Fon Cosmology (Mawu-Lisa)

← Encyclopedia

On the plateau above Abomey, in the country the Fon call their own and the slavers came to call the Slave Coast, the world is held together by a serpent. It lies coiled beneath the earth and the sea, its tail in its mouth, and what it carries on its back is not a burden imposed on it but the work of the two who made everything: Mawu, who is the moon, and Lisa, who is the sun. They are one deity spoken with two names, and to understand the Dahomean account of how the world came to be is to begin with that doubling — a creation conceived not as a single will descending but as a pair holding the world between them, each incomplete without the other.

A Legba shrine in a locality of Savalou, Benin, where the threshold-keeping vodun is still served — Ahya ATINDEHOU, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mawu-Lisa, the dual creator

Mawu-Lisa is the high creator of the Fon, named as a single power that is plainly two. Mawu is female: the moon, the night, the cool of the west, mistress of coolness, gentleness, fertility, motherhood, and forbearance. Lisa is male: the sun, the day, the heat of the east, the principle of strength, hardness, and the warrior’s force. They are described in the oldest sustained record of Fon religion — Melville Herskovits’s two-volume Dahomey (1938) — as twins, born together, and at once as consorts, brother and sister joined; and from their union the ordered world descends. The pairing is not decorative. It carries the whole logic of the cosmology, which thinks in twos: heat and coolness, day and night, male and female, the visible and the hidden. Mawu-Lisa is the dualism at the root of Fon thought made into a deity, the principle that nothing in the world stands alone but each thing answers to its complement.

In the fuller mythography the dual creator is not first. Before Mawu-Lisa stands Nana Buluku, the primordial mother who is herself spoken of as beyond gender or as holding both — the “beginning,” the source from which Mawu and Lisa are brought forth. Having given birth to the dual creator and so to the world, Nana Buluku withdrew. The withdrawal is decisive and not an oversight: the first power, having delegated the ordering of things to its offspring, retires from the running of the world. Herskovits recorded that in Dahomey there was no specific cult of Nana Buluku, though its precedence over all the others was acknowledged — the creator one does not approach because the creator no longer attends to the near affairs of the living. This is the figure the comparative study of religion has called the deus otiosus, the god at rest; in the Fon telling it is the hinge on which the whole structure turns, for the remoteness of the first source is exactly what makes the active deities — the vodun — necessary.

The vodun ordered beneath the creators

The work of governing the world fell to the children of Mawu-Lisa, and these are the vodun: the active powers, the deities one actually serves. The Fon word vodun names this whole class of beings, and it is the word that crossed the Atlantic to become the name of an entire diasporic religion. In the Dahomean account Mawu-Lisa bore a generation of offspring and apportioned among them the great domains of the world, and these became the heads of the major pantheons. The eldest, Sakpata, received the earth — its soil, its harvests, and the smallpox and afflictions that rise from it. Sogbo (also reckoned as So) took the sky and the thunder, the lightning that falls and the rain that feeds the ground. Agbe, with his consort, received the sea and everything that lives in it. To others fell the wild and the hunt (Age), iron and the edge of every tool and weapon (Gu), and the air (Djo). Each of these stands at the head of its own family of vodun, so that the pantheon is not a flat list but a branching order, descending from the dual creator through the great sky-earth-thunder-sea divisions to the many local powers served in particular towns and lineages.

The architecture is hierarchical and genealogical at once. The remote first source delegates to the dual creator; the dual creator delegates to the children; the children preside over the pantheons that touch human life directly. Worship does not climb back up the chain to Nana Buluku or even, ordinarily, to Mawu-Lisa as such; it addresses the vodun who govern the field, the storm, the sea, the forge. The system has the shape that the study of West African religion meets again and again — a withdrawn high creator above a crowded order of active intermediaries, a structure paralleled in the Nyame-and-abosom order of the Akan and in the supreme Roog above the lesser spirits of the Serer, each an independent cosmology and none reducible to the others — but the Fon give it a particular, doubled signature, because at its summit the creator is itself a pair.

Da Aido-Hwedo, the serpent that girds the world

Older than the ordered world, and necessary to it, is Da Aido-Hwedo, the cosmic serpent — da being the Fon word for the dynamic, sinuous principle, the quality of motion and life that runs like a snake through all things. In the creation account Aido-Hwedo existed before the earth was shaped, and when Mawu-Lisa went out to make the world the serpent carried the creator in its mouth, winding across the void. Where its body passed it left the contours of the land: the mountains heaped up, the rivers traced in its track, the valleys pressed into the ground. The world the serpent helped lay down is the world we walk.

