Liye

Liye is the soul of Kuiye, the supreme solar deity of the Batammariba. Batammariba thought holds that every living being is composed of a body and a soul, and the divinity is no exception: the body, also called Kuiye, is imagined as remaining in the 'sun village' beyond the western horizon, while the soul, Liye, is the radiant disc that journeys across the sky from dawn to dusk. As the visible motion of the sun, Liye governs the passage of daylight and underpins the Batammariba reckoning of time and space, in which the daily east-to-west course of the disc is woven into the orientation of villages and the naming of times of day. Liye is therefore not a god separate from Kuiye but the luminous, mobile aspect of that single solar divinity.

Domains

• solar disc and daylight
• passage of time and day

Powers

• to cross the sky each day as the disc of light

Relations

• subordinate to: KuiyeLiye is the soul-aspect of the supreme deity Kuiye rather than an independent god; the corporeal Kuiye dwells in the western sun-village while its soul Liye crosses the daytime sky as the solar disc.Dafon Aimé Sègla, 'Chasing the Shadow of the Sun: The Batammaliba's Binary System of Time,' Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, vol. 501 (2016), p. 277. (secondary)

Sources

• Liye is the soul of the Batammariba sun-deity Kuiye, the disc of light that crosses the sky each day while the corporeal Kuiye remains in the western sun-village.: Suzanne Preston Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge University Press / University of Chicago Press, 1987). (secondary); Dafon Aimé Sègla, 'Chasing the Shadow of the Sun: The Batammaliba's Binary System of Time,' Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, vol. 501 (2016), p. 277. (secondary)