In Haitian Vodou the crossroads is not a place of disposal or of private bargain but the threshold of the lwa Legba, the old man at the gate who carries word between the human world and the spirits. Every rite begins by saluting him, because nothing passes to the other lwa without his leave; a Vodou ceremony that omits him is understood to be going nowhere. The crossroads is also the emblem of the market, the door and the moment of choice, and the same power appears in Cuban Lucumí as Eleguá and in Brazilian traditions as Exu.
Legba is saluted at the beginning of a ceremony and at the door of a house, with offerings, with a song and with the words that open the way; the crossroads and the cemetery gate are his. What is placed there is placed as an offering to a power that is greeted, not as refuse to be carried off, and the difference matters: the same physical place serves two entirely different logics in the two traditions. The details of the salute belong to the priests who perform it, and this entry does not describe them.
Legba is a lwa served inside an initiatory religion, and his salute is performed by priests and by the initiated, not assembled from a book. The corpus records that the crossroads is his and that he must be greeted, and it does not describe the greeting: in Vodou the authority to approach the lwa is conferred by initiation and by the sosyete, and an outsider who sets up at a crossroads has not thereby been given anything.
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