One of the more distinctive features of Dan in the ethnographic record is that the deity is consistently described as embodying both male and female principles simultaneously rather than being assigned a single fixed gender the way many other deities in the same pantheon are. Some accounts describe Dan as a single serpent that is at once male and female; others describe a linked or paired serpent, one aspect male and one female, understood nonetheless as a single deity rather than as a couple. Herskovits records this dual-gendered understanding as a settled feature of Fon belief about Dan rather than as an ambiguity later observers introduced, and it fits naturally with Dan's association with the rainbow and with fluid, changeable movement more generally, qualities that resist being pinned to one fixed category.
Vodun as practised in Haiti, carried there by enslaved people taken from the Bight of Benin during the transatlantic slave trade, preserves a related figure under the name Ayida-Weddo, usually paired in Haitian tradition with the loa Danbala, a serpent lwa with whom Ayida-Weddo is closely associated as a companion figure, a pairing that reads in Haiti more like two related beings than a single dual-natured one. The atlas records Dan as it is described in Fon Vodun in West Africa specifically, and treats the Haitian development as a related but distinct elaboration of the same serpent complex, carried across the Atlantic and reshaped by a different history rather than transmitted unchanged.
Dan and the practices that honour it are part of a living tradition maintained today among Fon communities in Benin and neighbouring parts of West Africa, described here rather than instructed or reconstructed.