Mahungu is the primordial androgyne of Kongo cosmogony. In the account given by the Kongo scholar Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Mahungu is 'the person of doubled being', at once male and female, whose separation into two persons of different sexes stands at the origin of human society and of the longing of man and woman for reunion. John Janzen documents Mahungu as an androgynous culture hero in the mythology of the Lemba society, the great healing and trading association of the region between the Loango coast and Malebo Pool, whose rituals consecrating husband and wife dramatize the recovery of Mahungu's lost completeness. As a being brought forth directly by the supreme god and standing between the divine and the human, Mahungu is classed here as a semi-divine figure of the primordial age.