In West African cosmology, the vodou are divine, specialized deities, whom, along with special ancestral and totemic spirits are cosmogenetically and biologically linked to the African at birth. As such, no individual or group can “introduce” these deities into ones biogenetic sphere. Further, the Africans who were imported and sold into the American slave-holding states, were transported directly from West Africa. The vodou deities and the exoteric “culture of the deities” (religions) also came directly from West Africa into America.
The two largest and primary groups of Africans who were transported directly from West Africa into the United States, upon whom the Vodoun religion would soon overlay, were from the Congo and southwestern, Nigeria. The largest West African groups imported into America who actually brought the Vodoun religion with them were mainly from the Ewe, Guin and the Nago groups.
The “Nago groups” were the Vodoun-Yoruba worshipers who comprised the inter-ethnic (Ewe-Fon, Edo, Igbo, Ijaw, and other) sub-mixtures, which were long ago established in Badagry, southern Benin and southern Togo.
This blend came about as a result of their long history from ancient Ketu, to their continual political and economic struggles through warfare after the establishment of the Dahomean and the Oyo empires.
In between both of these nations quest for regional hegemony, there were sparse periods of inter-ethnic marriages, mass migrations, mutual commerce and inter-cultural sharing. It was these primary West African groups who initially laid the cultural, linguistic and the religious substratum for the African spiritual traditions that existed in America.
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