Mawu-Lisa

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West of the noon stands the moon; east of the midnight stands the sun. In the country the Fon hold as their own — above the red plateau of Abomey, down to the surf of the old slave coast — the two are named in a single breath and served as one power: Mawu, who carries the moon and the cool of the night, and Lisa, who carries the sun and the heat of the day. They are not two gods set against each other. They are the one creator spoken with two mouths, and the first thing the pair did, when the world lay finished, was to give it away.

The name, and how it comes to be told

Mawu-Lisa is the high creator of the Fon, and the hyphen in the name is itself a doctrine. Mawu is the moon-being: female, the night, the coolness, the west, the principle of gentleness and forbearance and the slow patience of things that grow. Lisa is the sun-being: male, the day, the heat, the east, the principle of strength and the edge of force. The Fongbe usage binds them, so that the creator is grammatically two and theologically one — a pair, or, in another telling, a single body with a moon face and a sun face turned to opposite quarters of the sky. Whether they are twins born together, or consorts, brother and sister joined, or the two aspects of one agender godhead, the tellings differ and are allowed to differ; the reference literature notes plainly that Mawu and Lisa “put together” are read as one being of no fixed sex, and the tradition keeps all the variants without needing to collapse them, as it does in the standard Encyclopedia of African Religion account of Mawu-Lisa. The doubling is the point, and to insist that the creator be only one thing would be to misunderstand it.

Behind the pair stands an older figure who does not act. The primordial mother Nana Buluku — Nana Buruku in another spelling — is named as the one before the beginning, older than creation itself. In the Fon telling it was she who brought forth the moon-being and the sun-being, and then withdrew: having given the world its makers, she left the running of it to Mawu-Lisa and retired beyond approach. No large cult attends her; the tradition acknowledges her precedence and does not petition her, because the first source no longer minds the near affairs of the living. This withdrawn creator behind the working one is a recurring shape in the religion of the Fon and their western kin, and it is what makes the active powers necessary in the first place: a god who has stepped back must delegate, and the whole crowded order beneath descends from that first stepping-back.

The account survives in the record chiefly because outsiders wrote it down. The classic ethnography is Melville J. Herskovits’s two-volume Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938), set down after fieldwork in Abomey, and its earlier companion, An Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief (1933), written with Frances S. Herskovits; the later French synthesis of Paul Mercier and, on the art and psychology of the vodun, Suzanne Preston Blier’s African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1995) extend it. These are the eyes through which much of the world first met Mawu-Lisa, and they are colonial-era eyes — thorough, but outside the shrine looking in. Where their account is load-bearing it is worth remembering that the living knowledge belongs to the vodunon, the priests, and to the oral tradition they keep; the books are a record of that knowledge, not its source. The tradition is older than its transcription, and it is still spoken.

A Vodun shrine wall in Grand-Popo, on the Benin coast, where the powers descended from the creator are served at the door of the sanctuary. Heikki Kastemaa (Kulttuurinavigaattori), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The moon and the sun, married

The genius of the conception is that the two are married, not at war. Coolness and heat, night and day, moon and sun, west and east, the female principle and the male — the Fon cosmos is thought in pairs, and the pairs are held in tension rather than resolved into a victor. There is no doctrine here of light conquering darkness, no hierarchy in which the sun outranks the moon; the world stands because Mawu and Lisa balance, each incomplete without the other, and to live well within that world is to honor the complementarity it is built from. The moon does not defeat the sun. The night is not the enemy of the day. What the creator teaches simply by being two is that nothing in the order stands alone, that every thing answers to its opposite, and that the equilibrium of opposites is not a weakness in the design but the design itself.

