Fon cosmology as documented by Melville Herskovits centers creation on Mawu and Lisa, complementary aspects of a single creative principle sometimes described as twins, sometimes as a single androgynous being, and sometimes as wife and husband depending on the telling and the ritual context. Mawu is associated with the moon, the west, and the cool, nurturing, forgiving qualities of night, while Lisa is associated with the sun, the east, and the hot, forceful, disciplining qualities of day, together spanning the full range of qualities creation was understood to require.
Mawu-Lisa is credited with shaping the physical world and, crucially, with fathering the other vodun, the wider pantheon of Fon deities, each of whom receives command over a specific domain of the created world: Sagbata governs the earth, Sogbo or Xevioso governs thunder and the sky, Agbe governs the sea, and further siblings hold further portfolios, so that creation is organized less as a single unified act than as a division of responsibility among a divine family under Mawu-Lisa's overall authority.
The cult of Mawu-Lisa was historically centered at Abomey, the capital of the old kingdom of Dahomey in what is now Benin, and the pairing of a cool, lunar, forgiving principle with a hot, solar, disciplining one recurs as a structural pattern across much of the wider Gbe-speaking religious world that Fon tradition belongs to, extending well beyond Dahomey's own historical borders through trade, migration, and the forced transportation of enslaved Africans that carried Fon religious concepts into the Americas.