Asase Ya / Asase Afua

Asase is the personified Earth in Akan cosmology and is paired cosmologically with the male sky deity Nyankapon. She is described as mother of important river/forest/land deities (Bia / Bea / Tano) and in some traditions is named as mother or stepmother of Anansi. Akan tradition recognizes two linked local identifications: the Asante and many other Akans call her Asase Ya / Asase Yaa (linked to Thursday), while the Fante and some other groups call her Asase Afua / Efua (linked to Friday). Both names denote the same single being with complementary aged and youthful personalities rather than two separate gods.

Akan sources present Asase primarily as two complementary personae of one deity. Asase Yaa (also called Aberewaa by the Asante) is pictured as an old woman associated with barren places and the realm of the dead. Asase Afua is pictured as a youthful, very beautiful woman associated with fertile land, farming, love and procreation. Symbolically Asase Afua is represented by animals such as the antelope and earlier or variably by the goat; descriptions record horn-coil numerology (e.g., ten coils on one horn and eight on the other, or variants with eight coils each) as symbolic elements tied to fertility and astronomical symbolism.

Asase governs the fertility of the land and agricultural abundance, receives human bodily remains (honam) and blood (mogya) at death, and functions as guarantor of truth and social peace—lying is a taboo against her. She must be propitiated before altering or using land (libation consent) and is invoked in naming/outdooring ceremonies, funerary libations (ayie) to permit graves, and other domestic appeasements (for example before house construction). Her dual aspects link her to both cultivation and the ancestral realm (Asamando), and she appears as an authoritative moral and ecological force within Akan society.