Reviewing four works of the 1990s, Dubois asks what it means to write the history of a religion whose formation went deliberately unrecorded. Vodou took shape among people barred from writing, in a colony where secrecy protected the planning of revolt, so its past is built around silences. He welcomes a turn in scholarship away from arguments about African survivals and Catholic syncretism toward the Atlantic conditions that made the religion. Joan Dayan's book gets the fullest treatment: her claim that ritual practice replays Haiti's colonial past, and that the spirits answer the arbitrary power of masters, moves interpretation onto historical ground. Dubois reads the two faces of Ezili and the many forms of Ogou as sediment left by remembered violence. Taken together, he suggests, these books make a religion long cast as the opposite of modernity into a way of seeing how modernity was made.