Written as a praise song in two voices, returning throughout to a refrain about the knowledge infants carry, this essay uses the serpent Danbala and his rainbow consort Ayida as a way into how Vodou answers questions of being, origin and death. The authors write as practitioners as well as academics and decline the habit of treating African diasporic religion as a by-product of Catholicism. They describe a system in which human beings rather than God stand at the centre, sin has no place, and the living, the dead and the unborn form a single unbroken chain. Practice precedes belief, and konesans, the wisdom that accrues through repeated gesture, is earned by doing. Possession is read as a fusion of person, persona and divine principle, occasionally permanent, as with the deified Dessalines. Gender works by complementarity, and the poor fit between Danbala and Saint Patrick is offered as proof of a tradition that adds rather than replaces.