The Temple of Pythons

Ouidah's Temple of Pythons fits inside a courtyard. A low wall, a round thatched hut, a large tree, and snakes sleeping coiled in the shade. No gilding, no display cases. Right across the square stands the neo-Gothic facade of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

That face-off says more about Ouidah than any long explanation. But to understand what you are looking at, you have to go back to a kingdom that disappeared three centuries ago, to the accounts of European travelers, and to a creation myth in which a serpent carries the world.

The shrine of Dangbé

The Temple of Pythons is the shrine of Dangbé, the serpent deity of the Xweda people (also written Hueda; European traders said Whydah). Before it became Dahomey's port, Ouidah sat at the heart of their kingdom, whose capital was at Savi, a few miles inland.

For the Xweda, the python is not a symbol. It is the deity's presence. You do not hunt it, you do not kill it, and when one wanders into a house, it is carried back to the temple.

The shrine stands on Place Agoli, in the Dangbexu neighborhood, literally "the house of Dangbé." An old baobab grows on the square. Only the sandy expanse of the square separates the temple from the basilica.

The site has two courtyards. The first holds the pythons' shelter, a cone-shaped building of about 12 square meters, a round thatched hut at the entrance and earthen buildings with metal roofs. The second, enclosed by a pink-painted cement wall, shelters a large sacred iroko tree that tradition says is six centuries old.

The temple is home to dozens of pythons, sometimes around a hundred. Females, which are larger, are called dangbé drè; males, dangbé kpohoun.

A cult described for more than three centuries

Ouidah's snake cult is one of the vodun practices best documented in early European sources. Those accounts are valuable, but they need careful reading: they were written by men who did not understand what they saw, and many of whom took part in the slave trade.

Labat and the "great Serpent"

The first detailed account comes through the Dominican friar Jean-Baptiste Labat, who in 1698 relayed the report of another cleric, Father Braguez. Braguez had been told that snake worship served to humble people before "the most despicable and wicked of all animals." That explanation probably says more about the missionary's gaze than about Xweda theology.

Labat also describes great processions at the "temple of the great Serpent" during royal coronations. For a ceremony in April 1723, he places the serpent's dwelling at the center of the ritual. A few years before the Dahomean conquest, then, the cult of Dangbé stood at the heart of Xweda kingship.

Bosman, the king and the pigs

Around 1700, Willem Bosman, chief trader for the Dutch West India Company, wrote that the snake was one of the three principal deities of the kingdom of Whydah. He described a "snake house": a cylindrical clay hut under a cone-shaped thatched roof, with two narrow entrances facing each other.

He told a story that became famous. One day, a pig bit a sacred snake and ate it. The priests complained to the king and obtained a royal order: every pig in the kingdom was to be killed. The story shows how far protecting the snake was a matter of state.

Bosman also noted that the king sent gifts to the shrine, adding with a sneer that in his view the priests kept the offerings for themselves. His book, published in 1704 and quickly translated, circulated across Europe and for two centuries fed a caricatured European image of West African "serpent worship."

The serpent's servants

Bosman reports another belief that puzzled him. According to him, the sacred snake sometimes "touched" young women, who then seemed seized by madness and had to enter the temple's service. Bosman, skeptical, claimed that the priests persuaded the girls to fake the trance so they would be sent to the snake house.

That passage needs careful reading. What Bosman describes from the outside closely resembles a central institution of vodun that is still alive today: the initiation of vodunsi, devotees consecrated to a deity, who spend a period of seclusion in the deity's convent before returning to the community. The Dutch trader saw fraud; practitioners see a calling. Above all, his account proves that this kind of initiation already existed around Dangbé around 1700.

The 19th century: Burton and Laffitte

In 1864, the British explorer Richard Burton, on a mission to King Glele of Dahomey, passed through Ouidah. He noted that the snake was associated there with trees and with the ocean in acts of devotion.

In 1873, the missionary Abbé Laffitte described a circular earthen building about three meters (ten feet) high, housing some twenty sacred snakes. More than 150 years after Bosman, the "snake house" had kept much the same shape.

Savi, the lost capital

The cult of Dangbé was tied to Xweda kingship, whose capital, Savi, lay about six miles north of Ouidah. Almost nothing of it remains visible. But archaeology has brought it back to life.

Since 1991, American archaeologist Kenneth Kelly, of the University of South Carolina, has led excavations at the site. In the ruins of the royal palace, his team found large quantities of imported goods: Dutch tobacco pipes, Chinese porcelain, wine and liquor bottles, and even Dutch bricks paving the palace floor.

These objects were found in the palace's most public spaces, where the king received guests. They were signs of power. Xweda kings tightly controlled access to European goods, and European traders had to live in trading lodges inside the royal compound.

