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Mawu

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Mawu-Lisa (alternately: Mahu) is a creator goddess, associated with the Sun and Moon in Gbe mythology and West African Vodun, particularly of the former Dahomey Kingdom (now Benin). Mawu and Lisa are divine; put together they are an agender god. Mawu (Mahu, Mau) and Lisa are the children of Nana Buluku, and are the parents of Oba Koso (Shango), known as Hebioso among the Fon.

According to myth, Mawu is the sole creator of human beings from clay, while her husband Lisa was instructed by her to teach humans how to build civilization. As the myth goes, after creating the Earth and all life and everything else on it, Mawu became concerned that it might be too heavy, so she asked the primeval serpent, Aido Hwedo, to curl up beneath the earth and thrust it up in the sky. When she asked Awe, a monkey she had also created, to help out and make some more animals out of clay, he boasted to the other animals and challenged Mawu. Gbadu, one of the first Loa Mawu birthed from her love making with Lisa, saw all the chaos on earth and told her children to go out among the people and remind them that only Mawu herself can give Sekpoli - the breath of life. Gbadu instructed her daughter, Minona, to go out among the people and teach them about the use of palm kernels as omens from Mawu-Lisa. When Awe, the arrogant monkey, climbed up to the heavens to try to show Mawu that he too could give life, he failed miserably. Lisa made him a bowl of porridge with the seed of death in it and reminded him that only his wife Mawu could give life, and that she could also take it away.

It became the state deity of Dahomey, but ultimately, the Mawu-Lisa dyad was not originally a Fon phenomenon, and were deities borrowed from Yoruba culture (cf. § Yoruba roots).

Etymology

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Mawu derives from Ewe: wu ("stretch over", "overshadow") in the Gbe language of the Ewe people.[1]

Yoruba roots

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It has been asserted that the cult of Mawu-Lisa as a dualistic vodun actually derives from Yoruba mythology, i.e., the Mawu vodun was originally the female orisha Mowo (Yeye Mowo), while Lisa was originally the male orisha Obatala (aka Osegbo/Oseremagbo), her husband and Yoruba creation and sky deity,[2] who fashioned humans out of clay.[3] However, the Dahomey kingdom (of the Gbe speakers; the Fon people, aka Danxome, later Benin) seized control over parts of historical Yorubaland, and as a consequence, the cult of Mawu-Lisa diffused westwards from Yorubaland into the socio-religious consciousness of the Gbe speaking peoples.[2][5] This diffusion into Dahomey first took place around the Agbome (Abomey) plateau.[2]

In Ife, the cultural cradle of the Yoruba, both deities are twinned as Orisa-Yemowo in conjoined temples.[3]

The gradual transformation from the word Orisa to Lisa is in congruence with the general rules of transmutation of borrowed words of Yoruba origin in Gbe lexicons to fit the Fon-Gbe phonology, which are characterized by certain sound shifts such as; the dropping of Initial Vowels i.e Ogun to Gun/Gu, the phoneme [B] to [V] i.e Oba Adjo to Avadjo or Oyinbo to Yovo,[6] and a switch from [R] to [L], i.e Iroko to Loko,[7] and the Akoro/Okoro quarters of Porto Novo into Aklon.[8]

Both ethnological research/data and oral accounts collected from the Fon themselves attest to these facts.[9] Under the 18th century rule byTegbesu, the Dahomey kingdom placed the borrowed gods Mawu-Lisa in an inferior hierarchy, i.e., serving the Nesuhwe (Nesuxwe[4]) or divinized ancestors of the royal house.[10][a] At the same time ("contemporary with the emergence of the state deity"), "the couple Mawu-Lisa" was elevated to status of the creator of the world, but remained as one creation myths among a number of cosmogonies present in the Kingdom,[10]

The original twinned Mawu-Lisa duplex was groomed into a monotheistic Mawu religion, due to machinations by Christian missionaries according to commentators. Even though mid-17th century Capuchin missionaries translated the Christian God as the male god Lisa (proselytizing in Allada, 1658[11]), by the 19th century,[12] it became common to use Mawu, the goddess's name as the Dahomey equivalent of the One God of Christianity.[12][11]

