Mawu-Lisa

Fon accounts of the beginning start further back than the creator. Nana Buluku is the primordial being, and from Nana Buluku came Mawu and Lisa, and it is the pair who made and ordered the world. Nana Buluku then withdrew, and receives little in the way of cult, which is a shape found across West Africa: the deepest source of things is not the deity one deals with.

Mawu and Lisa are set out as a matched pair of opposites. Mawu is the moon, coolness, night, rest, the west and, in most tellings, female. Lisa is the sun, heat, day, work, the east and male. Whether they are two beings or one is not a question the tradition settles in a single way. Some accounts make them twins, born together, whose union produced the other vodun. Others treat Mawu-Lisa as one deity with two aspects, and the hyphen in the name is doing real work rather than joining two separate parties. Both readings are current among practitioners, and the atlas does not flatten them.

The pair are not distant in the sense that they take no interest, but they are distant in the sense that they are not what a household deals with day to day. The world was assigned: Sakpata took the earth, Xevioso the sky and thunder, and others the sea, the hunt, iron, smallpox and the crossroads. Cult goes to those. The creator stands behind the arrangement and is invoked in accounts of how the arrangement came to be, which is why the creation story is where Mawu-Lisa is most often met.

The Fon creation account gives the creator a servant, and the servant is the most vivid thing in it. Aido-Hwedo is the rainbow serpent, who carried Mawu in his mouth while the world was being made, and whose winding movement across the ground is why rivers and hills follow the courses they do. Where the pair rested, mountains stand, made of the serpent's dung.

When the making was finished the world was too heavy. Aido-Hwedo was set beneath it, coiled in a circle with his tail in his mouth, in the sea, to hold it up. Because he cannot bear heat, the ocean was made cold for him. He is fed by red monkeys who forge iron bars for him under the sea, and when the bars run short he shifts from hunger, and the shifting is felt as an earthquake. When the bars run out entirely, he will eat his own tail, and the world will slide into the sea.

This is not decoration. It is a working cosmology with a mechanism, a dependency and an ending, and it puts the continuation of the world on a serpent's appetite. Dan, the serpent, is served in his own right as a vodun of movement, wealth and continuity, and his shrines carry iron and the colours of the rainbow.

The serpent crossed the Atlantic with the rest. In Haiti, Damballa is a serpent lwa of the Rada rite, whose name and whose associations with water, wealth and continuity come from the same source, and whose arrival in a service is recognised by the serpentine movement of the person he mounts.