Fon accounts of the beginning start further back than the creator. Nana Buluku is the primordial being, and from Nana Buluku came Mawu and Lisa, and it is the pair who made and ordered the world. Nana Buluku then withdrew, and receives little in the way of cult, which is a shape found across West Africa: the deepest source of things is not the deity one deals with.
Mawu and Lisa are set out as a matched pair of opposites. Mawu is the moon, coolness, night, rest, the west and, in most tellings, female. Lisa is the sun, heat, day, work, the east and male. Whether they are two beings or one is not a question the tradition settles in a single way. Some accounts make them twins, born together, whose union produced the other vodun. Others treat Mawu-Lisa as one deity with two aspects, and the hyphen in the name is doing real work rather than joining two separate parties. Both readings are current among practitioners, and the atlas does not flatten them.
The pair are not distant in the sense that they take no interest, but they are distant in the sense that they are not what a household deals with day to day. The world was assigned: Sakpata took the earth, Xevioso the sky and thunder, and others the sea, the hunt, iron, smallpox and the crossroads. Cult goes to those. The creator stands behind the arrangement and is invoked in accounts of how the arrangement came to be, which is why the creation story is where Mawu-Lisa is most often met.