Key Info

- Husband Wife twin descendents of Nana Buluku who rule after she "retires".

- Lisa is the sun and Mawu is the moon

- They will eventually merge into a twin being

Brief Bio

Mawu-Lisa is the creator god of the Fon pantheon. The deity is actually a combination of two gods, Mawu and Lisa, who merged to form a single being with two faces. They are husband and wife, and both children Nana Baluku and are the parents of Oba Koso (Shango), known as Hebioso among the Fon.

The dual nature of the god represents balance between the opposing elements of the universe. Mawu is the female aspect of the deity, associated with motherhood, gentleness, forgiveness, and fertility. She represents the earth, the west, the moon, the night, and the rising sun.

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 relationship 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.