The Sòrbulu, the primordial devil-race

The Sòrbulu (Bribri; Sòrburu in Cabécar) are the primordial devil-race of Talamancan cosmogony — the first beings to inhabit the world, resembling people but cruel, in whose hands every planting turns to grass and brush so that maize and crops will not grow. They stand for the barren, malevolent order of the first age, and they are ruled by their named elder, the great shaman Sórkura, paternal grandfather of the creator Sibö. In the central myth Sibö, after killing Sórkura, takes the old man's shape and sounds his conch to gather the Sòrbulu, then persuades them to dismember and roast their own elder's body before revealing himself; the scattered remains become signs of ill omen, and the devil-age yields to Sibö's fertile creation. Authored here as a single named, bounded primordial people of the canon — the antagonist-race of the creation epic, comparable in role to the Titans or the Jötnar — rather than as a generic class of spirits.

Domains

• primordial chaos and blight

Powers

• to turn every planting into weeds and brush

Relations

• enemy: Sibö, the creator culture-heroThe Sòrbulu are the cruel first people whose order Sibö overturns; though he tricks them into destroying their own elder, they remain the antagonist race of the cosmogony.Enrique Margery Peña, 'Sibö (relato mitológico cabécar)', Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha, XIV (1995), pp. 31–39. (secondary)

Sources

• The Sòrbulu (Cabécar Sòrburu) are the named primordial race of devils, the first and cruel inhabitants of the world in whose hands the ground yields only weeds, ruled by their elder Sórkura and overturned by Sibö.: María Eugenia Bozzoli de Wille, El nacimiento y la muerte entre los bribris (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1979). (secondary); 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)