Dan

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In the center of Ouidah two low houses face each other across a paved square, and between them, most days, nothing moves. On the one side stands the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, its twin towers the color of old cream. On the other, behind a plain wall painted with a coiling snake, stands a single-story building with a tiled roof and a small door. Inside that door, in a dim round room, several dozen royal pythons lie heaped and folded on one another, harmless, no longer than a walking stick and no thicker than a wrist, warm and nearly still. They are fed, and handled, and now and then let out to move through the town. They are also, in the reckoning of the people who keep them, the living body of a god — the serpent the Fon call Dan.

The name, and the two roads it comes by

Dan reaches the record along two roads, and the Fongbe language keeps them distinct even where the tradition binds them into one. The first road is cosmological. In the Fon account of the world’s making, the serpent is Dan Ayido Hwedo — Aido Hwedo, Ayido Hwedo in the several spellings — the great primordial snake who was already there when the dual creator Mawu-Lisa set to work. As the ethnographer Melville J. Herskovits recorded the telling in his two-volume Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938), the serpent served the creator at the making: he carried the deity in his mouth as she moved across the still-forming earth, bearing her from place to place while she shaped the land with her hands, and where his own body dragged and curved he left the canyons, the rivers, the valleys, and the hills. When the work was done, the serpent did not leave. He coiled beneath the finished world and around it, and there he holds it yet.

The second road is cultic and coastal, and it runs through one town. On the shore below the Abomey plateau lay the old Kingdom of Whydah — Hueda, Xwéda, in the people’s own name — and its chief vodun was Dangbe, the serpent, whose totem is the royal python and whose seat is the sanctuary at Ouidah. The antiquity of this cult is fixed by outsider testimony, which is worth reading with care, since it is the record of European traders and clerics looking in from the factory and the ship. The French cleric Jean-Baptiste Labat set down an account of the serpent worship at Whydah around 1698. Close behind him the Dutch trader Willem Bosman, whose A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea was published in 1704 from observations of about 1700, reported that at Fida — the European name for Ouidah — a certain snake held the first rank among the three principal deities of the country, invoked when the rains failed or fell too hard, when the harvest was thin, and in all affairs touching government, so that even the king sent presents to the snake-house. The English survey of snake worship that gathers these early notices records that at Whydah, the chief center, the serpent temple was tenanted in that era by some fifty snakes.

Whether the cosmic Dan Ayido Hwedo of the creation and the coastal Dangbe of Ouidah are one vodun under two names, or kindred serpent-powers braided together by a shared form, is a question the scholarship leaves genuinely open. The Fongbe usage carries both. When Dahomey, the inland Fon kingdom, conquered Whydah under King Agaja in 1727, the Dangbe cult of the coast was drawn into the wider Fon vodun world, and the two serpents came to be spoken of together — the rainbow, the python, and the coil beneath the earth given a single voice. It is not necessary, inside the tradition, to decide which serpent is meant. The serpent is the serpent, and the tradition names it both ways and lets the ambiguity stand.

The coil that holds the world

What Dan is, first of all, is motion. He is the vodun set over everything in the world that curves, flows, and circulates — and so he is seen at once in two things that could not look more different and are, to the tradition, the same. He is the arc of the rainbow, the bright curve thrown across the sky after rain. And he is the living python, which pours itself across the ground without legs, a smooth and unbroken movement, the plain image of continuity itself. To watch a snake travel is to watch motion with no joint in it, no step, no break; that seamless going is Dan’s signature, written large in the rainbow and small in the grass.

The creation-work explains why the serpent still matters. Having carried the creator and cut the land’s shape as he went, Dan coiled himself beneath the earth to keep it from sinking, and around it to keep it whole. The tradition renders the labor in figures. Herskovits recorded that the serpent lies in three thousand five hundred coils above the earth and three thousand five hundred below, seven thousand folds of a single body holding the world suspended between them. The Fon cosmology gathered around the rainbow-serpent keeps the same reckoning, and adds the consequence that follows from it: the earth is a great weight, and it rides on a living thing. When the serpent shifts under the load — straining against the mass, or merely stirring because he lies uncomfortable — the ground moves with him. The trembling of the earth is the serpent adjusting his coils. What the rest of the world calls an earthquake, the Fon read as the great body turning in its sleep.

