Lumawig

Lumawig is the central figure of Bontoc religion, both the supreme deity invoked in prayer at the chono feast and the culture-hero of legend. Myth makes him the second of the three sons of Kabunian, the sky-god; he alone chose to leave his father's fields in the sky and descend to the Bontoc valley, where he married a local woman and gave the people the arts of settled life: wet-rice terracing and irrigation, hunting, headhunting, and the cycle of ceremonies and customary law. He is closely associated with the towns of Bontoc, Sadanga and Sagada, where episodes of his earthly career are localized. Because the Bontoc sometimes address him by his father's title, the names Lumawig and Kabunian are partly interchangeable in ordinary speech.

Parentage

• parent: Kabunian

Domains

• culture hero teaching
• rice agriculture irrigation
• law and ritual

Powers

• to teach the Bontoc rice-culture, hunting, ritual and law
• to descend from the sky and live among mortals

Epithets

• Lumawig ad ChakongJoy Christine O. Bacwaden, "The Lumawig Bontoc Myths," Philippine Studies 45, no. 1 (1997): 3-49. (secondary)

Relations

• spouse: FukanIn the Bontoc creation-and-flood cycle Lumawig takes the Bontoc woman Fukan to wife, the marriage from which the Bontoc people are descended.Mabel Cook Cole, Philippine Folk Tales (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1916). (secondary)

Sources

• Lumawig is the culture-hero and supreme deity of the Bontoc, second son of the sky-god Kabunian, who descended to live among the Bontoc, married a Bontoc woman, and taught them rice-culture, hunting, ritual and law.: Albert Ernest Jenks, The Bontoc Igorot (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905). (secondary); Joy Christine O. Bacwaden, "Lumawig: The Culture Hero of the Bontoc-Igorot," Philippine Studies 45, no. 3 (1997): 329-352. (secondary)