It was in this rich, cosmopolitan and highly ritualized kingdom that the cult of Dangbé held a central place, to the point that the king sent it gifts and his coronations passed through the "temple of the great Serpent."

The legend of King Kpassè

Local tradition tells a different story, one of origins. Pursued by his enemies, King Kpassè is said to have fled into the forest, where pythons emerged from the trees and bushes to protect him. In gratitude, he had shrines built for the snakes.

The same Kpassè gave his name to the sacred forest, a few minutes' walk away, where another legend says he turned into an iroko tree. The two places echo each other: the Temple of Pythons and the Kpassè forest together form the heart of Xweda vodun in Ouidah.

From the Dahomean conquest to today

In 1727, King Agaja of Dahomey conquered the Xweda kingdom. Ouidah became Dahomey's great slave-trading port. The cult of Dangbé did not disappear. It carried on, and 19th-century travelers still described it.

The colonial period, from the 1890s on, brought the Catholic missions. The basilica was built right across from the temple between 1903 and 1909. The temple stayed active.

The modern turning point came in 1992. To prepare for the Ouidah 92 festival, the first world festival of vodun arts and cultures, the temple was restored with money from Benin's cultural aid fund. Since then, an annual ceremony has been held there at the time of the national vodun holiday: the temple priest sacrifices a goat and pours its blood on the white cloth wrapped around the iroko, in honor of the ancestors. The holiday, long set on January 10, has been held on the second Friday of January since 2024.

The temple has also known tensions. In 2014, it was temporarily closed because of long-standing family disputes over the management of the site. Like many sacred places run by lineages, it is at once a place of worship, a family heritage and a source of tourist income, and those three roles do not always agree.

Dan, the serpent that carries the world

To understand how a python can be divine, it helps to step into the vodun thought of the Gbe-speaking peoples (Fon, Xweda, Adja, Ewe).

Dan is the serpent power. It is linked to movement, continuity, wealth, and the rainbow that joins sky and earth after rain. Dangbé, the python of Ouidah, is one local form of it.

The great Fon creation myth gives a serpent a central role. According to several versions recorded by ethnographers, the creator deity Mawu shaped the world while traveling on the back or in the mouth of Aido-Hwedo, the rainbow serpent. Where its body passed, valleys, rivers and mountains were born.

When creation was finished, the earth was so heavy with mountains, trees and animals that it risked sinking. Mawu asked the serpent to coil in a circle beneath the earth to hold it up. Aido-Hwedo holds its tail in its mouth and rests in the cool of the seas Mawu made for it. An end-of-the-world version adds that it feeds on iron bars forged by red monkeys from the sea; when the iron runs out, it will devour its own tail, and the earth will slide into the ocean.

In light of that myth, it is easier to see why the serpent is linked to the stability of the world and to the rainbow, and why Burton saw Ouidah's snake connected with the ocean.

The iroko, tree of Loko

The large tree in the second courtyard is not mere decoration. The iroko (Milicia excelsa) is a sacred tree across much of West Africa. In Benin, a scientific study found that the veneration surrounding it is one of the main reasons it survives: people protect it in fields, sacred groves, public squares and cemeteries.

In vodun thought, the iroko is the home of Loko, the deity of trees. The name crossed the Atlantic: in Haiti, Papa Loko is the lwa of trees and plants, patron of healers, considered the first houngan (priest) and husband of Ayizan.

At the Ouidah temple, the iroko is wrapped in white cloth. It is on that cloth that the priest pours the blood of the goat sacrificed at the annual ceremony. Tradition says the tree is six centuries old. No scientific dating has been published, but nobody who sees it doubts that it is very old.

Dangbé among the other vodun

Dangbé is not alone. Vodun is not a single-god religion but a whole set of deities, each with its convents, priests, taboos and festivals. In Ouidah, several of them live side by side:

• Legba, the messenger, guardian of thresholds and crossroads, whose earthen altars stand in front of many houses.
• Hevioso, the vodun of thunder and lightning.
• Sakpata, the vodun of the earth, associated with eruptive diseases.
• Gu, the vodun of iron, tools and war.
• Mami Wata and the sea deities, on the coast. Our pillar on Mami Wata is devoted to them.

Within that whole, Dangbé holds a special place in Ouidah: it is the guardian deity of the Xweda, the town's vodun since before the Dahomean conquest. Coming to the Temple of Pythons means meeting the vodun most rooted in local history.

Our pillar on the Vodun Days shows how these deities come together every year in the streets of Ouidah.

The seven-year ceremony

The temple has its own ritual calendar. Its rarest rite takes place every seven years.

