Vodun means spirit or deity in the Fon language, and Fon religion is the organized service of the vodun: powers that govern the world's domains and take up residence in initiated devotees. At the head of many accounts stands Mawu-Lisa, a twinned creator uniting moon and sun, female and male; the rainbow serpent Aido-Hwedo carried the creator through the making of the world and now holds it coiled beneath. Legba, the youngest and cleverest, keeps the gates between the worlds and must be greeted first in any rite; Sakpata rules the earth and smallpox; Xevioso wields thunder from the sky; Dan, the serpent, moves in continuity and fortune. Melville Herskovits' classic Dahomey ethnography recorded this pantheon and its cult houses in detail in the 1930s.
Service is a discipline. Each vodun has its own priesthoods, drum rhythms, dances, foods and prohibitions, and new initiates enter convent communities for seclusion and training, emerging bound to their deity for life. Possession trance is central and honored: the deity mounts the devotee, dances, speaks and blesses. Divination by Fa, the Fon form of the Yoruba Ifa system, tells households and kingdoms alike which vodun requires what.
Dana Rush's study of coastal Benin shows Vodun as deliberately unfinished and absorptive, taking new images, saints and even commercial imagery into its shrines without losing its own logic, a quality that helped it survive the Atlantic passage and colonial suppression alike.