Serving the spirits shapes daily conduct in Haiti, and Claudine Michel sets out the ethics that follow from it. Vodou has no sacred book, no clergy in the Western sense and no afterlife in which accounts get settled, so its moral standard is the health of the collectivity: balance, respect for elders, beneficence, forbearance, forgiveness and justice. Wrongdoing by one person disturbs the wider web of relations, which makes virtue a constant work of repair. Michel builds the case from Karen McCarthy Brown's work with the Brooklyn priestess Mama Lola, from Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Harold Courlander, and from Peter Paris on African virtue. She then turns to transmission. In a country where most people cannot read, values travel by oral performance: proverbs, tales, songs, drumming and dance, which carry meaning only when enacted. The religion appears here as a practical technology of survival, assembled from African inheritance and Creole conditions, and still changing as its devotees need it to.