All Africans had to be baptized into the Catholic Church according to the colonial slave code. Forced into conversion, Africans found many correspondences between their ancestral religions and the rites and images of Catholicism. So Catholic images, especially of the saints, were freely appropriated to honor African deities. The merging of symbols grew more intense after the French fled Haiti in 1804, abandoning their churches to the religious imagination of their former slaves. The influence of Catholic art and ritual on Vodou remains dramatically visible today. Both share the same ritual calendar. Vodou ceremonies start with Catholic prayers. The lwa are known as often by the names of Catholic saints as they are by their African names. Little in Catholic practice is alien from service to the lwa.
