Fon cosmology gives Mawu-Lisa a role comparative religion recognizes as a specific and well studied type, the deus otiosus, an idle god: a supreme creator who shapes the world and then withdraws from directly governing it, leaving that work to lesser beings created for the purpose. Mawu-Lisa is itself already a paired figure, Mawu associated with the moon, coolness, night and the west, Lisa with the sun, heat, day and the east, described in some tellings as twins and in others as two faces of one being, and Herskovits's ethnography records the pair as standing, in turn, beneath the more remote Nana Buluku, from whom they came. Having shaped the earth and set the mountains that steady Aido-Hwedo's coils, Mawu-Lisa is said to have withdrawn to the sky rather than continuing to act directly in the world, delegating the day to day governance of earthly affairs to the vodun born of their own union, chief among them Legba, Sakpata and Xevioso. The withdrawal is not decline or defeat; it is the theology's own account of how a supreme, distant creator and a populated, active pantheon of intermediary spirits can coexist in the same system, with the creator's remoteness itself explaining why worship in practice addresses the intermediaries rather than the source they descend from.