Because he girds the whole earth, Dan is figured biting his own tail — the serpent bent into a closed ring around the world, the ends met and joined. It is the shape that has no end, and that is exactly the meaning the tradition draws from it: Dan is the vodun of what holds together and does not break, of continuity, of the circle that keeps closing. He is the guarantor that the world, made once, stays made. A thing girded by an unbroken serpent does not fall apart, because the serpent has no seam at which it could begin to.

He is, with equal emphasis, a vodun of wealth, and the reasoning is characteristically concrete. As the great serpent traveled at the making, the tradition holds, he left his droppings behind him in the earth, and those droppings hardened into the metals and the bright minerals — the iron, the copper, the gold, the colored stones and the beads mined from underground. Riches, in this account, are quite literally the trail the serpent left. Where Dan has passed, wealth is buried; to strike metal or ore in the ground is to find the track of the world-serpent. It is a striking piece of theology, because it makes the mineral wealth of the earth not a dead resource but a residue of the living power that shaped the land — the same body, in a harder form, that still holds the world up.

Dan does not stand alone. He is paired with a feminine aspect, Ayida-Weddo — Aida Wedo — and the two are best understood not as a married couple but as one serpent-power shown with a masculine and a feminine face, the arc of the rainbow doubled. Where the rainbow is often described as two arcs, a brighter and a fainter, the tradition can read the pair in the doubled bow: Dan and Ayida-Weddo, a single continuity spoken as male and female at once. The pairing belongs to the same logic that gives the creator two names in one breath and the moon a sun for its complement; in this cosmos the whole powers come as pairs, and to name only one face of Dan would be to see only half the arc.

And on the coast, as Dangbe of Ouidah, the serpent wears a gentler office. The record of the Whydah cult names Dangbe a benefactor-god of wisdom and bliss, associated with the trees and the ocean, protector of the waters and of fertility, whose python is the totem of the Hueda and whose blessing is prosperity and health. This is the serpent one goes to for the good of life — for rain in its season, for children, for the turning-out of a venture. The python at the shrine may be consulted, and its keeping is a public and living thing. Where the cosmic Dan is the awful body under the earth, the coastal Dangbe is the near and approachable one, coiled in the cool of the temple, fed by the town.

The two houses on the square

The most famous seat of the serpent is the one on the square in Ouidah, and its position there is itself an argument. The Temple of the Pythons — the Temple des Pythons, the house of Dangbe — stands directly across a short open space from the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, the great Catholic church of the town, so that the two faiths regard each other across the pavement, door facing door. The French account of the temple sets the scene in the Dangbexu quarter, on the Place Agoli, an old baobab standing in the plaza between the shrine and the church. Inside the temple, in the reading room of the god, are kept several dozen — up to about a hundred — royal pythons, Python regius, a mild and non-venomous species that grows no more than roughly a meter and a half long. They are the living body of Dangbe. Periodically they are let out to move through the streets of Ouidah, hunting the rats and insects of the town, and the inhabitants, holding themselves responsible for their god, gather up any snake that has wandered and carry it back to the sanctuary. The same French record notes the older counts against which today’s population is measured: the abbé Laffitte described about twenty sacred serpents in the temple in 1873, where Bosman’s era had reckoned some fifty. The travelers’ account of the site describes the same coil of harmless snakes and the same small, dim room in which they are honored.

