Maa Ngala, also rendered Mangala, is the formless supreme creator of the cosmological tradition the Maninka share with their Mande neighbours. In the creation narrative recorded by Dieterlen he forms a primordial seed within an egg-shaped matrix, from which emerge the paired ordering powers and, in time, the first human ancestors. Having set the world in motion, Maa Ngala remains distant from human affairs and receives little direct cult; the everyday religious life of shrines, sacrifice, and initiation is directed instead toward intermediary divinities, ancestral spirits, and the powers governing the bush. Sources differ on how sharply this high creator is distinguished from the demiurge Faro, and the concept overlaps closely with the neighbouring Bamana cosmology, of which the Maninka corpus is a related rather than identical branch.