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.