritual assistant who may or may not pursue further initiation into the priesthood.
Anyone entering these ranks will pass through initiation and will pass through a chamber called the djevo. That’s where you meet Ayizan. The djevo is the womb of Ayizan. The details of what happens in the djevo is a great secret, so we obviously won’t be talking about that here.
Ayizan is also the name for the protective palm fringe that hangs over the door of the djevo in order to keep it pure. We’ll come back to Ayizan’s association with palm leaves later.
Initiates spend about a week in the djevo. The process is called kouche, or to lie down. It’s both a retreat to the womb and a death to self. In the djevo, no matter how old you are, you put aside all your learning, all your adult self-importance, and you surrender to the elder that is initiating you. You become a fetus. You might think you’re smart, cultured, well educated, whatever. You might think you already know something. In the djevo you surrender to your mother. She might not be educated, she might be poor, illiterate. Ayizan doesn’t read. But she has konesans, a deep spiritual understanding, and she is the one who is going to pass the tradition on to you, so you do what she says.
Time in the djevo, incidentally, is also a reliving of the experience of the trans Atlantic slave trade, and the time Africans spent chained together in the hold of the ship, not knowing what awaited them afterwards. So when you hear that Vodou is a closed tradition only for people of African or Haitian ancestry, this is not quite right. I can’t speak for what all godparents do, maybe there are some who will only accept people with this ancestry into their houses, but I know my lineage does not ask.
When you enter the djevo, however, you relive that experience.
When the initiates emerge from the djevo, they wear the ayizan- the shedded protective palm leaves, now dried- over their faces as a veil during a ceremony called leve kanzo.
After an initiate emerges from the djevo, there is a period where they must maintain strict ritual purity. No sex, no drinking, no smoking, no cursing. The initiate wears white during this period. They avoid certain foods, they use certain utensils, they sleep on a mat. Again, it’s a spiritual infancy after you’re born out of the djevo, and just like you have to be really careful with a newborn baby, you’re really careful with yourself during this period. In my house this is a 40 day period, corresponding to Jesus’s time in the desert. During this period, you keep Ayizan with you at all times. She is watching over your purity, she’s like your mother making sure you are pure, clean, and protected.
And then, as an initiate, you keep Ayizan with you till you die.
Ayizan is also the market. This might seem like a jarring contrast with her being the initiatory womb and the keeper of purity, because the market is a loud, open, permeable place where you find everything. Buying, selling, bartering, stealing. And everybody is there, not just initiates. It’s the opposite of the djevo! But there are both allegorical and historical reasons for her connection with the market.
When I asked my godmother why Manbo Ayizan was connected with the market, she said, “Because without her you don’t have nothing! Everything comes from her. Everything good!” If you want something, you have to go to the market and you have to pay, beg, barter, or steal for it.
Additionally, as the feminine divine parent, Ayizan’s domain is the surface of the water, the horizontal axis, the intersection of the physical and spiritual worlds, of which the market is a prime example. In Yoruba, the earthly plane is referred to as “The Market.” At the market, things go from being in your imagination to being in your physical possession. So in a certain sense, they’re moving from the spiritual or invisible world into the visible world.
Ayizan is both running through all the commerce that takes place in the marketplace and is exiled within it. People forget her, but she exists in every hollow, every empty space, even the space between atoms, or the silence between sounds. She’s the Sophia, the pervasive spiritual wisdom.
To look at the historical side of her connection to the marketplace, we can look at Ayizan’s name. We see it begins with the same root as Ayiti, the name of the island; Ayibobo, the celebratory declaration in Vodou which is usually translated to Amen, and Ayida Wedo, the ancient serpent lwa Danballah’s rainbow consort.
Ayi is a root word that means land or earth in both Taino, the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Ayiti (who gave it its name) and Fonbe, a West African language. This is another one of those etymological crossroads or synchronicities we find in Vodou.
