the Creator who Ordered the World

Entered as a deity (the Baule creator-god of the firmament, 'Anangaman Nyamien'). IMPORTANT INTERPRETIVE NOTE: the Baule sources treat 'Anangaman' and 'Nyamien' both as a single compound name for the one supreme creator AND (in the ethnographic/scholarly framing after Guerry and Étienne) as a creator-demiurge aspect set just below the remote, intangible high god Nyamien (baule_nyamien) — hence the directed subordinate-to relation rather than an identity merge. The Baule are an Akan people, so the creator is cognate with the wider Akan high god Nyame. 'blolo' (otherworld), 'asye usu' (bush spirits) and 'amwin/amuin' (power-beings) are CLASSES of spirits, not individuated figures, and are not authored. Principal scholarship: Guerry (1975); Vogel (1997); Étienne.

Domains

• creation and ordering of the world
• supreme creator
• souls of the dead

Powers

• to create and set in order the world and its three tiers
• to receive the souls of the dead returning from the world

Relations

• subordinate to: Sky God

Sources

• Vincent Guerry, Life with the Baoulé (Three Continents Press, 1975; orig. La Vie quotidienne dans un village Baoulé, Abidjan: INADES, 1972)
• Susan Mullin Vogel, Baule: African Art, Western Eyes (Yale University Press / Yale University Art Gallery, 1997)
• Rezo-Ivoire.net, 'Croyance en pays Baoulé' and 'Les valeurs culturelles ancestrales et les interpénétrations culturelles chez les Baoulé' (Anangaman Nyamien, god of the firmament; 'Anangaman Boli-Alliè' = 'Dieu le créateur de l'univers')
• baoule.ci, 'Étude approfondie sur les funérailles et la mort en pays Baoulé de Côte d'Ivoire' (Baoulé eschatology: souls come from and return to the otherworld blôlô; immortality of the soul)