Among government documents from the 1760s of the flourishing French colony of Saint-Domingue, we find alarming reports talking about plantation slaves freely “mixing Catholicism with their pagan beliefs.” Moreover, it appears that it was “not uncommon to find them acting as missionaries and priests, issuing a doctrine that was replacing Catholic teachings.” Even the sacraments were said to be abused. Such alarming observations had been made earlier by Labat in the beginning of the eighteenth century and are found in most later accounts of slave religion or cultic practices on Saint-Domingue plantations. After the Haitian Revolution, the scanty historical documentation we have, points to a continued process of an appropriation and a reworking of rituals, texts and objects drawn from Roman Catholicism – yet in the relative absence of regular priests and missionaries. Twentieth-century Vodou, as the religion of the black population of Haiti has come to be generally called, exhibits numerous references to Roman Catholicism, which has provoked the most divergent comments in popular media, as well as a whole array of academic studies.