Nana Buluku: The Supreme Creator
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Nana Buluku: The West African Primordial Creator

Before the sun and the moon, before the gods who run the world, there is a grandmother who made all of it and then stepped back.

The Fon of Dahomey call her Nana Buluku. She gave birth to the twin creators Mawu and Lisa, handed them the cosmos, and withdrew so completely that she has no shrine, no priesthood, and hardly any stories. Her absence is the point.

Then the slave ships came, and the goddess who had retired from the world crossed an ocean and went back to work.

Overview of Nana Buluku

Nana Buluku (also Nana Buruku, Nana Buku, and in Haiti Nanan-bouclou) is the supreme creator of the Fon people of Dahomey, the old kingdom that is now Benin, and of the neighboring Ewe of Togo and Ghana. The Yoruba to the east know her too, as Nana Bukuu, which is why this site shelves her with the Yoruba deities. Her home and her oldest form are Fon.

She comes before everything. In Fon cosmology the universe begins with her alone, and she is described as both male and female at once, a being with no parent and no partner. From her come the twins Mawu, the moon, and Lisa, the sun, who together create the world, the vodun (the spirits), and the people. Once that is done Nana Buluku hands the whole running of things to Mawu-Lisa and retires.

That retirement is her defining act. The anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who studied Dahomey in the 1930s, recorded that she had no cult of her own, even though every priest he asked ranked her above every other power. She is honored by being acknowledged, and then people turn to the gods who answer.

The same goddess has a second life on the far side of the Atlantic. In Brazilian Candomblé she is Nanã, and in Cuban Lucumí (Santería) she is Naná Burukú: the oldest of the orixás, the grandmother of the mud and the still water, who shapes the human body and receives it again at death. This post tells both halves of her story.

Titles

  • Nana Buluku, the primordial creator of the Fon
  • Nana Bukuu, her name among the Yoruba
  • Nanã Buruquê, or simply Nanã, in Brazilian Candomblé
  • Naná Burukú in Cuban Lucumí and Arará tradition
  • Nanan-bouclou in Haitian Vodou
  • “Grandmother of the orixás” (the word nana itself is a Fon and Akan honorific for a grandmother or elder)

Characteristics

Dahomey made no images of her, so nearly every picture we have comes from the Americas:

  • An old woman, older than creation itself in the Candomblé telling
  • Stooped and slow, moving with the dignity of great age
  • Dressed in lilac, purple, and white, often with her face veiled
  • Carrying the ibiri, a curved bundle of palm ribs bound with cowries and beads, which she cradles and rocks like an infant
  • In the Fon telling, without a body at all: a presence rather than a figure, both male and female

Abilities

  • Primordial creation — the first cause, mother of the creators Mawu and Lisa and, through them, of everything
  • Shaping the body — in Candomblé she molds the first humans from mud before Oxalá breathes life into them
  • Keeping the threshold — she governs the passage into life and the passage out of it, and welcomes the dead back into the earth
  • Ancient wisdom — the knowledge that comes from having been there first
  • Rain and water — in Cuban tradition she carries water to the sky as a serpent and brings the rain down

Symbols

  • Mud, clay, and the swamp — the wet earth she shapes bodies from and takes them back into
  • Still water — lakes, ponds, and springs, the water that has stopped moving
  • The ibiri — her staff of palm ribs, a sign of her authority over the ancestors
  • Lilac and purple — her colors in Brazil, with white for her great age
  • The wooden knife — her offerings are made with wood or bamboo, since she predates iron
  • The serpent — her form in the Matanzas tradition of Cuba, where she rides to heaven as a snake to make rain

Traits

  • Remote and self-contained, content to let others act in her name
  • Patient in the way of something that has already seen everything
  • Stern and exacting; in Cuba elders describe her as dangerous and treat her with real caution
  • Secretive, the keeper of what came before the world
  • Grandmotherly at the root, the one who shaped you and will hold you at the end

Festivals and Rituals

In her homeland she receives almost nothing, and that is by design. Herskovits found no temple, no priesthood, and no offerings addressed to Nana Buluku in Dahomey. Fon religion is built around the vodun who are close enough to help, and the most distant power of all is simply named with respect and left alone.

