The term "Vodun" covers a number of cults dedicated to different deities in the same pantheon, or to spirits, natural forces or ancestors, either disembodied or resident in fetishes.

Art, Psychology, and Power (Chicago, 1995) was the most complete English-language account of African vodun objects when it was published, based on a year of fieldwork in 1985-86 in Abomey, Benin and nearby towns.

It discusses the religious artifacts of the Fon people and their neighbors in Benin and Togo, called bochio or bocheaw (empowered bodies) and the associated vodun beliefs and practices.

[7] Typically the bochio are wood carvings enhanced with medicines that are packed inside them or attached in packets, and with paint and objects such as horns, beads or chains.

[7] Bocheaw are activated or empowered by assemblage, speech, saliva, heat in the form of pepper and alcohol, knotting and offering to the higher power or deity.

[8] The coastal regions of what are now Benin and Togo have long been open to external ideas and images that have been absorbed into the local culture, and are reflected in the elastic structure of Vodun religion and art.

Attissou was also drawn to the Indian gods and their power to control the sea from an early age, and used to spend many hours on the beach, where he made long visits to "India".

[15] Ancestral asen, which honor the dead, are authentic ritual sculptures in the sense that they are made by African artists for religious purposes and not for the tourist trade.

It celebrated the transatlantic Vodun religion, and was attended by priest and priestesses from Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil and the United States, as well as by government officials and tourists from Europe and the Americas.

[17] Some of the art commissioned for the festival is displayed at sites in the city, including work by the Benin artists Cyprien Tokoudagba, Calixte Dakpogan, Theodore Dakpogan, Simonet Biokou, Dominique Kouas, and Yves Apollinaire Pede, and work of the African Diaspora artists Edouard Duval-Carrié (Haiti), José Claudio (Brazil) and Manuel Mendive (Cuba).