When John William Polidori sat down in 1819 to write The Vampyre, he might have been a humiliated young doctor seeking revenge against a cruel employer, but the character he created — Lord Ruthven — became something vastly larger.

Haitian Vodou is a deeply layered spiritual system that is not only a living religious tradition, but also a vehicle of cultural memory, communal governance, and political resistance.

Whether it’s a shaman in the jungle, a livestreamed binding spell against a president, or a 17-year-old with a phone and a sense of the sacred, the grammar of revolt is changing—but its roots remain old, and deep, and smoldering.

What was once the exclusive domain of nation-states with billion-dollar defense budgets has become democratized through a volatile combination of civilian innovation, commercial technology, and wartime necessity.

What distinguishes a revolution from a criminal enterprise? Is it ideology? Popular support? Historical timing? Or simply the ability to win and write the laws afterward?