It centers on the zingbin, a sacred jar more than two centuries old. According to tradition, 41 young virgin women drew the sacred water for the rite. Today, the role falls to 41 post-menopausal women. Sacred leaves are ground into the water, which is then used for healing; the rest is poured out.

The shift in the rite, from young virgins to post-menopausal women, says something about how vodun adapts. Tradition is not a museum: it is handed down and transformed at the same time.

This rite is not a show, and it is not staged for visitors. If you are in Ouidah at the right time, your guide will know whether it is possible to attend and under what conditions.

The temple's pythons

The temple's snakes are royal pythons (Python regius), a common species in southern Benin. Americans know them as ball pythons, one of the most popular pet snakes in the United States. They are non-venomous and famously calm: when threatened, a ball python curls into a tight ball rather than strike.

They stay fairly small. The temple's pythons measure under 1.5 meters (5 feet). They can live 10 to 50 years. Tourist photos with a snake draped around someone's neck often suggest something much bigger.

The pythons are not captives. Every week, they are released to hunt insects and rats in the neighboring houses, and residents welcome them. If a python has not come back after 72 hours, residents go looking for it and bring it back to the temple: this is about their deity's well-being.

That back-and-forth between shrine and town is part of the cult itself. In this neighborhood, the python belongs to everyone, and everyone is a little responsible for it.

The ball python, from temple to global trade

Here is a paradox few visitors know about. The ball python, sacred in Ouidah, is also the CITES-listed live animal most exported from Africa.

Since 1978, Togo, Benin and Ghana have exported nearly four million ball pythons, mainly to the United States. If you have ever seen a ball python in an American pet store, there is a real chance it, or its parents, came from this part of West Africa. Since 1997, farms in the three countries have practiced "ranching": raising snakes collected in the wild as eggs or hatchlings that would otherwise have had little chance of reaching adulthood. Benin cut its export quota for ranched ball pythons from 45,000 in 2017 to 22,000 in 2018 and 2019. Researchers have documented quota overruns and gaps in the official data. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now lists the ball python as Near Threatened: exploitation is heavy, and wild populations are believed to be declining across most of West Africa.

So the same animal is, a few dozen miles apart, a deity brought home when it wanders off, and a commodity exported by the thousands. That contrast takes nothing away from the temple. It helps measure what it means, here, to choose not to kill the python.

Facing the basilica

The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception was built between 1903 and 1909, directly across from the temple, by the Catholic mission. Vodun followers worked on the construction alongside Christians.

The church was raised to the rank of minor basilica in 1989, and Pope Benedict XVI came there in November 2011, during his visit to Benin. It was there, on November 19, 2011, that he signed Africae munus, the document setting out the Catholic Church's priorities for Africa after the second synod of African bishops. The head of the Catholic Church thus signed a text addressed to a whole continent a few dozen yards from Dangbé's shrine, which sums up Ouidah rather well.

The two buildings face each other across a sandy square. On Sundays, you can hear Mass from the temple courtyard. It is the most photographed view in Ouidah, and it says something true: many families here live both belongings without seeing a contradiction.

It would still be naive to read it as effortless harmony. Building a large church facing Dangbé's shrine in the colonial era was not a neutral gesture. Today's coexistence is the result of a century of adjustments, not a natural state. Our pillar on the basilica tells that story.

Dan, from Ouidah to the Americas

Captives shipped from this coast carried their deities with them. Dan is one whose trace is clearest across the Atlantic.

• In Haiti, Danbala Wedo is the serpent lwa, associated with white and purity, and his wife Ayida Wedo is the rainbow. You can hear the Aido-Hwedo of the Fon myth in her name.
• In Brazil, in Jeje Candomblé, the tradition inherited from Dahomey, Dan holds a prominent place. In Jeje Mahi traditions he is described as the serpent of life, linked to transformation and renewal, like a snake shedding its skin; his main aspect is Bessen, his symbols are the rainbow and the serpent, and his favored color is white. Those traditions even name Aidóhwedó, the rainbow serpent of the Fon creation myth, among the elders of Dan's family. Ketu Candomblé, of Yoruba origin, associates Dan with Oxumarê. In Salvador, the Terreiro do Bogum, one of the historic Jeje houses, was founded by Africans from the Dahomey region.
• In Louisiana, the name Damballa survived in the memory of New Orleans Voodoo.

The serpent in New Orleans

The link with Louisiana deserves a closer look. The first enslaved Africans brought to French Louisiana included many Ewe, Fon and Yoruba people from the Bight of Benin, the same coast as Ouidah. Later, people from West-Central Africa became the majority. Then, around 1809, 15,000 to 20,000 French-speaking refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution arrived in New Orleans, reinforcing the city's religious life with Haitian Vodou.

