Nana Buluku

Nana Buluku is the primordial creator at the head of the Fon pantheon, the being from whom the paired creator Mawu-Lisa themselves descend. Melville Herskovits's ethnography of Dahomey records her as the old, old deity who brought Mawu, associated with the moon, and Lisa, associated with the sun, into being along with the rest of the created world, and who then withdrew from the world's active governance, leaving it to the pair she had made. Herskovits notes that Nana Buluku receives no cult of her own distinct from theirs, a mark of how far back into the unapproachable beginning of things Fon tradition places her rather than a sign that she is forgotten: her precedence over every other deity, including the pair she created, is acknowledged even where no shrine addresses her by name. Where Mawu and Lisa divide the world's governance between night and day, moon and sun, coolness and heat, Nana Buluku precedes that division itself.