Damballa

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On the packed earth of the peristil, before the great spirits are called, a clean white sheet is spread on the ground, and on it, on a small mound of white flour, someone sets a single uncooked egg. The color of everything meant for him is the same: white flour, white foods, a bowl of milk, the sweet almond syrup called orgeat, and the sheet itself, kept immaculate and folded away from anything soiled. When he comes he comes without a word. The serviteur he mounts — his chwal, his horse — sinks to the floor and begins to move along the ground like a snake, the tongue flicking, the body climbing the center-post or a nearby tree toward the sky; and the assembly answers not with speech but by taking up a second white cloth and waving it, over and over, to fan the spirit cool. He does not talk. A great serpent has no words; he hisses, or he whistles, or he makes a low sibilant sound, and that is his voice. This is Danbala Wedo, and the cool, wordless, immaculate spirit crawling the white sheet is the same primordial snake who in Dahomey carried the creator in his mouth while the world was being made — a rainbow that survived the Middle Passage.

Line-drawing vèvè of Damballa and Ayida-Wedo: two serpents flanking a central axis, the pair always drawn together. chris 論, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The serpent that crossed the water

His full name in Haitian Kreyòl is Danbala Wedo, written in the older orthographies as Damballah-Wèdo, Damballa, or Dambala. The first part is the serpent himself; the second, Wedo or Weddo, is a place. It preserves, across three centuries and an ocean, the name of Ouidah — Whydah, the old slaving port on the coast of Dahomey, in what is now the Republic of Benin — the town the tradition holds to be the cradle of the religion from which Danbala descends. To pronounce his name is to name a West African city that most of his servants have never seen and will never see, and to carry it, as an epithet of the god, into a country he never left.

Danbala is one of the oldest and most revered of all the lwa, the spirits a Vodou house serves. His root is the Fon cosmic serpent Dan — more fully Dan Ayido Hwedo, the rainbow-snake, whose place in the cosmology of Mawu-Lisa belongs to the African religion of the Fon and the Ewe and is told there at length. It is enough to recall its shape. In that account the serpent existed before the earth was shaped; when the creator went out to make the world, Ayido Hwedo carried the creator in its mouth, and where the two of them passed the winding of the snake left the rivers and the folds of the hills; and when the ordered world stood finished, too heavy to hang unsupported, the serpent was set to coil beneath it and around it, biting its own tail, holding heaven and earth together. Above, the same serpent shows itself as the rainbow. On the beach below Ouidah the royal pythons of the Temple of Pythons are its living vessels still. That is the Dan of Dahomey, worshiped on its own coast to this day.

Danbala Wedo is what became of that serpent in the New World. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries the French colony of Saint-Domingue, on the western third of the island the Taíno had called Ayiti, drew hundreds of thousands of captive Africans onto its sugar and coffee plantations — Fon and Ewe from Dahomey, Yoruba, and vast numbers of Kongo and other Central Africans. The 1685 Code Noir compelled their baptism and forbade their own worship. Out of that density and that prohibition a new and integral religion crystallized: Haitian Vodou, a creole synthesis in which the spirits of many African nations were reordered into nanchon, “nations,” and served together beneath a remote creator, Bondye, and beneath the outward forms of the Church. Danbala belongs to the Rada nanchon — the “cool,” ancestral, Dahomean-rooted pole of the religion, named for the old Fon kingdom of Allada, whose spirits are saluted first and served with white and with water. He did not merely survive the crossing. He kept his oldest office: the serpent who holds the world together.

The white and the silence

Within the living faith Danbala Wedo is the primordial father, benevolent and immense. In the houses that name him among the first of Bondye’s works — or as Bondye’s own instrument in the making of things — he is the great white serpent who formed the cosmos with his coils. The tradition tells it in a number: with his seven thousand coils he spun the stars and the planets into the heavens and shaped the hills and the valleys of the earth, and then, by shedding his skin as a snake sheds it, he released all the waters of the world. He governs creation itself, and wisdom, and purity, and water, and wholeness, and the long unbroken line of the ancestors. He is a father and not a warrior; his benevolence is settled and enormous and a little remote. He is wise, patient, kind, and detached — removed from the small daily trials of human life, which he leaves to spirits closer to the ground. One does not go to Danbala with a lawsuit or a fever. One goes to him for what he is: peace, continuity, the sense that beneath every trouble the world is still held.

