Howdy! Let’s talk today about a Lwa you may have heard of, since he’s the one who stands at the gate to anything, including Vodou itself: Papa Legba. So, Papa Legba, open the gate to this blog post!
There’s a lot of lore around Legba, not just in Haitian Vodou, but across the African diaspora, and in popular culture as well. Some of this is relevant, some is half-relevant, and some is absolutely not relevant at all. So, in the interested of emphasizing what IS, I’m going to start with what I can say with (always relative) certainty about who the Haitian Vodou Papa Legba IS and move down through layers of truth/myth/ambiguity into what he (relatively certainly) isn’t.
Legba Nan Bayè-a, Legba At The Gate
Papa Legba, most of all, is the guardian of the Door, or the Gate. This is how he is addressed in most songs.
As is always the case in Vodou, he is the guardian of doors in both worlds: the physical and the spiritual. In fact, he guards the door or gate between the human world and the spirit world. This is why we have to call him first in ceremony. We ask him to open the door, to open the gate.
In the book Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (which is directly connected to my lineage: my godmother is Mama Lola’s daughter), a ceremony is described in which the physical door next to the statue of Saint Lazarus is accidentally left closed. After the group sings the Priye Deyò or Outside Prayers— another name for the Priye Ginen in which a Catholic-based liturgy gradually descends into the world of the African ancestors— they try to proceed through Legba’s door, which was supposed to have been opened and served with offerings before the ceremony, and find it still shut. Legba immediately comes down in possession, very old and feeble, and terribly distraught that he has been forgotten, and must be appeased with a lot of attention, songs, and offerings before the ceremony can proceed.
Papa Legba can be petitioned privately to open the gates or doors of opportunity and/or the doors to the spirit world. It’s said that Legba speaks all languages. It’s fairly common for Legba to appear in dreams to people still outside the tradition, to invite them in. In fact, the dream that got me into Vodou was interpreted as a Legba dream. Again, in that role, he is acting as the gate, the portal to communication.
We place him near the door of our homes, often in the form of a statue of Saint Lazarus (in my house anyway.) We give him gin, a cigar, black coffee. We often put a brown coconut behind the door for him.
The Papa Legba of Haitian Vodou is an old, tattered man with a walking stick, a broad-brimmed hat, and a straw bag. He has a dog with him. Anyone who has a dog already knows that dogs are especially concerned with doors and gates and deciding who or what can go in or out.
That’s the first level of certainty. If you want one thing that Legba is in charge of, it is the gate or door. He opens or closes communication between the worlds. He opens and closes opportunities.
Mèt Gran Chemin, Master of The Great Road
There are a lot of songs about The Great Road in Vodou. Since they usually come first, they could be referring to a manifestation of Papa Legba as the master of not only the gate, but of the road or path, which is, of course, exists in both the physical and spiritual worlds.
So he’s not only the point of entry, but the path that is walked itself.
The idea that he is the great road jives with his tattered old man appearance. He’s walking along the road, on his stick. He’s been walking for a long time. It’s hot, dusty, almost intolerably sunny. The sun beats down on his hunched back. He’s so old, his bones are crumbling inside him. He wobbles and totters. The road is very, very long and he’s been walking it since the dawn of time. Unceasingly.
Is this also Legba?
My godmother once told me that in this tradition, with yes, there is always a little bit of no. With no, there is always a little bit of yes.
The topic of who’s who in the spirit world can be very slippery. The Great Lwa— The Marasa, Papa Legba, Papa Ogou, Danballah, Ezili, etc — are each one, but they are also each seven. Each of these seven will have different qualities, different surnames, different offerings and ways of manifesting, different domains. Additionally, any number encountered in this tradition should be understood not literally (as in “there are exactly seven”) but symbolically. So the number seven, perhaps—and I am indeed guessing— should be taken as, there is a spectrum of each Lwa. There’s a range of meaning and quality. They’re different, but they are the same.
It. Depends.
And those of us raised in the western mindset tend to be pretty uncomfortable with that. But that’s okay, it’s healthy for us, spiritually speaking, to stew in these ambiguities. Might get us out of our heads a little.
So, let’s just for the sake of this being a blog post about Legba, pretend we know Gran Chemin is Legba, or perhaps, a Legba.
In that manifestation, Legba, as eloquently explained by Maya Deren in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, is Solar. That is to say, his path along the Great Road is the path of the Sun. This is echoed by Milo Rigaud in his wonderful and very hard to read book Vèvè.
That book, incidentally, is hard to read partly because all the Lwa keep swimming into each other, exactly in the “yes and no” way I was describing. It attempts to give the tradition structure, but as in a dream, the archetypal symbols and names keep swapping and overlapping. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to enter into this divine confusion.
Legba, like the sun, has been tracing this worn path since the beginning of time. Deren describes him as the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” The answer is man, in his relationship with the sun, and the three-legged Legba we see tottering along leaning on a cane is clearly entering the twilight of his days, at the point just before completely dipping under the horizon. He’s the end of the year, he’s the end of the day, he’s the end of life. In Dahomey, this is not where Legba is standing in the celestial arc. We’ll get back to that.
