Romi Kumu

Romi Kumu, whose name means Woman Shaman, is the primordial creatress of Barasana cosmology and, in her own person, the sky. She opens her body to bring the world into being: her blood and breast milk become the rivers, her ribs the mountain ridges, and her gourd of beeswax the containing vault of heaven. Holding both water and fire within herself, she first drowns the world in a flood and then consumes it in a universal fire, and by this alternation she sets in motion the cycle of wet and dry seasons; the rains that follow are understood as the menstruation of the sky. As the first of the kumua, the shaman-chanters, she is the source of the ritual knowledge on which male ceremonial authority later rests. In a further act of creation she travels downriver and gives birth to the ancestral anaconda from whose body the founders of the descent groups are disgorged, so that she stands at the head both of the cosmos and of human society.

Children

• He Anaconda

Domains

• creation
• sky
• fertility

Powers

• shapes the cosmos from her own body
• unleashes the seasonal flood and the world-fire
• presides as the first shaman

Epithets

• Romi Kumu — Woman ShamanStephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)
• Sky Woman — the creatress who is the sky itselfStephen Hugh-Jones, 'The Pleiades and Scorpius in Barasana Cosmology,' Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385 (1982): 183-201 (secondary)

Relations

• parent: He AnacondaGoing downriver, she gave birth to the ancestral anaconda that carried the clan founders.Instituto Socioambiental, 'Barasana,' Povos Indígenas no Brasil, pib.socioambiental.org (tertiary)
• counterpart: AbeThe sky-woman and the sun stand as complementary cosmic principles.Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) (secondary)

Sources

• Romi Kumu, the Woman Shaman, is the sky, the creatress and the first shaman, who makes the world from her own body.: Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary); Christine Hugh-Jones, From the Milk River (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)
• With water and fire held in her body she causes the flood and the world-fire, and the seasonal rains are her menstrual blood.: Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge University Press, 1979) (secondary)