On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.

As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.

But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.

Ezili Freda is the loa associated with beauty, romance, and luxury. In the poverty of Haiti these things are closely connected: says Mama Lola, “Poor people don’t have no true love. They just have affiliation.” So Ezili Freda is portrayed as light-skinned, as the Haitian élite typically are. Since slaves were required to be officially Catholic and could only practise their ancestral traditions in secret, the image of Maria Dolorosa del Monte Calvario – an image originally intended to be the Virgin Mary, but with a sword through her heart and surrounded by jewels and heart shapes – in Haiti became the iconic portrayal of Ezili Freda.

I don’t get the impression that Ezili Freda is one of Brown’s favourite loa – Brown gives Freda only six pages, compared to 24 for her angrier sister Ezili Dantor – but I found myself turning to those six pages over and over. For Ezili Freda is drawn to the same things I am drawn to in my own gender fluidity: the aesthetic trappings of traditional femininity, pink, frills, perfume. I suspect she calls to me additionally because – unlike so many divine female figures – she’s not a mother goddess. Most traditions associate femininity with motherhood. But for me I’ve never felt a calling to be a mother, or for that matter a father. Ezili Freda represents a femininity I recognize in myself. That she is considered a protector of gay men – the namesake of the New Orleans rapper Big Freedia, who loves his feminine side – also makes me feel that she connects to my own gender fluidity.

Ezili Freda also has a psychological problem that I tend to have: seeing the world as never good enough. She’s not snark over smarm exactly – she’s not an academic or journalist – but like academics and journalists, certainly like myself, she acutely sees what’s wrong with the world. Whatever else Ezili Freda is, she is beautiful – and she wants the world to be beautiful, perfectly beautiful in a way that it can never be. She requires that offerings to her to be perfect. She leaves every session of spirit possession in tears, because something was not good enough for her. In the words of Vodou initiate and blogger Dykedon (who also calls himself Houngan James), “she mourns for the loss of an unspoiled perfection that perhaps never truly existed. The realistic ugliness of the world wounds her.” None of this is a good trait, in her or in me; it’s not something to cultivate. But it is relatable. And that does seem to be part of the point: whatever else the loa may be, they are not moral exemplars. Vodou practitioners are not encouraged to emulate them, only to have a relationship with them.

All of which is a characteristic found in many gods across cultures, from Zeus to Krishna. (A New Orleans guide did stress to us that the loa are “not gods, they’re spirits” – but the boundaries between those two categories can be quite porous. One of the things a Vodou theological inquiry could do would be to spell out more clearly how that distinction works.) One of the many things I like about traditional Buddhism is that it admits this role for the gods: you’re not supposed to revere them (let alone emulate them), they’re just there. Many traditions take a god who begins amoral – like the YHWH who punishes the pharaoh’s whole people for an act that God made the pharaoh do – and try to turn him into a moral exemplar. In the history of Buddhism, rather than such gods becoming turned into moral exemplars, the moral exemplars – the buddhas and bodhisattvas – start becoming gods. But Vodou takes a different approach that I also like: the loa neither started as nor became moral exemplars, they just are. Which seems truer to the universe as it is – the imperfect universe that Ezili Freda weeps for.

By Haitian standards, Ezili Freda has everything, and it’s still never good enough. That’s a bracing reminder for me, since by those same Haitian standards I’m in a position something like hers – to a Haitian I am light-skinned, and my upper-middle-class American lifestyle is a wealth unimaginable to most Haitians. And my Buddhist awakening in Thailand in many ways showed me how I can be too much like her, so readily upset by everything that’s lacking, despite (or because of?) my relative privilege. Ezili Freda is relatable because she is both the feminine beauty I want to be, and the miserable spoiled young self I’ve spent so many decades trying to get away from – perhaps what Jung might call a shadow.

One of the things that I find exciting about Ezili Freda is that she calls to me from a non-intellectual, non-theological world – and that’s pretty unusual for me. I tend to live very much in my head: a group of my friends recently had an activity that involved bringing something cherished from one’s childhood; where everyone else brought a stuffed animal, I brought a book. The earthy, non-intellectual world of Vodou is very, very far from mine – but Ezili Freda calls to me across its boundaries. If it weren’t for her, I would likely have personally found Vodou unappealing – but it’s a different story with her there.