This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Fon Deities gathers nine vodun from a single cosmology, in which one creator and a line of children between them cover the natural world, the household and the crossings between them.
Nana Buluku is the primordial creator from whom Mawu-Lisa, the paired creator at the head of the Fon pantheon, themselves descend. Mawu governs the moon, coolness, night and the west, Lisa the sun, heat, day and the east, described in some accounts as twins and in others as two faces of one deity. Their children divide the created world between them. Dan, the rainbow serpent, is said to have carried Mawu-Lisa across the still forming world, its winding path shaping the mountains, valleys and rivers as it moved, and now coils beneath the world to hold it steady. Sakpata, the eldest child, is the vodun of the earth and of the diseases that come from it, above all smallpox, so dangerous that his own name is often avoided in speech. Sogbo and Xevioso both govern thunder, lightning and the storm's justice, a house struck by lightning understood as judged rather than accidental, with the thunder priesthood, not the family, handling what follows.
Gu holds iron, ironworking and the tools smiths forge from it, patron of blacksmiths, hunters and warriors, with a diaspora counterpart, Ogou, carried into Haitian Vodou, Santeria and Candomble. Loko holds trees, above all the silk cotton and iroko, and the healing power in their bark and roots, closely associated with the initiation of Vodun priests, an association this atlas names without describing the initiation itself, which is closed to outsiders. Legba, the youngest child, holds the threshold and the crossroads and is greeted first in any service, because nothing reaches the others except through him.