Fon

At the head of the Fon arrangement is a pair understood as one. Mawu and Lisa, associated respectively with the moon, coolness and night, and with the sun, heat and day, are the creator, and the creator is dual. Sovereignty at the source is shared rather than singular, which is unusual, and it is one of the sharpest structural contrasts the atlas records with the single sovereign of the Greek or Norse arrangement.

Having created, they do not administer. The vodun are the powers that act in the world, arranged in families with their own domains, thunder, earth, iron, the sea, smallpox and healing among them, and each with its own priesthood, convents, drums, songs and prohibitions.

Fa, the divination system, is the mechanism by which a person finds out which vodun is concerned with them and what is required. It is not a separate practice bolted onto the religion; it is how the religion is navigated.

The roster grows locally and it grows through the royal past. The tohosu, associated with the royal lineage of Dahomey, occupy a distinct category, and the ancestors of a lineage are attended to as a matter of course.

This is a living religion and the parent tradition of Haitian Vodou. Its convents are entered by an initiation that is closed, and its initiates are held to secrecy. The atlas names that and does not work around it.

The kingdom of Dahomey was documented by Europeans earlier and more heavily than most West African states, because it was a major participant in the Atlantic slave trade and European traders and officials were resident on the coast for two centuries.

That produces an early and detailed record with an obvious problem. The men who wrote it were engaged in the trade or dependent on it, and their accounts of the kingdom's religion sit inside arguments about its character that were, at bottom, arguments about commerce and later about conquest. French colonial rule from the 1890s added an administrative archive with its own aims.

Twentieth-century ethnography, from the 1930s onward, produced the first sustained attempt to describe the religion as a system on its own terms, and later work by Beninese scholars has continued it.

The tradition's own transmission is oral and initiatory. The Fa corpus is held in the memory of trained diviners, and the material of the convents is held by initiates under obligation. There is no scripture and no central authority that could produce one.

Since 1996 Vodun has had official status in Benin, with a national day and public ceremony, which has changed the visibility of the religion and the terms on which it is documented.

The atlas describes the structure and reproduces no convent material.