Vodun (West African)

The English word voodoo, and most of what it carries, has nothing to do with this. Vodun is a Fon word meaning a deity or a spiritual power, and it names the religion of the Gbe-speaking peoples of southern Benin, Togo and southwestern Nigeria. The atlas holds it separately from Haitian Vodou because they are not the same thing: Haitian Vodou is a Caribbean religion formed from several African traditions under slavery and in contact with Catholicism, and West African vodun is the older tradition on its own ground, with unbroken lineages, its own priesthoods and no Catholic layer.

A vodun is a person with a domain, a temperament and a set of obligations owed to it. Mawu-Lisa stands at the head, a paired creator, Mawu associated with the moon, coolness and night and Lisa with the sun, heat and day, sometimes described as twins and sometimes as two aspects of one being. Behind the pair, in the Fon account, stands Nana Buluku, from whom they came. Legba holds the threshold and the crossroads and must be greeted first, because nothing reaches the others except through him. Sakpata governs the earth and the diseases that come out of it. Xevioso governs thunder and the justice that arrives suddenly. Dan, the serpent, is movement, wealth and continuity, and in the creation account he coils around the world to hold it together.

The system is not a fixed pantheon so much as a set of houses. Deities are inherited in lineages, acquired, imported and given to individuals, and a household serves the vodun it has obligations to rather than the whole list.

Entry into the priesthood of a vodun runs through a period of seclusion. Initiates enter a convent community under senior priests, are taught the songs, salutations and obligations of the deity they will serve, and emerge with a new name and a changed standing. The duration, the content and the ordeal vary by deity and by house, and none of it is public. The atlas records that this is how the tradition transmits itself, and does not set out what is taught, because the material is closed and printing it would not make it open, only stolen.

Fa is the divination system that regulates the rest. A diviner casts and reads one of a fixed set of signs, each attached to a body of memorised verses, and the sign indicates what is owed, to whom, and what must be done. It is the mechanism by which a person learns which vodun has a claim on them, and it is closely related to the Yoruba system of Ifa across the border.

Public life is a different matter and is genuinely public. Festivals bring masks, drumming and processions into the open, the ceremonies at Ouidah draw visitors from the diaspora, and Benin marks a national vodun holiday each January in which the state itself takes part. Anyone may attend.

That distinction, an open festival and a closed initiation, is not a compromise or a concession to outsiders. It is how the tradition has always been arranged, and it is the shape a reader should carry away: vodun is visible, and vodun is not therefore available.