Asase Ya

The Krachi cosmogony recorded by A. W. Cardinall opens with the statement that in the beginning of days Wulbari and man lived close together, and Wulbari lay on top of Mother Earth, Asase Ya. Mankind, cramped between sky and earth, so irritated the sky god that he withdrew upward: an old woman kept striking him with her fufu pestle, the smoke of cooking fires stung his eyes, people wiped their dirty hands on him, and another old woman cut bits from him to flavour her soup. Wulbari rose to his present unreachable height, leaving Asase Ya below as the abiding earth on which humanity lives. Her name is shared with the Akan earth spirit Asase Yaa, 'Thursday's Earth', a reflection of the strong Asante influence on the Guan-speaking Krachi; in the Krachi text she figures as the named, female primordial earth upon whom the sky once rested. The tale was reprinted as the opening piece of Paul Radin's African Folktales and appears in Ulli Beier's collection of African creation myths.

Domains

• earth

Relations

• consort of: Sky God

Sources

• A. W. Cardinall, Tales Told in Togoland (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), ch. 2, 'Of the Origin of Things'.
• Harold Scheub, A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. 'Wulbari'.
• David Adams Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v. 'Wulbari'.
• Ulli Beier (ed.), The Origin of Life and Death: African Creation Myths (London: Heinemann, 1966).