Ayi can also mean mountain or mountainous, as a mountain is a mound of earth. Metaphorically, it can mean the body, as distinct from the soul. According to some sources, the declaration Ayibobo means Body and Soul.
In Dahomey, in West Africa, Ayizan is the name given to spirits older than the mythical founders of the tribe; the most ancient, forgotten ancestors. The Ayizan watch over the markets in the form of a symbolic mound of soil in the marketplace that is sprinkled with palm oil and overlaid with palm branches. So Ayizan in Haiti has her origin in this practice.
Next, let’s talk about some syncretisms we see with Ayizan, some ways that she has been mapped to both traditional Catholic iconography and the Catholic liturgical calendar.
In some houses, including my own, no image is used for Ayizan at all, almost as if to emphasize that she is on a different plane. She is the djevo itself, the interior initiation experience itself, and so she can’t have an image. This brings to mind the Islamic prohibition against representing Allah in human form.
In other houses, you’ll find Ayizan represented by images of Saint Clare, Saint Francis of Assisi’s partner in Agape who founded the order of the Poor Clares, specifically in the image where she is holding the palm, and not the glowing monstrance. The legend goes that when the Bishop handed Clare a palm branch, a callback to Palm Sunday (the day Christ rode into Jerusalem and his final persecution began), she renounced worldly things. So the connection to both the palm and to initiation is there.
Sometimes you’ll see her associated with Saint Ann, who is generally shown instructing the Virgin Mary, for fairly obvious reasons; she is and older femaile figure imparting the tradition and teaching the most pure. She was able to give birth to a being without sin, capable of virgin birth. So the connections with age, the womb, purity, and instruction are all there.
And sometimes you’ll see her represented by the image of Saint John the Baptist baptizing Christ, again with the obvious connection to initiation and purification. Ayizan’s gender, though generally thought of as female, is not quite fixed across the breadth of the tradition. In some regions, she’s male. This tracks with the Nana Buluku connection.
In terms of the liturgical calendar, Ayizan is most associated with Palm Sunday.
Traditionally, Palm Sunday is the beginning of the initiation cycle in Vodou. It comes right after Lent- it’s technically still Lent- during which 40 days some houses stop activity altogether for fasting, purification, and introspection. The temple or hounfor, again traditionally, opens back up on Easter, when a cycle of celebrations begin. Easter is a week after Palm Sunday and it signifies Jesus’s resurrection, his emergence from the tomb. So it makes sense that Easter would be the day that the year’s first initiates emerge from the djevo, reborn, resurrected.
So because it’s a week earlier, Palm Sunday would be the day the initiates would enter into the djevo. But also, the association with palms also brings that day into association with Ayizan.
Let’s talk a little bit about Ayizan’s relationships!
Relationships and marriages among the Lwa in Vodou are a pretty slippery subject once you try to get a handle on them across sosyete. Sometimes a spirit that’s the child of another spirit in one lineage will be their lover in another. Sometimes one lineage will insist two spirits are married and another will deny that altogether. Add to that the fact that marriages among the Lwa are by no means exclusive and you have a situation rivaling the most convoluted polycule.
Although androgynous or male by some accounts, Ativan is considered the female counterpart to Papa Loko, the first Houngan. You’ll find all over most of the internet that Manbo Ayizan and Papa Loko are a married couple. This is because they are seen as the spiritual parents of all of humanity. But a counterpart is not the same thing as a spouse, and automatically assuming the two .
By some sources and in some houses, Ayizan is seen as married to Papa Legba, as they both sit at the intersection of the spirit and human realms.
In my house, Ayizan walks hand in hand with her husband, Papa Danballah. We’ll talk about Danballah in a future class, but right now I’ll say he is very, very ancient, and is associated with the force that, in union with his consort Ayida Wedo, generates life. Da or Dan means life. So in a way, this association makes sense because Ayizan is considered a womb or a seed. But these marriages are better pondered than explained. This is where we get back into these beings as Mistè, or Mysteries. In the end, we can’t know everything.
