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Jean-Daniel Lafontant
For 25 years, Jean-Daniel Lafontant was a professional marketing executive. Additionally, he spent a few years working for the Haitian Government, including two as a diplomat. Lafontant is a Vodou initiate and healer, who’s area of expertise includes Haitian art and culture. In 1997, he founded the sacred Vodou temple Na-Ri-VéH 777. He has worked as a producer for various media and has appeared in a handful of films. Among them, an episode of “Believers” for CNN; and the British documentaries “Caribbean with Simon Reeves” for BBC and “Hidden Caribbean with Joanna Lumley” for TV4. As a Houngan, cultural entrepreneur, and art specialist, Lafontant spends his time in various places and consults museums, universities, and cultural institutions worldwide.Lafontant’s conversation with Moira Ivana Millán, The Earth's Remembrance, was most recently published in Duke University journal of critical thinking.
Their Presentation
This presentation explores the Vodou understanding of the human being as a sacred and composite reality. In this worldview—rooted in and enriched by our ancestral spiritual philosophies and cosmology—the person is not a single, indivisible entity, but a constellation of interrelated elements.
Vodou teaches that the individual is formed by multiple spiritual and material components that together shape the body, soul, intelligence, character, destiny, ancestry, and divine essence. Each element plays a distinct role in defining who we are, how we think, how we inherit, and how we fulfill our life path.
Grounded in African and Arawak esoteric traditions, this conception understands the human being as inseparable from community, environment, and lineage. The self is not isolated but relational—anchored in ancestors, aligned with spiritual forces, and embedded within the living world.