His silence is of a piece with his wisdom. A serpent has no speech, and because Danbala is a serpent and because his knowledge is too old and too deep for words, he does not talk when he comes. His color is white, and it is kept white: the sheet spread for him is spotless, the second sheet waved to cool him is spotless, and he is kept scrupulously apart from anything impure or hot. His offering above all others is the white uncooked egg set on a mound of white flour; he takes also milk, rice, coconut, white flowers and white foods, and orgeat, the almond syrup. These details are, as everywhere in the religion, house-variable — a lwa’s day, colors, and preferred food differ from one lakou and one temple to the next — but the whiteness does not vary, nor does the silence, nor does the serpent’s way of moving through the body of the one he mounts. When Danbala arrives, the chwal slides to the floor and travels like a snake, darting the tongue, seeking the height of the poto-mitan or a tree; the possession is described this way by observers and servants alike, and it is described here at that distance, as public record, not as instruction.

He is not served alone. His companion is Ayida Wedo, the rainbow serpent of the waters and of fertility — in some houses his wife, in some his sister, in some simply the female aspect of a single doubled being that may be named Danbala-Ayida, both genders in one body. Where he is the arc of the sky, she is the arc beside it; when a double rainbow stands over the Haitian hills, it is said that the rainbow serpent has descended with his consort. That is why his vèvè, the ground-drawing that summons him, so often shows not one snake but two, twined or set side by side: the making of the world is the work of the pair, and the two of them together arc across the heavens as the sign that the flood has passed and the covenant of the waters holds.

The Rada rite that keeps Danbala is the cool, ancestral, Dahomean-rooted pole of Vodou, and it is best understood against its opposite. The other great rite is Petwo — “hot,” fast, forceful, forged in the New World in the crucible of slavery and revolt and owing most to the Kongo traditions of Central Africa. The polarity is functional, not moral: Rada is not “good” and Petwo “evil,” and many spirits are served in both waters. But Danbala sits squarely on the cool side. He is everything Petwo is not — slow where it is quick, white where it is red, silent where it cries out, water where it is fire. He is the ancestral temperature of the religion, the register of Ginen, the old Africa beneath the waters from which the lwa come and to which the dead return.

Under the Catholic surface the colony imposed, Danbala came to be served alongside particular saints — not confused with them, but honored beside them, in the double vision that runs through the whole faith, where a household keeps the lwa and the sen at once and finds no contradiction in it. His usual companions in the Church’s calendar are the ones who share his shape or his story. He is syncretized most often with Saint Patrick, who is pictured in the holy chromolithographs standing over a ground alive with snakes — the saint remembered for driving the serpents out of Ireland, chosen to stand for the serpent-lwa himself, an irony the tradition absorbs without blinking: the picture is full of snakes, and the snakes are Danbala. His other saint is Moses, whose rod was thrown down before Pharaoh and became a serpent, and swallowed the serpents of the Egyptian magicians — a staff that turns into a snake, matched to a god who is one. Ayida Wedo, for her rainbow and her serpents, is set beside the Immaculate Conception. This serving of the lwa beneath the santo is not a mask worn to fool a priest, and not the “survival” of a lost thing: it is the living theology of a living people, a faith that learned to hold two languages at once and to speak both.