In Brazil she has a full cult. Candomblé houses of the Jeje (Fon-descended) and Ketu nations greet her with the cry “Saluba, Nanã!”, dress her in purple and white, and dance her as a bent old woman rocking the ibiri in her arms. Her feast falls on July 26, the day of Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus, with whom she was paired under Catholic rule. Her offerings are prepared without any iron touching them, a rule that comes straight out of her mythology (below).

In Cuba the Arará lineages of Matanzas, who descend from Dahomean captives, keep her as an elder linked to Babalú-Ayé, the god of disease and healing. She is fed at springs and pools of standing water, her sacrifices are made with a bamboo knife, and priests use her looped broom, the já, in healing rites. Few elders approached her willingly, and that reluctance is a kind of honor.

Legends associated with Nana Buluku

Her Fon mythology fits in a paragraph, and the reason is theological: a god who withdraws from the world leaves few stories in it. The rich telling comes from Brazil, where the enslaved and their descendants gave the grandmother a body, a family, and a past.

The birth of the twins and the long retirement

In the beginning there is Nana Buluku, alone and complete, holding both sexes within herself.

She gives birth to twins. Mawu, the female twin, takes the moon, the night, and the cool west; Lisa, the male twin, takes the sun, the day, and the hot east. Together they are Mawu-Lisa, a single creator with two faces, and the Fon speak of them as one name. Mawu-Lisa goes on to make the world, the vodun who govern it, and the people who live in it.

Nana Buluku, having made the makers, steps away. She keeps no hand on the world she started. Everything after that first act belongs to her children, and she stands behind it all, unseen and unbothered.

The body shaped from mud

The Candomblé story of the first humans starts with a problem. Oxalá, the elder creator, tries to shape people from air, and they blow away. He tries wood, and they are stiff. He tries stone, fire, water, and oil, and every attempt fails.

Nanã comes forward. She reaches down into the bottom of her lake, brings up a handful of mud, and hands it to him. Oxalá shapes a body from it and breathes life in. It stands. It lives.

The bargain in the story is exact. Nanã lent the mud, so the mud is hers, and when a person dies the body goes back to her. She is the material of every human being and the place every human being returns to. That is why she keeps the gate of death, and why she is honored as the mother of the ancestors.

Why no iron touches her

At a gathering of the orixás, Ogum, the god of iron and war, claimed first place. Every orixá, he argued, needed his iron: the farmer’s hoe, the hunter’s blade, the sacrificial knife. Without him nothing could be done.

Nanã disagreed. To prove it, she made her offering there in front of everyone, taking the animals in her bare hands and killing them without a blade. She had been making offerings long before iron existed, she told him, and she would go on making them without it.

From then on her rites use no metal. Her sacrifices are made with wood, bamboo, or the hands, and iron is kept away from her shrine. The story fixes her place in time: she belongs to the age before the forge, older than the tools the other gods depend on.

The mother of Omolu

Nanã’s most human story is a hard one. She bears a son, Omolu (Obaluaiê), and he is born covered in sores. Ashamed, she abandons him on the seashore.

The sea mother Yemanjá finds the infant, heals what she can, and raises him as her own. He grows into the god of smallpox and of healing, feared and needed in equal measure, his face hidden under a veil of straw. In many tellings Nanã later reconciles with him and takes up the protection of the sick and the old, the people she once turned away from.

Her other children in Brazil include Oxumarê, the rainbow serpent who carries water between earth and sky. Keep that serpent in mind for the Cuban story that follows.

