Earth Deities

Earth Deities holds figures whose defining domain is the earth itself, granted as a portfolio distinct from the sky, the sea or a single natural feature. Sakpata is the atlas's one entry so far. Herskovits records him as the eldest child of Mawu-Lisa given the earth as his own domain, together with the power to send and to lift the skin disease the Fon call by his own name. What that domain meant in practice, the priesthood that alone held the correct rites for the disease he governed, and the independent standing his cult built on a threat no royal court could reach, is already recorded on his own page and is not extended here beyond what defines the category itself.

The heading is kept apart from Departmental Gods, the catch-all for a portfolio not yet narrowed to one of the standing headings, and from Primordial Deities, whose defining claim is an origin generation rather than an ongoing domain. It sits beside Sky Deities and Sea Deities as the third of a small set of elemental-domain headings the atlas uses when a deity's office is specifically one of the great domains of the world rather than a narrower function within it. A second entry belongs here only when another catalogued figure holds the earth itself, rather than a single feature of it, as a named domain.