But the finished earth, loaded with its mountains and forests and the great beasts, was too heavy to hang unsupported. So Mawu set Aido-Hwedo to coil beneath it, ringing the earth round and resting under its weight to hold it from sinking into the waters below. There the serpent lies, biting its own tail, and to keep it cool in its labor — for it cannot bear heat — the sea was made for it to lie in. The serpent’s stirring is felt as the movement of the heavens and, when it shifts in its coils, as the trembling of the earth. Above, the same serpent shows itself as the rainbow, the bright double arc that bridges sky and ground. Here again the doubling speaks: the single serpent is at once the hidden support far beneath and the visible sign far above, the lowest thing in the cosmos and the highest, holding the structure between its two ends exactly as Mawu and Lisa hold the day between night and noon.

Legba at the threshold

Among the children of Mawu-Lisa the last-born holds a place out of all proportion to his rank. Legba is the youngest, and in the telling the one most indulged. When the realms were parceled out among his elder siblings — earth, sky, sea, iron, the hunt — there was no domain left to give him. What he received instead was a function that runs through all the domains: he was kept at the side of the creator and made the one who carries word between Mawu-Lisa and the other vodun, and between the vodun and humankind. To each of his siblings Mawu gave a separate language for the governing of a separate realm; Legba alone was given all of them, so that he is the single being who understands every tongue the vodun speak and the speech of the creator besides. He is, in the precise sense, the divine translator — nothing passes between the worlds except through him.

This makes Legba the trickster and the gatekeeper together, and the two are one office. He stands at the threshold — the doorway of the compound, the gate of the village, the crossing of paths, the opening of any rite, which is saluted before all others. He is unpredictable, appetitive, given to overturning expectation; the mischief and the mediation are the same capacity, the freedom of the one who belongs to no fixed realm and therefore moves through all of them. Every communication with the vodun begins by opening the way through Legba, because a message that cannot cross the threshold reaches no one. And it is Legba who stands at the door of the one practice on which the whole Dahomean sense of order finally rests: the reading of destiny through Fa.

Fa at the core

If Mawu-Lisa is the structure of the cosmos, Fa is its writing. In the Fon understanding Fa is the destiny inscribed for the world and for each person within it — what Mawu-Lisa has decreed — and the system by which that decree can be known. Fa is held to be the very script of the creator: the order of things set down before a person is born, carried as a personal sign that each individual possesses. The signs are sixteen principal figures combined into sixteen-by-sixteen pairs, yielding two hundred fifty-six in all, and to each belongs a vast body of memorized verse — narratives, precedents, and counsel — that the diviner holds in his trained memory. The one who reads them is the bokono (also bokonon), who undergoes a long apprenticeship to master the corpus and the discipline of interpretation. To consult Fa is to discover which of the two hundred fifty-six signs governs a matter, and so to learn what destiny has already set down and what the proper response to it must be.

Fa does not stand apart from the rest of the cosmology; it is woven into it. Because Fa is the speech of the creator’s order, it can be opened only through Legba, who alone construes the message — the diviner’s work begins by addressing the one who keeps the threshold. The faculty of fixed sight by which destiny is held is itself personified and depends on Legba’s hand to be opened. And the whole apparatus belongs to the same family of West African systems of divination as the Yoruba Ifa: Fa is the Fon cognate of Ifa, sharing the same sixteen-fold architecture and the same idea of an immense oral corpus of signs and verses that functions, in effect, as a memorized scripture — the role the Yoruba give to the Odù. The kinship is close and historically traceable. Dahomey and the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo were rivals and neighbors, and the centuries of war, exchange, and tribute between them carried divinatory knowledge across the frontier; the Fon adopted and recast the system on their own terms. It is a kinship of cognates, not an identity: Fa is Dahomean, worked through the Fon order of the vodun and the threshold-keeping of Legba, and it is not interchangeable with the Yoruba orisha system from which its sister discipline grew.

The kingdom and the consolidation of Fa

This cosmology took the shape in which it is best documented inside a state. The Kingdom of Dahomey, a Fon polity centered on Abomey, rose in the seventeenth century and expanded south toward the coast in the eighteenth: under King Agaja it conquered the older kingdom of Allada in 1724 and the slaving port of Whydah (Ouidah) in 1727, fastening the kingdom onto the Atlantic trade that would make it notorious and rich. Dahomey grew by absorbing what it conquered, and the religious order grew with it — the cults of subject peoples, the vodun of Allada and the coast, and the divinatory science were drawn into a deliberately administered state cult.

