Mawu-Lisa

The Moon and the Sun

Domain: Creation, Sun & Moon
Alignment: Lawful Good
Element: Light
Relics of Power: Twin Disk of the Sky

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5 sections of this entry are open to everyone: the summary, the people, the symbols, the lineage and the sources. The other 9 (Name and epithets, In the ancient sources, The myths, Worship and archaeology, How the god was depicted, What scholars debate, After antiquity, Did you know?, Codex relic) are part of the full Codex: PRO opens the whole study of all 500 deities, and without a subscription you can read one full entry a day, just like in the app.

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The People

People

African peoples

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Period

antiquity – present

These deities gather traditions of various Sub-Saharan African peoples, from the Bantu to the Akan and Dogon. Worshipped through ancestral rites, masks, and drums, they bind communities to the spirits of nature and the ancestors. Many of these beliefs remain alive both in Africa and in the religions of the diaspora.

Mask societies, such as those of the Dogon and Bambara, give body to the spirits in ceremonial dances. Initiation rites mark the passage to adulthood, and offerings of water, grain, and animals keep the bond with the ancestors and the spirits of nature.

At a glance

In the ethnographic sources on old Dahomey, Mawu and Lisa are the two sky deities: Mawu, tied to the firmament, to rain and (in Burton) to the moon, and Lisa, tied to the sun. Herskovits (1938) calls them the 'Great Gods of the Sky' of the Fon sky pantheon, alongside Gii and Agè, and records origin myths in which couples sent from the sky teach the worship of Mawu and Lisa. Ellis (1890) and Burton (1864) disagree on the central point: whether Mawu is a supreme creator or only the most powerful among independent gods. This study follows only what those three books say. Ellis identifies Lisa with the sun and records his marriage to Gleti, the Moon; Burton instead identifies Mau with the Moon, differing on the lunar deity.

The ancient sources on this deity are scarce. This study gathers only what is on record.

14 min read · Reviewed on October 14, 2026 · How we research

Sacred symbols

The moon and the sun, the eclipse, the chameleon and the rainbow

Family

Mawu-Lisa

Unions

Gleti (the Moon, wife of Lisa in Ellis)

Children

Children of the sky god, unnamed in the consulted sources (Herskovits, p. 159)

Genealogy according to Ellis 1890, cap. IV; Herskovits 1938, vol. 1, p. 159; Burton 1864, vol. 2, p. 135. Nana Buluku não consta nesses textos.

Sources and further reading

Primary sources

Alfred Burrows Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1890). read
Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, vol. 1 (1938). read
Richard Francis Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, vol. 2 (1864). read

Studies

Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (digital edition, same work, volume 2 not consulted). 1938. open

Name and epithets

According to Ellis (1890, ch. III), Mawu is both a proper name and a word meaning 'sky', 'firmament' and 'rain'; he derives it from the verb wu, 'to stretch over', and understands the god as the spirit dwelling in the v…

In the ancient sources

A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, 1890; account by a British colonial officer.

The myths

Mawu partitions the universe and sends Gii and Lisa to men. Herskovits opens his section on the 'tohwiyo' (the founding being of each clan) by summarizing beliefs about the origin of the world.

Worship and archaeology

The sources describe worship unevenly. Ellis states that no one offers sacrifice directly to Mawu and that prayer is rarely made to him; in his words he is ignored rather than worshipped, since informants explained that…

How the god was depicted

What the sources describe is cult objects, not figures. Lisa's emblem, in Ellis and in Burton, is a red clay pot with a lid, striped with white, with a chameleon on top, filled with water on a small mound.

What scholars debate

Is Mawu the supreme creator?. Ellis denies it: Mawu is the most powerful of the gods but only one among many independent gods, and the idea of a supreme creator would come, in his view, from European influence, above al…

After antiquity

The name of Mawu entered the vocabulary of Christian missionaries on the Slave Coast. Ellis reports that Roman Catholic missionaries took Mawu for a recollection of Jehovah, to the point of calling themselves Mawu-no, a…

Did you know?

In Burton, 'Mau-ji' and 'Lisa-ji' are also cardinal points: Lisa-ji, the 'sky of Lisa', is the east, where the sun rises, and Mau-ji, the 'sky of Mau', is the west, where the moon is supposed to begin.

Codex relic

Twin Disk of the Sky. The union of the cool moon and the burning sun, the two aspects with which they govern the world's day and night.

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