Freely translated from Heike Owusu’s “Vaudou: Rites and symbols”
The Guédés are spirits tied to death and the defuncts. These “demons of death” usually appear at the end of every major Vodou ceremony, even if they weren’t invited. The members of the Guédé family are only invoked when one wishes to contact the dead, the spirits of their ancestors. They don’t have true worshipers, and they live a very solitary existence. They look with avidity and desire the lives of mankind, and they shamelessly mock it when they manifest themselves. They have in them the accumulated knowledge of many generations of defuncts, which makes them very wise and knowledgeable beings – they can act as counsellor if one asks for their help.
Le Baron Samedi, The Baron Samedi is the leader of the family. He appears under three different shapes: baron Cimetière (Baron Cemetery), baron La-Croix (baron The Cross) and baron Samedi (baron Saturday). He is manifested as a black cross on which a black outfit and a top hat are placed, installed near a fake grave and with a cane leaning against it.
Some members of the Guédé family walk around with shovels or pickaxes. Their outfits are adapted to the environment they appear in – but the clothes are either frightening, or ridiculous. They usually dress in mourning outfits, usually a worn-out frock coat or a top-hat who is out of fashion, with sometimes a purple veil. The idea behind their outfit is that they try to imitate either the undertakers, or the people that come to funerals. They absolutely love sunglasses, when they are black – they often steal those sunglasses to people around them, and can wear two or three pairs on their nose.
Other Guédés manage to convince the people they possess to disguise themselves in corpses and walk around publicly dressed like a dead body – they especially do that around Toussaint (All Saint’s Day). People might be scared by their corpse appearance, but soon the Guédés’s jokes and humor make everyone laugh, and so they are often invited to parties.
A characteristic of the spirits of this family are their nasal voice and their scabrous language, which is known to make even a whore blush. They often are tied to phallic symbols, because by wielding them they invoke the idea of the cycle of life : for a vodou adept, death is just a rebirth, a different form of birth leading to another plane of existence, a part of the cycle of life. The Guédés like to take possession of those that, in their every day life, pretend to be modest and moral, and they force them to do the “banda”, an exaggerated and comical mating dance. With all their erotic allusions, the Guédés are actually highlighting the fact that a new life can be created out of death.
Given they are very impertinent and allow themselves a lot of sexual freedom, those possessed by the Guédés are strictly and sternly checked and verified, to make sure that they are truly inhabited by a spirit, and not some simulator wanting to play. One really possessed by a spirit of death will start by holding his breath, before throwing himself on the ground. As soon as he is up, the vodou priests will make him drink a special type of brandy, made out of sugar cane and containing 21 types of spices – this very hot, very burning liquid, is either poured down the possessed one’s throat, or directly thrown into their eyes. Only someone possessed by a Guédé can actually stand this trial without bing harmed or bothered – in fact this extremely spicy drink is the favorite drink of the famly.
The Guédé possessed usually smoke cigarettes of cigars, chain-smoking them while drinking a lot of brandy and rum (when they don’t pour the alcohol into their ears). When you give them food, they eat it very quickly, and then they bury the leftovers in the earth – like that, if another day they are hungry they just dig it up and at it. By doing this, they want to represent with irony the materialism, greed and gluttony of humans. At the end of the ceremony, the Guédés sing the “undertaker song” with a nasal voice, and they end their possession on loud laughs.
The most famous female member of the Guédé family is Madame Brigitte (who is also the mother of most of the Guédés). She has a skinny and bony appearance that is perceived by everyone as repulsive. Another noteworthy member of the family is a baby Loa called Linto. The man possessed by him will act like a baby who just learned how to walk. The possessed usually is treated as a baby by the participants of the ceremony, and he is often given baby food.
To better understand this article, two elements have to be explained:
1) The Loas/Lwas of Vodou, the great spirits who receive offerings and prayers and that interact with priests and sorcerers (who are often mistaken for the "gods of voodoo" but are not exactly gods), are organized into "families". Here the Guédés is a vast category of death Loas that count as a "family". But there are many other families of Loas (sometimes also called "nanchon", a deformation of "nation", the same way "family" is called "fanmi")
2) Possession. The Loas of Vodou, when invoked during rituals and ceremonies, cannot take physical form, because they are pure spirits : they need a human host to manifest themselves. And so the Vodou religion relies on trance-induced possessions where the loa will "ride" a human being (the same way one "rides" a horse, in fact the possessed are often called "mounts" or "horses" - the term is "chwa" or "chuai", which is a deformation of "cheval", the French word for "horse").