The snake held a central place in New Orleans Voodoo. A deity called Gran Zombi was represented by living serpents in ceremonies, to the point that the snake became the trademark of the city's Voodoo. Marie Laveau, the most famous Voodoo priestess of the 19th century, was described communing with snakes during her rituals. Her Saint John's Eve ceremony of 1874, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, reportedly drew about 12,000 people. She died in 1881.

For a visitor from New Orleans, holding a python in Ouidah is not an exotic thrill. It is touching one of the roots of a story told in your own city.

For many diaspora visitors, the visit then takes on another meaning. It is no longer a curiosity. It is a meeting with the source of a name they already knew.

The temple and tourism

The Temple of Pythons is one of Ouidah's most visited sites. According to figures cited by Wikipedia, it welcomed about 1,100 paying visitors a year when those figures were compiled, mostly during end-of-year holidays and school vacations. Revenue was estimated at 5 million CFA francs a year, 10 percent of which went to the municipality for local development. Visitor numbers have risen sharply since then with the growth of the Vodun Days.

The entrance fee keeps the site and its caretakers going. Extra donations let those who wish be photographed with a python.

A visit, step by step

In practice, here is how the visit usually goes.

At the entrance, you pay the fee. A temple guide welcomes you and explains in a few words who Dangbé is and how the cult works. In the first courtyard, the guide takes you to the pythons' shelter, where the snakes often sleep coiled against each other.

If you wish, the guide takes out a python and places it on your shoulders or in your hands. The touch is cool and smooth, heavier than you might expect. The snake moves slowly. Most visitors are struck by how calm it is. A small contribution is then asked for the photo.

In the second courtyard, you see the iroko and its white cloth. This is the time to ask about ceremonies, the place of women in the cult, or the link with African American and Caribbean religions. Guides are used to these questions.

On the way out, take time to cross the square to the basilica. Doing both visits back to back shows, better than any text, the double belonging of many people in Ouidah.

Visiting respectfully

The temple is open to visitors every day. A temple guide walks you through and explains the cult. There is an entrance fee, and an extra charge is usually asked for photos. Prices change, so bring cash in small notes.

A few guidelines for a good visit:

• Nobody has to touch a python. The guide can place one on your shoulders if you want. If you are afraid of snakes, just say so.
• Ask before photographing people and ceremonies. The courtyard is an active place of worship.
• Come early, especially in the dry season: it is quieter, and the snakes are often easier to see before the heat of the day.
• Do not touch the iroko or ritual objects unless invited to.
• During the Vodun Days, held each year around the second Friday of January, Ouidah welcomes hundreds of thousands of people. The temple gets very crowded then. For a peaceful visit, pick another time.

For how to behave in the town's sacred spaces, see our vodun ceremony etiquette guide.

The Temple of Pythons is the first stop for many visitors. It is best seen together with the Kpassè sacred forest, a ten-minute walk away, which tells the other half of King Kpassè's story, and before or after the Slave Route, a reminder that vodun Ouidah is also the Ouidah of the slave trade.

Plan a visit with a local guide →

Sources

• Temple des Pythons, Wikipedia (French): accounts by Labat, Bosman and Laffitte, site description, seven-year ceremony, python care, 1992 restoration, 2014 closure, visitor numbers.
• BnF Takamtikou: the Temple of Pythons (French).
• Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1704), quoted in Serpent worship in Africa (archive.org) and Popular Science Monthly, "On Vodu-Worship" (1891): snake house, the pig story, Burton's account.
• Savi, Kenneth Kelly's excavations: American Scientist, "Urbanism on West Africa's Slave Coast" and World Archaeology (1997).
• Fon creation myth, Wikipedia and Aido-Hwedo, Oxford Reference.
• Iroko use and traditional conservation in Benin, Forest Ecology and Management, Loco (loa), Wikipedia and Milicia excelsa, Wikipedia.
• West African Vodun, Wikipedia: the main deities.
• WildCRU, ranching ball pythons in West Africa, Mongabay (2020), "Seeking serpents: Ball python trade in Benin" and Ball python, Wikipedia.
• Louisiana Voodoo, Wikipedia: Bight of Benin origins, 1809 refugees, Gran Zombi, Marie Laveau.
• O Candomblé, "Vodun Dan" (Portuguese): Dan and Bessen in Jeje Mahi traditions.
• Candomblé Jeje, Wikipedia, Terreiro Zogbodo Male Bogun Seja Unde and Ayida Wedo, Wikipedia.
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Ouidah, Wikipedia (French).