Fieldwork near Plaisance in northern Haiti, drawing on peasant informants and a houngan named Boisier, underpins Simpson's account of what practitioners of Vodun actually hold to be true. He opens historically, linking the consolidation of the cult around 1790 to the nocturnal assemblies through which insurgent leaders such as Makandal and Boukman drew scattered African groups together, and he cautions against imposing theological consistency on a religion with no scripture and no hierarchy. Most of the article maps the lwa, their correspondences with Catholic saints, and the obligations families owe to spirits and to the dead. Simpson then reads the whole complex for its social effects: it directs suspicion and aggression toward neighbours instead of the elite, supplies entertainment and sociability, and explains illness and crop failure, all of which help hold rural arrangements in place. A closing section tracks how Haitian presidents and the American occupation alternately suppressed and tolerated it.