The cult’s antiquity, documented from the late seventeenth century, is bound up with the darkest chapter of Ouidah’s own history, and that chapter is told most fully where the port itself is treated — at Ouidah, the town that became one of the great embarkation points of the Atlantic slave trade, its Route des Esclaves ending at the shore in the monument called the Door of No Return. It was along that Middle Passage that Dan crossed the ocean. In the memory and the practice of the enslaved carried out of the Bight of Benin, the serpent went to the far shore and surfaced again, changed and recognizable. In Haitian Vodou he is Damballa, the great white serpent, benevolent and ancient, and beside him Ayida-Weddo, the rainbow — the same doubled arc of the homeland, the serpent-lwa served among the oldest and gentlest of the spirits. He echoes, too, in the serpent powers of Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Lucumí, and he has a cousin across the eastern frontier in the Yoruba rainbow-serpent Oshumare, though which people first knew the rainbow as a snake, and who learned it from whom, is one of the unsettled questions between these neighboring worlds. The crossing did not corrupt the serpent. It carried him.

The Temple of the Pythons at Ouidah, the house of Dangbé, which stands across the square from the town’s basilica. Rachad sanoussi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Between the serpent as the Fon serve him and the “voodoo” of the poster there is no honest resemblance, and the distortion is worth naming exactly so that it can be refused. The colonial pamphlet and then the horror film ground this religion down to a set of props — pins in a doll, the shuffling zombie, the “snake-god savagery” of the jungle-adventure reel, the charge of devil-worship — and sold the bundle under a single word. That bundle is a diaspora-and-cinema invention, assembled far from any shrine, and it describes nothing that happens in the round room at Ouidah. What it erases is the actual shape of the faith: a supreme creator in Mawu-Lisa, behind whom stands the primordial mother Nana Buluku; the vodun as an ordered company of powers set over the domains of the world — Legba the crossroads-opener honored first, the serpent among them; the priesthood, the vodunon, who keep the shrines; and the Fa divination that reads a life’s destiny. A python honored as the body of a god of continuity and rain is not a monster of the matinee. It is the center of a coherent religion, and the serpent-savagery of the caricature is a thing said about that religion, never a description of it.

The living cult answers the slander by simply continuing. Vodun is a recognized national religion of the Republic of Benin — acknowledged as such in 1996, its national holiday set on the tenth of January and kept most visibly on this very coast, the Fête du Vodoun drawing pilgrims and visitors to Ouidah each year. The python temple has shared in that revival in a literal way: the temple was restored in 1992, its roof retiled and its interior reinforced, during Ouidah 92 — the first world festival of vodun art and culture, held in the town that the trade had made a byword for departure and that the festival remade as a place of return. Today the temple is at once a place of pilgrimage and one of the foremost sites a visitor to the coast is shown, and the two functions do not compete: the same snakes are the god of the Hueda and the wonder of the tourist, honored in the morning and photographed in the afternoon.

Royal pythons in the temple at Ouidah — harmless snakes no longer than a walking stick, kept, handled, and let out to move through the town. Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The scholarship that carries the documentary weight sits, as always, beside a living authority older than any book. Herskovits’s Dahomey set down the creation and the coils and the droppings in the 1930s; Bosman and Labat fixed the coastal cult two centuries earlier from the deck and the factory; Suzanne Preston Blier’s African Vodun read the art and the meaning of the Fon powers a generation ago. All of them are witnesses from outside the shrine, and each records a knowledge that belongs, in the end, to the vodunon who keep it and to the town that gathers the strayed snakes home — to the Fon of Benin and to the Ewe of Togo and Ghana, the Aja of the old cradle-country, and the Gun of the coast, who all serve the serpent still. The serpent they describe is not a relic. He is the curve of every river the tradition says he cut, the bright arc after the rain, the vein of metal in the ground, the tremor in the earth — and, most plainly, the warm coil of harmless snakes in a dim room in Ouidah, resting as the body of the god who holds the world together by refusing to let go of his own tail.

→ Related: Mawu Lisa · Legba · Gu · Sakpata · Ouidah · Abomey · Allada · Dankoli · The Ewe · The Aja · The Gun