The serpent that carries the rain

In the 1940s the anthropologist William Bascom sat with Lucumí priests in Matanzas Province, Cuba, and asked about Naná Burukú. They told him she works with fierce creatures, especially snakes, and that in the form of a snake she carries water up to heaven to make rain. She also brings the sacred stones of the orichas down from the sky and sets them in the rivers.

That description lines up almost point for point with Ochumaré, the rainbow serpent, which suggests the two ancient water powers had begun to merge in Cuban memory. In an old, thinly worshipped deity, that kind of blurring is common. The important thing is what survived: her link to water, her age, and her place at the source.

An older Nana Buluku?

Across West Africa the creator tends to make the world and then leave it, and Nana Buluku is the purest case of the pattern.

Scholars of African religion have long noted that the supreme being usually receives no organized worship. The Ewe describe Mawu as a remote sky creator with no universal cult. The Akan of Ghana tell of Nyame retreating into the sky after an old woman pounding fufu kept striking him with her pestle. The Yoruba address prayers to Olodumare but build no temples and offer no sacrifices to him; the orishas handle the daily traffic. Early European writers labeled these gods deus otiosus, “the idle god,” or deus absconditus, “the withdrawn god.” The Nigerian scholar David Ògúngbilé argues those labels misread the theology: the high god is honored precisely by being placed beyond bargaining, and reached through the nearer powers who act in her name. Nana Buluku fits this to the letter, and she goes one step further than her neighbors, since she stands behind even the creator pair. Where most peoples have one layer of withdrawal, the Fon have two.

The Middle Passage tested that theology against catastrophe. Fon captives, called Jeje in Brazil and Arará in Cuba, arrived in the Americas as a minority among the far more numerous Yoruba, whose orishas set the pattern for Candomblé and Lucumí. In that setting the Yoruba high god Olorun took the withdrawn creator’s chair, and the Fon grandmother found a different place: on the earth, in the mud, at the threshold of death. The sociologist Roger Bastide and the photographer-ethnographer Pierre Verger both documented how the Jeje houses of Bahia kept her rank while the surrounding Yoruba system reassigned her domain.

What continued is as telling as what changed. She kept her seniority, her androgynous or veiled quality, her position at the origin of things, and her separation from the age of iron. She gained what a withdrawn god in Africa never needed: a shrine, a color, a dance, a feast day, and a body of stories. The people who carried her across the ocean had lost their land and their dead, and the goddess who had once stood behind creation became the one who held the earth and the ancestors. Read one way, that is a demotion from supreme creator to elder orixá. Read another, the grandmother came out of retirement because her people needed her closer. The sources record the change; what it means is for the reader to weigh.

Nana Buluku across cultures

The withdrawn creator is one of the oldest ideas in religion, and Nana Buluku keeps company with the Akan Nyame and the Yoruba Olodumare, all three of them creators who step back behind a crowd of nearer, more answerable gods.

Her mud has its own relatives. In Yoruba tradition Obatala shapes the first humans from clay while Olodumare gives the breath, the same division of labor Nanã and Oxalá share in Brazil. In Mesopotamia the mother goddess Ninhursag pinches humans from clay at the god Enki’s request. Genesis forms Adam from the dust of the ground. The instinct runs everywhere: people are made of earth, and earth is where they go.

Her water sets her apart from the other great water deities of the Yoruba world. Yemanjá is the open sea, Oshun the running river, and Olokun the unknowable deep. Nanã is the water that has stopped: the lake bottom, the swamp, the mud where water and earth become one thing. Among a family of moving waters she is the stillness, and stillness is the natural element of a god who has already done her work.

Final thoughts

Nana Buluku made everything and then let it go. The withdrawal is the whole of her legend, the rare creator remembered for stepping back.

In Dahomey she is the answer to a question people rarely need to ask: where did the creators come from? In Brazil and Cuba she is the mud under your feet and the grandmother waiting at the end of the road. Both are the same goddess, and the distance between them is the distance a people traveled in chains, carrying her with them.

When a god withdraws so far that no one prays to her, does she become less real, or more?

Bibliography

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