Sakpata holds the earth, and in Fon reckoning the earth is not only the ground that is farmed. It is also what the dead go into, and what sickness rises from. His department therefore joins two things a European reader tends to keep apart: fertility and contagion. He gives the harvest and he gives the pox, and both are the same jurisdiction exercised.
Smallpox is the disease most closely associated with him, and the association was not metaphorical for the communities that lived with it. A person marked by the pox was marked by Sakpata; a person who survived it was his, and often entered his service; a person who died of it was buried by his priests under their own rules rather than by the family under theirs. The priesthood of Sakpata handled the sick and the dead of the epidemic, which gave it a position no other cult held, and made it powerful enough that the kings of Dahomey watched it closely and at times moved against it.
Because of what he does, his name carries weight. It is frequently avoided in ordinary speech, and he is spoken of by circumlocutions and titles instead, in the way that dangerous things are named indirectly in many languages. The avoidance is itself a form of respect, and using the name casually is not neutral.
His emblem is the earth itself, and his shrines carry pottery, cowries and objects of the ground. He is served in the open, at the edge of settlement, rather than in the middle of a compound.