Butan
Batammariba · deity · Batammariba traditional religion; continuing · deity
Butan is the earth-and-underworld goddess of the Batammariba and the divine counterpart of the solar Kuiye, to whom she stands as both twin and wife in a cosmology that pairs the sky above with the earth below. Her dominion embraces everything within the ground and upon its surface: the growth of plants and the success of agriculture, the proliferation of game on which hunting depends, and the cemeteries in which the dead are buried. As such she is honored at the earthen, ground-level features of the Batammariba tower-house, complementing the solar worship directed to the door-horns above. Her earth-and-death associations make her central to the funerary world documented at length in the ethnography of the Atakora peoples.
Domains
- earth and underworld
- agriculture and vegetal growth
- death and the cemetery
Powers
- to rule the earth, its growth, and the cemeteries of the dead
- to grant the fertility of fields and the proliferation of game
Relations
Sources
- Suzanne Preston Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge University Press / University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- Paul Mercier, Tradition, changement, histoire : les « Somba » du Dahomey septentrional (Éditions Anthropos, Paris, 1968).