Iriria, the girl-child who became the earth
Iriria (Bribri Irìria; Sulára in Cabécar) is the girl-child of the underworld who becomes the earth itself. She is the daughter of Sulá, the subsoil seed-and-soul guardian, and dwells below until Sibö, needing fertile ground for his creation, sends a bat to feed on her and finds that vines and trees spring from the bat's droppings — proof that her substance can become soil. Sibö then brings the child up to the bare rock of the surface, where she dies; from her body and spilled blood the fertile earth is formed, and in it Sibö plants the human clans as kernels of maize. Because the soil is her body, the Bribri treat the earth as a living person to be respected and not wantonly wounded, and her death is recalled in the funerary festival that frames Talamancan ideas of death as a return to the earth and the seed. She stands apart genealogically as the daughter of Sulá, brought into being for the single cosmogonic purpose of becoming the world's soil.
Parentage
Domains
- earth and soil
- agricultural fertility
Powers
- to become the living earth in which crops and people grow
Sources
- Iriria (Cabécar Sulára) is the girl-child daughter of Sulá whom Sibö brings up from the underworld so that her body and blood become the fertile earth in which humanity is sown as maize.: Doris Stone, The Talamancan Tribes of Costa Rica, Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 43 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1962). (secondary); María Eugenia Bozzoli de Wille, El nacimiento y la muerte entre los bribris (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1979). (secondary)