Hurbon starts from the Fon word vodun — an invisible, unpredictable force liable to intervene in anyone's affairs — and follows it across the Middle Passage into the forms African belief took throughout the Americas, of which the Haitian one is a single branch.

Much of the book concerns slavery. In the runaway camps of the Bahoruco mountains and elsewhere, where the newly arrived outnumbered those born in the colony, ritual, song, healing and oath-taking bound together people from different nations and different plantations and gave them a shared purpose: the end of the system. Hurbon runs that thread through Makandal's poisonings and the gathering at Bois-Caïman a week before the rising of August 1791.

Later chapters set out the theology plainly — the lwa as intermediaries rather than gods, their route from a lost, mythical Guinea to the centre post of the temple, and the Catholic saints behind whom, under prohibition, they went on being served.