Naaŋmin
Naaŋmin is the supreme God and creator in Dagara religion, an omnipotent and benevolent sky-being whose name joins the words for 'chief' and 'God/sun'. He is identified with the sun, the sky and the life-giving rains, and in the Bagre recitations he presides over a heavenly dwelling thronged with animals, insects and plants. Yet Naangmin is a withdrawn God: having created the world he retired from it and keeps no shrine, so that no direct cult or sacrifice reaches him. The Dagara link this remoteness to the problem of evil, holding that were God still active among them disease, misfortune and death could be banished. In practice worship is directed instead to the Earth and to the ancestral dead, who mediate between humankind and the distant creator.
Domains
- creation
- celestial sky
- providence fate
Powers
- creates the world and its creatures
- withdraws from creation as a remote God
- sends rain and withholds it
Epithets
- Naaŋmin soba ka — the God who has no shrineJack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (1972), on the unapproachable High God. (secondary)
Sources
- Naaŋmin (Naangmen, older Naamwin) is the Dagara supreme God and creator of the universe, good and omnipotent, identified with sun, sky and rain, but so remote that he keeps no shrine.: Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 20-24. (secondary); Sean Hawkins, Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana (University of Toronto Press, 2002). (secondary)
- The name derives from naa 'chief' and ŋmin/mwin 'God, sun'.: Sebastian Bemile and comparative Dagaare lexicography; discussed in ethnographic profiles of the Dagaaba (101 Last Tribes). (secondary)