Sky Deities

Sky Deities holds figures whose defining domain is a weather office exercised from the sky, thunder, lightning and the rain that follows, rather than a fixed celestial body or the sky as a whole. Xevioso is the atlas's one entry so far. Herskovits describes him as the child of Mawu-Lisa given command of thunder, lightning and rain, wielding a double headed axe that falls to earth as the visible mark of a strike. What that command meant in practice, the judgment a lightning strike was read as pronouncing, and the thunder priesthood's exclusive authority over the body and the rites that followed, is already recorded on his own page and is not extended here.

The heading is kept apart from Celestial Deities, reserved for a deity who is a fixed light in the sky, the sun or the moon, rather than a weather office exercised from it; Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi hold that different kind of claim. It is kept apart from Earth Deities and Sea Deities only by which of the great domains is named, the three together forming a small set of elemental-domain headings this atlas uses when a deity's office is one of the standing domains of the world rather than a narrower function within it. A second entry belongs here only when another catalogued figure holds command of weather from the sky, rather than the sky itself, as a named office.