The Kingdom of Dahomey, with the inland capital Abomey and the conquered coastal ports of Allada and Whydah — AbstractIllusions, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The reign of Tegbesu (1740–1774), Agaja’s successor, is the period conventionally associated with this consolidation. Ruling a kingdom that had recently swallowed older and prouder states and needed to make its authority legitimate over them, Tegbesu is credited with a wide reorganization of Dahomean institutions, ritual among them. Fa divination was bound into the machinery of the state, consulted on questions of war and policy and required, in the royal tradition, to ratify the succession to the throne itself; the great annual ceremonies of the kingdom, the offerings that sustained the royal ancestors and the vodun, fixed the cosmology into the calendar of public power. What had been a cosmology of household, lineage, and village became also the cosmology of a state — the same structure of withdrawn creator, dual makers, ordered vodun, and inscribed destiny, now underwriting a throne.

Polychrome bas-reliefs at the Royal Palaces of Abomey, where the kingdom’s history and ritual order were recorded on the palace walls — UNESCO, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

The same Atlantic trade that enriched Abomey carried the Fon and their gods out of Africa, and there the cosmology entered its second life.

Across the Atlantic

When enslaved Fon and Ewe people were carried from the Bight of Benin into the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the vodun went with them. The word itself made the crossing: Haitian Vodou takes its name directly from Fon vodun, “spirit” or “deity.” The Dahomean stratum became the “cool,” ancestral wing of the diasporic religion — the Rada nation, named for Allada/Arada, the very kingdom Agaja had conquered — set in a working balance against the “hot” Petwo nation of largely Kongo derivation. The figures travel recognizably. Legba, keeper of the threshold, becomes the lwa saluted first at every Haitian ceremony, the one who opens the gate; the serpent Aido-Hwedo and the rainbow are remembered in Damballah and Ayida-Wèdo, the primordial serpent-couple; the very practice of serving active intermediary spirits beneath a remote creator is the Dahomean architecture carried intact. This is one of the principal channels by which African religion crossed the Middle Passage, and the relationship is one of parent to descendant, named here with the respect owed to a transmission accomplished under enslavement — syncretism in its hardest and most creative form. The lived diasporic religion, and the source tradition still served across Benin, Togo, and beyond, belong to West African Vodun and to the cult of Sango and its neighbors in their own right; what the Fon contributed to that Atlantic world was, above all, this cosmology — the dual creator and the order beneath it.

The textual and scholarly record

The documentary base for Fon cosmology rests on a small number of foundational works. The indispensable source remains Melville J. Herskovits’s Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (J. J. Augustin, 1938), the two-volume ethnography that recorded the Mawu-Lisa creation, the genealogy of the vodun, the figure of Nana Buluku, and the place of Da Aido-Hwedo in the fullest detail then set down; its companion, Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (with Frances S. Herskovits, Northwestern University Press, 1958), gathered the creation and vodun myths as told. For Fa specifically the landmark is Bernard Maupoil’s La géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves (Institut d’Ethnologie, 1943), the great study of the Dahomean divinatory system and its corpus, against which later treatments are measured. The trickster-mediator at the threshold received its classic analytic treatment in Robert D. Pelton’s The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (University of California Press, 1980), which reads Legba alongside the Yoruba Eshu. The art and material theology of the vodun — the bocio power-figures, the asen memorial altars — are treated in Suzanne Preston Blier’s African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (University of Chicago Press, 1995). For concise reference, the Encyclopedia of Religion entry on Fon and Ewe religion sets out the pantheon and the divinatory system, naming Fa as the writing of Mawu administered by the bokono; and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s introduction to Fa divination of Benin situates the practice in the living religion of present-day Benin and in the Dahomey-Oyo exchange that links it to Yoruba Ifa. These works are properly consulted, not reproduced: the divinatory corpus is living religious property, and its verses, signs, and procedures are described here as architecture only, never as operative instruction.

The logic of the pair

What holds the Dahomean cosmos together is the same thing that opens it: a refusal of the single. Nothing in it stands by itself. The creator is two, moon and sun married; the serpent is one body with two ends, the buried support and the bright rainbow; the youngest god is both trickster and gatekeeper, mischief and message in one office; destiny itself is read only when the keeper of the threshold consents to open the sight that holds it. To live well within this order is to honor the complementarity it is built from — to keep the way open through Legba, to serve the vodun who govern the near world while acknowledging the withdrawn source above them, to consult the writing of Mawu before acting, and so to bring one’s own conduct into the doubling by which the world was made and is held. The serpent does not let go; the sun and the moon do not collapse into one; and the order they made stands because each of its powers answers to another, exactly as it was set down.

→ Related: West African Vodun · Ifa Divination · Odu Ifa Corpus · Orisha Religion · Akan Religion · Dogon Cosmology · Serer Religion · Bakongo Cosmology Dikenga · Sango Cult · Divination · Syncretism · Dualism