* Based on Dumesle’s account, subsequent writers developed a fuller picture of what became known as the Bois Caïman ceremony, for the woods in which it was held, and recent historians have discovered a series of new archival sources that seem to confirm that a religious ceremony indeed took place in the week before the insurrection. Today, it is broadly considered Haiti’s founding event: the moment when the seed of liberty was planted, leading first to the abolition of slavery and eventually to full independence from France. The Bois Caïman ceremony is also understood by many who practice Vodou as a generative moment for the religion as well.5 However, in part because of this, it has also become the focus of evangelical groups in Haiti, many of whom consider the ceremony itself to have been the moment when a “pact with the devil” was made that has haunted the country ever since. The notion was made famous in the United States by Pat Robertson in the wake of the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, but he was simply repeating a view that is prevalent among many evangelicals, both missionaries working in Haiti and Haitians themselves. Indeed, several attempts have been made to exorcise the site where the ceremony is believed to have taken place, as well as to poison a tree—considered sacred by Vodou practitioners—located there.