Freemasonry in the Haitian Imaginary is a remarkable collaboration between scholar Katherine Smith and photographer Leah Gordon, offering a rare entry into one of Haiti’s most complex symbolic universes. Combining rigorous historical research with striking visual documentation, the volume traces how Freemasonry became deeply embedded in Haiti’s revolutionary origins, political imagination, and spiritual life.
Rather than appearing as a mere European import, Freemasonry emerges here as a dynamic and adaptive tradition—at once a universal brotherhood and a system of symbols reinterpreted and transformed within the Haitian context.
Smith’s introduction follows the movement of Enlightenment ideas through the Caribbean, revealing how they were reshaped by free people of color, political actors, and ritual practitioners. Masonic imagery—columns, compasses, the all-seeing eye—appears not only as inherited iconography, but as a language of aspiration, belonging, and spiritual force.
Gordon’s photographs deepen this inquiry. Her lens captures a living symbolic ecology: temple thresholds, embroidered aprons, carved emblems, and vernacular architecture in which Masonic forms persist—sometimes recognisable, often radically reimagined.
Further contributions by Henrik Bogdan and Gaétan Mentor—who introduces the compelling notion of the “Black Janus”—alongside intimate conversations with the artist and Freemason Ernst Dominique, extend the work into the domains of Vodou, political struggle, visionary experience, and the creation of sacred objects.
Presented in an elegant large-format edition (24 × 30 cm), the book stands as both a significant scholarly contribution and a carefully crafted aesthetic object—essential for readers seeking to understand Haiti beyond conventional narratives, through the symbols that continue to shape its historical and spiritual life.
 
320 pages
240 × 300 mm format
Printed on 150gsm wood-free silk paper
Over 155 full-page colour and black-and-white images
Peyer Surbalin endpapers, headbands, ribbon marker
Fine Hardcover Edition
Bound in Peyer Comtesse fine cloth (Germany)
Embossed and printed cover with rounded spine lettering
Limited to 735 copies