Rey combines archival history with fieldwork at two northern shrines, Saint James the Greater as Ogou Feray at Plaine-du-Nord and Saint Philomena as Lasyrenn at Bord-de-Mer-de-Limonade, to ask where Haiti's pilgrimage tradition comes from.

Pilgrimage, he notes, is the communal rite with the widest following in the paired cults of Catholic saints and Vodou lwa, and the major feasts cluster in a single summer season. Tracing ritual forms, processions and devotional idioms back through the colonial period, he argues that they draw heavily on Kongolese religious culture, both its older strand and the Catholicism Kongo had already absorbed before the Atlantic crossing.

That claim cuts against a scholarly habit of reading Vodou primarily through West African sources. On Rey's evidence, Central Africa shaped the pilgrimage complex more decisively than the literature on the religion has allowed, and syncretism in Haiti has a longer prehistory than the plantation.