Papa Legba Ki Pare Soley Pou Lwa Yo- He Who Blocks The Sun for the Lwa
You hear this a lot in songs. My godmother explained that, although Legba is always standing out in the sun, “trying to dry out the sores on his feet,” the other Lwa don’t like to be out in the sun, so they stand in the shade of his hat. This tracks with his role as an intermediary between the physical and spiritual worlds. He’s out here in the sun with us, creating a shade that the Lwa can come into to speak with us, when the light of day would just burn them away.
Legba Nan Kalfou A - Legba At The Crossroads
Legba is really, really famous for standing at the crossroads. The problem, once again, is… does he really stand at the crossroads? Is that Legba? Or is it Mèt Kalfou, literally translated to Master of the Crossroads? Is Mèt Kalfou a version of Legba? The sources, once again, taken all together, are wonderfully ambiguous on this point. Add to that the fact that pop culture has DEFINITELY latched on to the idea of Legba as the Devil at the Crossroads, even while almost every Haitian Vodou song has him at the gate, and it gets pretty confusing.
My godmother described him as standing on the street corner in the hot, bright sun, watching everyone and everything, in control of everyone and everything.
“Like… at the crossroads?” I asked.
“He’s on the corner. Bawon is at the crossroads,” She emphasized.
BAWON??? Really??? I’m tempted to insert a shrugging emoji here, but I’ll speak a thousand words instead.
According to legend, Robert Johnson claimed he paid three dollars to the Devil at a crossroads so that he could have a successful musical career. This “devil” is often identified as Papa Legba. Now, this is a piece of American, not Haitian, folklore, and the distinction is important. Although New Orleans Voodoo and Haitian Vodou have shared roots and definite points of overlap, they are not the same thing. The Legba we find in American folklore is much more of a trickster than this poor old man at the gate.
Then again, we could also observe that although the crossroads was the site of this interaction, it did, more accurately open a door for Mr. Johnson; the door of opportunity for a musical career.
Also, figuratively speaking, every crossroads IS a door of opportunity. Whichever path is taken at the crossroads by definition opens a road forward and closes off the other directions. And if Papa Legba is standing on the corner, watching and controlling all of that, he is essentially opening or blocking the gates to the roads.
It’s not the crossroads are NEVER mentioned with Legba. In songs, at least the ones I can find, it’s sometimes cried to Legba that we are AT the crossroads, i.e. a dangerous place, and need help. But then again, the crossroads are mentioned in conjunction with a lot of Lwa. The general idea seems to be that the crossroads are a place of risk. You need the help of all the Lwa there.
“Crossroads” could also be a metaphor for the place where the poto-mitan, or the central post of a Vodou temple, meets the ground, which most certainly is related to Papa Legba, as it’s sometimes called poto-Legba. The central post, as the vertical, crosses through the barrier between the physical and spiritual world and allows communication between the two. In this regard, Legba does sit at the intersection between the two. The post is sometimes seen as his cane. Or, it’s sometimes sung that he’s carrying the poto-mitan around on his back.
How Old Is Legba?
As mentioned, our Papa Legba in Haitian Vodou is old. He’s been walking the path of the sun for a long, long time. But the Legba of Dahomey is a very ahem virile young man, and the Ellegua (who shares a common origin with Legba) of Santería/Lucumi is often seen as a mischievous child. Add to that that Ellegua is sometimes called Eshu, and in some Brazilian traditions Eshu is called Exu, and in at least one of those traditions there is basically nothing BUT a slew of Exus and their female counterparts, and you will be deep in the weeds if you try to consider these all the same spirit.
I don’t want to hyper-focus on these other traditions right now since I’m less familiar with them and not trying to write this blog all day, but this again both points to the importance of not mixing traditions and the non-fixed nature of spirits and spirit evolution and lineages. That they have a common origin don’t make them the same. You are not your great grandfather, nor are you your second cousin twice removed. Better (in my opinion) to pick a tradition and go deep with an elder to explore these mysteries (while also educating yourself on the breadth of the tradition, if your schedule allows) than to cherry pick pieces of deities that seem related. I mean, unless you just want to play around with the spirit world like that. insert shrugging emoji
He’s Not Evil BTW
I can feel my energy for this blog post starting to hobble like old Papa Legba, so I will wrap it up here by saying that American Horror Story apparently got Papa Legba very, very, atrociously wrong, I haven’t watched it and don’t want to, but I am not surprised to hear this. That’s entertainment, I guess. Sigh. I'm not even gonna include a link. Obviously if you just google Papa Legba THIS is what will come up.
There are, however, some interesting musical and artistic encounters between my favorite New York Art Rockers and Papa Legba, so I’ll add some videos down here to enjoy. Perhaps not the deepest but I feel like David Byrne and Debbie Harry captured something here.
Thanks for reading! Come back next week, y’all.
