Working from fieldwork among cultivators near Plaisance in the north, Simpson sets down what believers there actually hold, warning at the outset against tidying it into a theology. With no scripture and no hierarchy, practice varies between regions and even between neighboring temples, and the inconsistencies are part of the material rather than a defect in it.

He sketches an emergence between roughly 1750 and 1790. Baptism was required of the enslaved and meant little to them; assemblies were forbidden and happened anyway at night; and by the time of the rising, leaders had found the rites useful for binding together groups drawn from different parts of Africa.

The center of the article is the loa. Some are African deities carried across and inherited down the generations; others, Simpson and his predecessors agree, are ancestors raised to that rank locally. Nobody knows the whole roster, and each person recognizes spirits particular to his own household.