Kanewabe

Kanewabe is a giant of Daribi myth from whom the izara-bidi, a class of ancestral ghosts, are held to originate. He belongs to the same body of narrative, recorded by Wagner, that accounts for the dead and their continuing presence: the ghosts of the deceased (izibidi) travel by night along watercourses and gather at an ill-defined place to the west, and the living fear their displeasure, guard against them, and summon them for reconciliation in the habu communion.

Domains

• ghosts

Powers

• gives rise to the izara-bidi ghosts

Sources

• Roy Wagner, Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
• Roy Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).