The serpent and the slander

There is another Danbala, and he is a lie. In the Anglophone imagination the cool white creator-serpent of a living religion was ground down, across the twentieth century, into a thing of horror — the coiling menace of the pulp novel and the film, the “voodoo” snake of the tourist show, hissing over a scene of pins and dolls and shuffling corpses. It is a peculiarly cruel theft to work on this spirit of all spirits, whose whole character is purity, patience, and peace. The word “voodoo,” with its pins and its zombies, is not the name of anything Haitians serve. It is a construct, and a datable one, taking its modern shape during and after the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, when sensational travel books — above all William Seabrook’s The Magic Island of 1929, which first carried the undead “zombie” into popular English — fed a market that painted Haiti as a land of savage superstition and so helped excuse the soldiers already there; Hollywood did the rest. The tradition’s own name is Vodou, from the Fon vodun, “spirit”; the horror-film “voodoo” is an appropriation and a defamation, named here only to be refused. The white serpent of the rainbow is not the snake of the nightmare, and the nightmare has no claim on him.

That the tradition holding Danbala should be slandered as savage is the more bitter for what it did. Vodou is woven into the founding of Haiti itself. A ceremony in the wooded north — Bwa Kayiman, Bois Caïman, remembered on the night of the fourteenth of August 1791, though some traditions give the twenty-second, and led by the houngan Dutty Boukman and the manbo Cécile Fatiman — is held to be the spark of the insurrection that opened the revolution, the only large-scale slave revolt in history to succeed. On the first of January 1804 the enslaved of Saint-Domingue declared Haiti independent, the first Black republic in the world. The exact details of the ceremony are part oral tradition and part later embellishment, and historians genuinely debate what happened at the site and where it stood; the event and the founding legend are braided together and cannot be fully pulled apart. What is not in doubt is that an act of Vodou stands at the root of Haitian freedom — a freedom for which the young state was punished, most crushingly by the ruinous indemnity France extorted in 1825 in exchange for recognition.

Danbala’s own century has its particular wound, and it is fitting to his nature. The lwa reposes in the great trees — the repozwar, the resting-tree, where a serpent-spirit is fed and where its coolness gathers in the shade and the water at the roots. When the Catholic Church, with the backing of the state, mounted its most severe assault on the religion — the campagne de rejeté, the anti-superstition campaign of roughly 1939 to 1942, which peaked in 1941 and 1942 under President Élie Lescot — it made servants swear oaths renouncing the lwa, and it burned their drums and their flags and their peristyles, and it felled and burned the sacred trees. To burn Danbala’s tree is to strike at the coolest and most harmless spirit in the whole pantheon, the one who governs purity and continuity and asks for nothing but a white egg and to be left in peace; and still the trees were burned. The campaign broke at last on urban unrest in Port-au-Prince and on the protest of Haitian intellectuals, among them the ethnologist Jacques Roumain, founder of the Bureau of Ethnology, who defended the religion as the deep culture of the Haitian people. The fuller catalog of the long punishment — the occupation, the cynical instrumentalization of Vodou imagery under the Duvalier dictatorship and its Tonton Macoutes, the scapegoating that returned after the earthquake of 2010 — belongs to the story of the Haitians as a people, and is told there.

Through all of it the white serpent endured, exactly because of what he is. Where Ogou is the fire of the Revolution and its anger, and Baron Samedi the lord of the cemetery who decides whether the dead may pass, and Ezili the love and the grief poured out, Danbala is the sign that beneath every fire and every grave the world is still coiled together and still held. He is served today across the country — in the Rada lakou at Souvenance, at the Kongo lakou at Soukri, at the falls of Saut-d’Eau where the pilgrims bathe, and wherever the marronage that first defended this faith is remembered in the songs of the Maroons. His service is the same now as it was on the plantations: the spotless white sheet, the egg on its little hill of flour, the milk and the orgeat, the second cloth lifted to fan him cool. He does not speak; he has no need. He sheds his skin as the year sheds its seasons, and the waters run, and the double rainbow stands over the hills with his wife beside him, and the oldest of the serpents goes on holding heaven to the earth.

→ Related: Papa Legba · Erzulie · Baron Samedi · Ogou · Souvenance · Lakou Soukri · Bwa Kayiman · Saut D Eau · The Haitians · The Maroons · The Kongo · West African Vodun · Orisha Religion · Fon Cosmology Mawu Lisa · The Fon · Bakongo Cosmology Dikenga · Taino