More broadly among other Gbe speaking people (i.e., Ewe-Aja-Fon culture area, including the Aja people and Ewe people), Mawu has been elevated to the omnipotent God by the influence of Christian doctrine.[13]

Ethnographer Alfred Burdon Ellis (d. 1894) was initially inclined to attribute the role of the Ashanti-Akan supreme deity Nyankopon as being largely modeled on the Christian Jehovah,[15] but retracted and decided the Ashanti Nyankopon was a confounding with Jehovah, not a conflation.[17][19] More to the point, Ellis also regarded the Mawu as being conceived of as a deity over the sky or firmament by the of the Ewe prior to their contact with Christianity.[20][14]

Explanatory notes

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  1. ^ The pairing of Mawu-Lisa mirrored the pairing of the kpojito (queen mother) Adono with King Agaja.[3][4]

References

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Citations

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  1. ^ Ellis (1890), p. 31.
  2. ^ a b c Fatunmbi, Fá'lokun (1993). Obatala: Ifa and the Spirit of the Chief of the White Cloth. Original Publications. ISBN 978-0-942272-30-7. Retrieved 4 March 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d Bay, Edna G. (1998). Wives of the leopard : gender, politics, and culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-8139-1791-7. (books.google)
  4. ^ a b c Mills, Bronwyn (2016). "6. The Vodun Has Killed Them: New Rorld/Old World Vodun, Creolité, and the After-Renaissance". In Joseph, Celucien L.; Hoffmann-Nixon S. Cleophat, Ama a (eds.). Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 120–121. ISBN 9798881882105.
  5. ^ Bay (1998): "Though brought from an area west of Dahomey, Mawu and Lisa were originally linked to Yoruba-speaking cultures to the east...",[3] quoted by Mills[4]
  6. ^ "Bulletin du Comité d'études historiques et scientifiques de l'Afrique occidentale française" (in French). E. Larose. 1924. Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  7. ^ Verger, Pierre (1995). Dieux d'Afrique: culte des Orishas et Vodouns à l'ancienne côte des esclaves en Afrique et à Bahia, la baie de tous les saints au Brésil (in French). Editions Revue noire. p. 36. ISBN 978-2-909571-13-3. Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  8. ^ Adefuye, Ade; Agiri, Babatunde (1987). History of the Peoples of Lagos State. Lantern Books. ISBN 978-978-2281-48-7. Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  9. ^ Yai (1993), p. 254.
  10. ^ a b Yai (1993), p. 257.
  11. ^ a b Yai (1993), p. 258.
  12. ^ a b Bay (1998), p. 168.
  13. ^ Yai (1993), p. 253.
  14. ^ a b c Frazer, James George (1926). The Worship of Nature: The worship of the earth, the sky, and the sun. London: Macmillan. pp. 101–102.
  15. ^ Ellis, A. B. (1887) The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa, (London, ), pp. 24 sqq. apud Frazer[14]
  16. ^ Ellis (1890).
  17. ^ [16], pp. 36 sqq. quoted by Frazer.[14]
  18. ^ Rattray, Robert Sutherland (1923). Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 140.
  19. ^ anthropologist Robert Sutherland Rattray (d. 1938) also shared the opinion that the Ashanti deity was not derived of Christian influence,[18] quoted by Frazer (1926), pp. 102–103 Rattray had rebuked Ellis on his earlier stance (Frazer, p. 103, n1).
  20. ^ Ellis (1890), pp. 35–36.

Bibliography

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|title= From Vodun to Mawu : Monotheism and History in the Fon Cultural Area |journal=SAPINA Newsletter: A Bulletin of the Society for African Philosophy in North America |volume=4 |number=2–3 |date=1992|url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/SAPINA/VCMqAQAAMAAJ?gbpv=1&bsq=mawu |pages=265-}}-->