Sakpata's Portion: How the Earth Fell to Him Among Mawu-Lisa's Children

Fon cosmology accounts for Sakpata's specific claim on the earth through a division myth distinct from the naming taboo and the priesthood already described: when Mawu-Lisa's children came of age, the realms of the world were parceled out among them, and Herskovits records the eldest, Sakpata, receiving the earth itself, while his brother Sogbo took the sky's thunder and lightning and another brother, Agbe, received the sea and everything living within it. The youngest of the line, Legba, is remembered in the same account as receiving no realm of his own at all, left instead as messenger between the others, an origin story that supplies the reason Fon and Haitian tradition alike hold that Legba must be addressed before any other vodun can be reached: he governs nothing himself and so stands permanently at the threshold of everyone else's domain. Sakpata's own portion, the ground itself and the diseases Fon tradition holds it capable of releasing, made him at once one of the most materially powerful of the vodun and one of the most feared, a combination the division myth presents as a single inheritance rather than two separate facts about him. The same account situates Sogbo and Agbe as siblings governing sky and sea respectively, giving Sakpata's earthly portion its place within a complete threefold division of the visible world among Mawu-Lisa's own children.