Damballa

Also Known As: also Damballah, Dambala, Dambalah; Haitian Creole Danbala; usually given in full as Danbala Wèdo or Damballa-Wedo, from Fon dan, the serpent, and Wedo, the West African port of Ouidah
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Caribbean Mythology, Dahomey/Fon/Ewe Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A vast primordial serpent whose coiling shaped the land and whose shed skin filled it with water, holding the world together by holding its own shape.
Role in Mythos: He is the oldest and coolest of the Rada lwa, the ancestral memory of the religion and the guarantor that life continues.
Relation to Humans: He mounts his servants in ceremony and speaks to them only in hisses and whistles, so that whatever he has to say must be read from his body rather than heard. What he gives in return is fertility, clean water, wealth and calm, and the sense that the people who served him in Africa and the people serving him now are the same people.

A white sheet goes down on the packed earth of the peristyle and the drumming drops to something slow and cool. The woman who has been dancing folds to the floor without a word. She will not speak again tonight. She moves on her belly with her tongue testing the air, then goes up the centre post hand over hand until she is looking down on the whole congregation from the beams, and everyone in the room understands that the oldest of them has arrived.

Damballa does not talk. That is the first thing anyone learns about him. When he mounts a servant the mouth is available to him and he declines it, offering instead a long sibilant whistle and a hiss like water hitting a hot stone, and the priest or the senior initiates have to interpret. The explanation given inside the religion is not that he lacks speech but that he predates it. He was there before there was anything to describe, and language is a late and rather clumsy invention that he has never seen the need to take up.

His full name carries his address. Wèdo is Ouidah, the port on the Bight of Benin that fed hundreds of thousands of people into the ships bound for Saint-Domingue, and dan is the Fon word for serpent. In Ouidah the python was not a symbol of the divine but the thing itself. Royal pythons moved through the town under protection, and the temple that still stands near the basilica keeps dozens of them; a python found in a house was carried back to the shrine rather than killed, and killing one required expiation. That cult crossed the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships and came ashore in a French sugar colony where the drums were illegal and the priests were Catholic, and it survived by becoming something new. When the colonial administrator Moreau de Saint-Méry wrote up what he had managed to learn about the rite the planters called vaudoux, in the years just before the revolution, he found a snake at the centre of it and a congregation of Arada people around it. He did not get the god’s name. He got the shape of the thing exactly.

Where he came from is told two ways, and the houses do not agree. In some, Damballa is the first thing the remote high god made, and everything after was made through him. In others he is the maker himself, uncoiling seven thousand times to push up the hills, drag out the valleys and scatter the stars, then sloughing his skin so that the water ran off it and became every river and spring and rain shower there has ever been. The sun came through that water and threw a rainbow across the sky, and the rainbow was Ayida-Wèdo, who is his wife in most tellings, his sister in a few, and in others simply Damballa wearing a different colour. Behind her stands the Fon rainbow serpent Aido-Hwedo, coiled beneath the world to keep it from collapsing, which is where the whole family of ideas started.

He is white. Almost every image agrees on that, though a minority make him black, and white is what he is fed: uncooked eggs on a mound of flour, rice, milk, coconut, syrup of almonds, white flowers, and never a drop of rum or a puff of tobacco smoke, because he neither drinks nor smokes and the fumes offend him. Catholic Haiti gave him two faces to borrow. One is Moses, whose staff turned into a serpent in front of Pharaoh. The other is Saint Patrick, whose cheap devotional print shows a bearded old man in green with snakes tumbling away from his feet, an image assembled to celebrate the destruction of serpents and repurposed, with some nerve, to house the greatest serpent of all.

Ceremony for him runs cool by design. The vèvè is traced in cornmeal on the floor, two serpents facing one another, and a basin of clean water sits ready at the edge of the dancing ground. The servant he has mounted will end up in it, submerged to the shoulders, while a second white cloth is fanned over the surface. His purity is the operating principle: nothing hot, nothing filthy, nothing sharp. Some houses keep an egg balanced on the flour untouched all night, and if it is intact at dawn that is taken as the whole conversation.

His gifts follow from what he is. He brings rain and springs and the fertility of animals and fields, because the water came off him in the first place. He brings money, since wealth in the old accounting was measured in living increase. He brings healing, and he brings the thing his servants value most, which is continuity: possession by Damballa is the proof that the line running back through the middle passage to Ouidah has not been cut. He is, as one of his best interpreters put it, at once the ancient past and the assurance of the future.

His limits follow just as directly. The silence that makes him venerable makes him nearly useless in an argument, since he can be asked a question and answer only with a noise that requires a translator, and translators can be wrong. Heat drives him off, so a house that wants vengeance or fast violent results does not call Damballa; that is work for the hot Petwo rite, where even he appears in a fiercer form under a different name. He has no interest in the daily grievances that fill a temple, the lawsuits and the unfaithful husbands and the immigration papers. He is not a god for settling scores. He gives peace, water and time, and a petitioner who wanted a result by Friday has come to the wrong serpent.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Damballa in Haitian Vodou?

Damballa, or Danbala Wèdo, is the great serpent lwa of the Rada rite and the oldest and most venerated spirit in Haitian Vodou. He is regarded either as the first thing created by the high god or as the creator himself, and he is associated with wisdom, water, fertility and peace.

Why does Damballa not speak?

When Damballa possesses a servant during ceremony, the person cannot use human speech and communicates only in hisses and whistles. Vodouisants explain this by his age: Damballa existed before language, and his priests and senior initiates interpret his meaning from his movements instead.

What offerings does Damballa accept?

Damballa is given white foods: an uncooked white egg on a mound of flour, rice, milk, coconut, orgeat syrup and white flowers. Alcohol and tobacco are excluded from his service entirely, since he neither drinks nor smokes and both are considered impure in his presence.

Where does Damballa come from?

His name points to Ouidah in present-day Benin, where the python deity of the Fon and Hueda people was served with live sacred snakes, and dan is the Fon word for serpent. The cult crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people from the Bight of Benin and was remade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue as part of what became Haitian Vodou.

Which Catholic saint is Damballa associated with?

Damballa is most often identified with Saint Patrick, whose devotional image shows snakes fleeing from his feet, and in some houses with Moses, whose staff became a serpent before Pharaoh. These identifications let his service continue under Catholic colonial rule without abandoning the lwa underneath.