Bondye made the world and does not administer it. That is the premise on which everything else rests. The supreme being is not petitioned directly and receives no cult in the ordinary sense, and the beings who are served, the lwa, stand between the human world and a creator who has withdrawn from it. The verb matters: practitioners speak of serving the lwa rather than worshipping them, and the relationship is reciprocal and contractual.
The lwa are grouped in nations, the Rada associated with Dahomean origins and a cooler temperament, the Petwo hotter and associated with the Kongo and with the conditions of slavery in the colony, the Ghede occupied with death and with a comic obscenity that is entirely serious. A family or a temple serves particular lwa, some inherited through lineage.
The pantheon is not a genealogy and has no generations succeeding one another. It grew instead by absorption, holding together West African, Kongo and Catholic elements under conditions where open practice was punished, and the identification of lwa with Catholic saints belongs to that history rather than to confusion about who is who.
The dead can be raised into it. After a period an ancestor may be drawn up and served as a lwa, so the roster is open at the human end and continues to change.
Vodou is a living religion with living custodians. Its initiation is closed, and this atlas names it as closed rather than describing it.