Within the pair the labor of creation is itself divided, and here the tradition draws its finest line. Mawu is commonly named the maker of human beings: she shapes them from clay, the old and universal gesture of the potter-god, mixing the stuff of the first people with her hands. Lisa is the one who then teaches — the use of tools, the working of iron, the cultivation of the ground, the building of an ordered and civilized life. Creation and instruction are not two acts by two gods but one act by one creator with two faces: to make the human being and to teach it how to be human are the same work, begun by the moon and completed by the sun. The reference tradition puts it starkly — that Mawu is the sole maker of people from clay, while Lisa was set to teach them how to build the world they would live in. A creator who both forms and instructs is a creator concerned not merely that the world exist but that it be inhabited rightly.

The world handed over

Having made the world, Mawu-Lisa does not sit on a throne above it and rule each grain of it by hand. The creator’s characteristic act is delegation. From the pair issue the children who become the great vodun, the active powers, and to each is given a domain of the world to hold. The earth, with its soil and its harvests and the smallpox and afflictions that rise from the ground, goes to Sakpata, the earth-king. The thunder and the sky, the lightning that falls and the rain that feeds the fields, go to Xevioso — Sogbo in the older naming — the thunder-vodun. The sea and everything alive in it belong to Agbe. Iron, and with it war and the forge and the edge of every tool and weapon, belongs to Gu, the smith of the gods. And the dynamic, sinuous principle of the world — the rainbow-serpent that coils beneath the earth to hold it from sinking — is Dan, named among the oldest of the works. These are the vodun, and they are what a person actually serves: not the remote creator but the near powers set over the field, the storm, the water, the iron, the pulse of living motion. The pantheon is therefore a genealogy, a branching descent from a delegating maker down through the great sky-earth-sea-iron divisions to the many local powers of a particular town or lineage. The word for this whole class of beings, vodun, is the one that crossed the ocean and became the name of a diaspora religion.

Between the human being and these powers stands a mediator, for a message that cannot cross the threshold reaches no one. Legba, the vodun of the crossroads and of the unpredictable, is the messenger without whom no offering arrives at the god it is meant for; every approach to the vodun opens by first opening the way through him. And the will of Mawu-Lisa for a single life is not left mute: it is read through the Fa, the Fon divination cognate to the Yoruba Ifa, held to be the very writing of the creator’s order — the destiny set down before a person is born, carried as a personal sign, disclosed by the trained diviner who has spent years learning the corpus. To consult the Fa is to learn what the creator has already ordained and what the fitting response to it must be. The system is described here only in its architecture, as it stands in the public record; its verses and its procedures are the living property of the diviners who keep them, and are not to be handled as instruction.

So Mawu-Lisa is present in the working world less as a throne to be petitioned than as the source and guarantor of an order that runs itself through others: through the vodun who hold the domains, through Legba who carries the word, through the Fa that reads the destiny, through the vodunon who serve at the shrines. This is a supreme-creator theology with a delegated pantheon beneath it — a cosmology of balance and of handing-over, sophisticated and internally coherent, and nothing about it warrants the old outsiders’ word “primitive.” The remoteness of the creator is not neglect. It is the very thing that makes the served world of the vodun necessary and full.

A Fon appliqué cloth of the old kingdom of Dahomey, the royal art in which the Fon set down the deeds and emblems of their world in cut-and-sewn color. IvanaMadzarevic, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The kingdom that held the account

The theology reaches the modern record from inside a state. The Kingdom of Dahomey, a Fon polity centered on the plateau capital of Abomey, rose about 1600 and grew southward across the following centuries, fastening itself onto the Atlantic trade of the coast until the French conquest of 1892–94 ended it. Its cradle lay to the south at Allada, the older Aja-Fon kingdom from whose ruling house the founders of Dahomey traced their line; the foundation stories of that descent — the brothers who parted to found the rival kingdoms — are told variously and their exact history is debated. What is not in doubt is the record the kingdom left behind. The Royal Palaces of Abomey, the earthen seat of the Dahomean kings with their long walls of polychrome bas-relief, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, and on those walls the kingdom recorded its own history and ritual order. It was the court and country of this kingdom that Herskovits came to in the 1930s, and it is largely the Dahomean telling that fixed Mawu-Lisa in the books.

