Agbe

Somewhere under the swell that breaks on the coast of old Dahomey, a serpent lies in the water because it cannot bear the heat. It is vast and it is old, older than the world’s arrangement, since it carried the creator about while she made things. It is not in charge. The sea already has a master, and the serpent is only a lodger there. The master is Agbe, a son of Mawu, and the reason he rules and the serpent does not comes down to a single dry principle of Dahomean kingship: those who command must be of royal blood.

Agbe belongs to the Fon, the people of the old kingdom of Dahomey in what is now the Republic of Benin. Nearly everything written about him in English runs back to the work of Melville and Frances Herskovits, who recorded Dahomean religion at Abomey, the royal capital, and published it in An Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief (1933), in the two volumes of Dahomey (1938), and most fully for the myths in Dahomean Narrative (1958). In those pages he has a mother, a twin, a rank and a realm. He never gets a face.

His beginning is told as a birth order. Mawu, in the version given by the Herskovitses’ Abomey tellers, was both man and woman, and so she conceived on her own. First came twins, a son called Da Zodji and a daughter called Nyohwé Ananu. Second came So, who took the shape of the parent, male and female in one body. The third birth was twins again, a boy, Agbe, and a girl, Naeté, and the pair would become husband and wife as well as brother and sister. After them came Agé the hunter, then Gu, who has no head at all but a great sword rising from his neck and a trunk of stone, then Djo, the air, which was needed before people could be made, and last of all Legba, whom Mawu called her spoiled child because he was the youngest.

Then the parent divided the world like an inheritance. Sogbo was to stay in the sky, being man and woman like Mawu. Agé was sent to the bush to command the animals and birds. To Agbe and Naeté she gave the sea, with orders to go and live in it and command the waters. It is a short sentence for a whole ocean.

The gift came with a price. As each child went to its kingdom, Mawu gave it the language that would be spoken there and took away its memory of the language of the sky. The Sagbata twins lost it, Hevioso lost it, and the same was done to Agbe and Naeté. The result was chaos in three directions at once. There was war on the earth, war in the sky and war in the sea; the water no longer knew its place, and the rain no longer knew how to fall, because those who had been given kingdoms could not understand their parent any more. Waves ran up the beach and did not stop where they should. Legba, the go-between, suggested sending down Gbadu, a child of Mawu born after the sea twins, who has sixteen eyes and lives at the top of a palm tree in the sky, watching over the kingdoms of the Sea, the Earth and the Sky. Mawu refused to let Gbadu go. Instead she gave some men on earth an understanding of her language, so that they could know the future and know how to behave. In Dahomean thought that is the origin of divination, and it means the sea was brought back to order partly by human beings reading signs.

Down in Agbe’s water the serpent Aido-Hwedo keeps its coils. It had carried Mawu everywhere as she built the world, and when the earth grew too heavy it wound itself into a circle to lie beneath it as a carrying pad, the kind a porter puts on the head under a load. Because it hates the heat, Mawu made water for it, and so it lives in the sea. The daily picture is almost domestic: the cool dark water, the great ring resting under the land, and the sea god above it giving the orders. When the serpent shifts, the earth shakes.

Not every Dahomean account arranged the family in the same way. The Herskovitses were told at Hevie that Mawu is Sogbo and that Lisa, Mawu’s male partner in other tellings, is Agbe. A rival account rejected this outright and insisted that Agbe, Sogbo and Sagbata each exist separately, all of them sons of Mawu. Each cult kept its own version, and a god’s standing depended on who was telling.

On the coast, the sea gods were a practical matter. Ouidah, the port of the old kingdom of Savi, was conquered by the Dahomean king Agadja in 1727, and the art historian Romuald Tchibozo, writing in 2023 and drawing on the work of Emmanuelle Kadya Tall, describes how the Fon then imposed a ritual called xuta yi yi, going to the beach: a procession from the middle of the town down to the sea to reinforce the power of the sea deities Adantoxu, Agbe and Avrekete, who were held responsible for the prosperity of the town. The Xwéda of Savi were fishermen who had long worshipped sea deities, and the sea was also where the town’s trade came from. The salt wind, the heavy Atlantic surf and the wealth that arrived on ships all belonged, in some sense, to the same god.

Across the Atlantic, Haitian Vodou honours a sea lwa called Agwé, and the likeness of the names is hard to miss. How closely the two are related is a question the record leaves open, and some writers look to other coastal spirits of the Bight of Benin for Agwé’s roots. The name has a humbler double at home too. In one Dahomean animal tale, agbé is a small beast whose hide is spotted because Leopard sprinkled it with the blood of the animals he had killed, which is a long way from commanding the ocean.

Agbe’s power is simple to state. He commands the waters of the sea, and his authority there outranks even the world-bearing serpent, because it rests on birth rather than size. His weakness is written into the same myth that made him king. He was cut off from the language of the sky the moment he received his realm, and a sea whose master cannot understand his parent is a sea that forgets where to stop. The fix did not come from Agbe. It came from Mawu, from Gbadu’s sixteen eyes and from ordinary people learning to read the signs of divination.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Agbe in Fon mythology?

Agbe is the god who rules the sea in the religion of the Fon people of the old kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin. He is a child of the creator Mawu, born as the male half of a pair of twins, and Mawu sent him and his twin sister Naeté to live in the sea and command its waters.

Who are Agbe’s parents and siblings?

In the version recorded by Melville and Frances Herskovits, Agbe is a child of Mawu, who is both male and female and conceived alone. His twin sister and wife is Naeté, and his siblings include the twins Da Zodji and Nyohwé Ananu, Sogbo, Agé, Gu, Djo and Legba, the youngest.

Why does Agbe rule the sea instead of the serpent Aido-Hwedo?

Agbe rules the sea because, in Dahomean tradition, those who command must be of royal blood, and he is a son of Mawu. The great serpent Aido-Hwedo lives in the sea because it dislikes heat, and it lies coiled beneath the earth as a carrying pad, but it does not command the waters.

What went wrong in Agbe’s kingdom?

When Mawu gave each of her children a kingdom, she gave them a new language and took away their memory of the language of the sky. Because Agbe and the other gods could no longer understand their parent, there was war in the sea and the water did not know its place, so Mawu gave some men an understanding of her language through divination.

Was Agbe worshipped at Ouidah?

Yes. According to Romuald Tchibozo, after the Fon conquest of Ouidah in 1727 a procession called xuta yi yi went from the town to the beach to reinforce the power of the sea deities Adantoxu, Agbe and Avrekete, who were held responsible for the prosperity of the town.

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