Xevioso governs the sky in its violent aspect: thunder, lightning, the storm and the rain that ends a dry season. The rain makes him a giver, and the lightning makes him a judge, and the two are not separable in his cult. What distinguishes him from a weather deity in the ordinary sense is that a strike is read as a decision. Lightning does not fall at random on the Fon account; it falls on wrongdoing, and specifically on the concealed kind, on theft, on oath-breaking, on the offence that has escaped human notice.
The consequences are institutional. A person or a house struck by lightning is not treated as unlucky. The thunder priesthood takes charge: the body, the site and the property fall under their authority rather than the family's, the ordinary funeral is not held, and a payment is required before the matter is closed. Nineteenth and twentieth century observers recorded this repeatedly, and often recorded the resentment that came with it, because the arrangement gave the cult a claim on wealth that arrived by an act of the sky.
The instrument is the axe. Xevioso's emblem is a double-headed axe, and the stone axe heads turned up in fields, which are in fact neolithic, are understood as thunderstones, the physical objects thrown down in a strike, and are kept in his shrines. The ram is his animal, and the bellow of the ram is the sound of the thunder. Red is his colour.