One question about the account remains genuinely open, and honesty requires that it be named rather than settled. Whether the Mawu-Lisa dual-creator theology is native to the Aja-Fon or was shaped in contact with the eastern Yoruba and their orisha religion is contested. Some of the documentary record derives the figures from Yoruba antecedents — pairing Mawu with the orisha sometimes rendered Yeye Mowo and Lisa with Obatala, adopted and recast by the Fon — while other scholars weigh the claim cautiously, and the wider question of who borrowed from whom, across a frontier of centuries of war and exchange, cuts both ways. Dahomey and the Yoruba kingdoms were rivals and neighbors, and rivalry is a channel of transmission as much as a barrier to it. The safe statement is that the Fon and the Yoruba religions are close cousins whose exact kinship is debated, and that Mawu-Lisa is worked, however it began, through a fully Fon order of the vodun.

Carried across the water

The same Atlantic trade that enriched Abomey carried the Fon and their creators out of Africa. Ouidah, on the coast below the capital, was one of the major embarkation ports of the transatlantic slave trade, and through its “Door of No Return” and the ports like it the vodun went into the diaspora in the hold of the ships, in the memory of the enslaved. They surface, recognizably, on the far shore. Nana Buluku, the primordial mother behind the creator pair, endures in Brazilian Candomblé — in the Jejé and Ketu nations — as Nanã, pictured there, as in the homeland, as a woman older than creation itself. The Fon powers reappear in Haitian Vodou, whose very name is the Fon word vodun, and in Cuban Lucumí, cousins in the New World to the Yoruba orisha carried across by the same trade. The word for the crossing is not corruption but transmission: the creators and the vodun were carried, under enslavement, and kept.

Against all of this stands a caricature that must be named precisely so that it can be refused. The colonial and then the Hollywood imagination reduced this religion to “voodoo” — zombies, pins in dolls, “black magic,” devil-worship, an image built for the horror film and the missionary tract. It is a distortion assembled in the diaspora and on the cinema screen, and it has almost nothing to do with the thing it claims to depict. What the caricature erases is exactly the structure set out above: a supreme creator in Mawu-Lisa, behind whom stands the primordial Nana Buluku; the vodun as the ordered forces over the world’s domains; a priesthood in the vodunon; a divination system in the Fa that reads a life’s destiny; and a cosmology of balance and delegation. Vodun is a coherent world religion, and the “voodoo” of the poster is a thing said about it by outsiders, never a description of it — a problem in the historical record to be marked, not a vocabulary to be adopted.

The living religion answers the caricature on its own ground. Vodun is a recognized national faith of the Republic of Benin: it was officially acknowledged as a religion in 1996 under President Nicéphore Soglo, who declared 10 January a national holiday — the Fête du Vodoun, the Vodun Days, now observed nationwide and most visibly at Ouidah, drawing thousands of pilgrims and visitors to the coast each year. The Fon are a living people; so are the Ewe of Togo and Ghana, the Ewe, western kin who name the moon-being Mawu in their own tongue; so are the Aja of Tado and Allada, the ancestral people from whom the Fon and the Ewe descend; so are the Gun of Porto-Novo. Vodun is a living faith across Benin, Togo, and the vast diaspora, served daily at shrines like the peg-studded pilgrimage mound of Dankoli near Savalou. The scholarship of Herskovits and Mercier and Blier records a religion; it does not embalm one.

At the head of it all the creator keeps a particular kind of presence — not the loud presence of a god who answers every call, but the quiet weight of the two who made the moon and the sun and then trusted the world to the powers they set within it. Mawu turns her cool face over the west and the night; Lisa burns in the east over the day; and between them the vodun hold the domains that were handed to them, exactly as the pair intended when they finished the work and stepped back from it. The Fon still salute the creator’s order at the crossroads and in the shrine, and the moon and the sun have not yet let the world fall.

→ Related: Legba · Gu · Dan · Sakpata · Ouidah · Abomey · Allada · Dankoli · The Ewe · The Aja · The Gun