Fon

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.

The Fon kingdom of Dahomey rose inland at Abomey in the seventeenth century and grew into one of West Africa's most formidable states, famous for its royal ancestor cult, its Annual Customs at which the kings honored their predecessors, and its corps of women soldiers Europeans called amazons. Dahomey conquered the coast in the 1720s and took over Ouidah, the port whose slave trade Robin Law has chronicled: through its beach passed hundreds of thousands of captives, many of them Fon, Ewe and Yoruba speakers, bound for the Caribbean and Brazil.

They carried their gods. In Haiti the vodun became the lwa of Haitian Vodou, its largest rite still called Rada after the Dahomean port of Allada; Legba still opens the gates, and Damballah the serpent still arches over creation, as Leslie Desmangles' study of Vodou's marriage with Catholicism shows. Related traditions took root in Cuba and Brazil, and Fon religious vocabulary survives across the Atlantic world.

France conquered Dahomey in 1894, and the colonial and later Marxist governments of Benin suppressed or disdained Vodun for most of a century. The republic reversed course in the 1990s: Vodun was recognized, and January tenth is now a national Vodun holiday centered on Ouidah, where festival crowds gather at the Gate of No Return to honor the spirits and the ancestors the trade carried away. Most Beninese today are Christian or Muslim, and many keep Vodun obligations alongside.