Baron La Croix

Death, elegance, philosophy

Baron La Croix is one of the three Barons of Haitian Vodou, alongside Baron Samdi and Baron Cimetière. The three share authority over death and differ in manner: where Samdi is boisterous and Cimetière a guardian, La Croix is the most elegant and the most detached. He is represented in a black suit, top hat and glasses, with a displayed distinction, and he is credited with a philosophical relationship to death. He is neither frightened nor saddened by it: he considers it. This detachment makes him the lwa invoked to accept the inevitable rather than to push it back. Like all the Gede, he practises mockery and obscenity, but with a drier irony than his brothers. His cross marks both the grave and the crossroads, and that is no accident: in Vodou thought, dying is a passage, and every passage is a crossing. He is served at the cemetery, mainly in November.