Pavá

Pavá, also invoked by the divine title Tasorentsi, is the supreme god of the Asháninka and is identified with the sun. He presides over the uppermost of the layered sky-worlds and is called the father of every creature in the universe. Like all the benevolent transformer-spirits he can remake anything by blowing upon it, but he is the first and greatest of them, and it is from his title that the whole class of good spirits is named. Sources differ on the exact relation between Pavá as remote high god and Pavá as the visible sun; in the widely told solar myth the sun is born of the moon Kashiri and a mortal woman, so that the luminary itself is understood as the moon's child. Asháninka eschatology holds that Tasorentsi will one day transform the present world into a renewed one.

Parentage

• Kashiri
• the Moon's bride

Children

• Pachakamáite

Domains

• celestial sun
• creation cosmic order

Powers

• transforms all things by blowing
• fathers all creatures of the universe

Epithets

• Pavá
• Tasorentsi

Relations

• child: Pachakamáite
• enemy: Kientibakori
• ally: Tasorentsi

Sources

• Weiss, Gerald. 1975. Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 52(5). New York.
• Instituto Socioambiental. 'Ashaninka.' Povos Indígenas no Brasil. pib.socioambiental.org.
• Weiss, Gerald. 1972. 'Campa Cosmology.' Ethnology 11(2): 157–172.