Souw

Souw is the primordial creator and culture-hero of the Daribi, the demiurge whose acts established the present human condition. In the central myth recorded by Roy Wagner, a widow lived with her two daughters beside the river Bore south of Mount Karimui in an age without death, theft or sorcery, an order kept so long as the household heeded the warning cry of the bird kauwari. When the daughters went into the forest in their mother's place they met what seemed a great serpent; it was the penis of Souw, a giant light-skinned man, which coupled with the dark-skinned daughter Karoba until she cried out. Shamed and enraged, Souw boarded his canoe and descended the Bore, carrying off his possessions and instruments of sorcery and casting upon those he abandoned the whole train of human afflictions: death, murder, sorcery, theft, adultery, warfare and the customs of mourning. He threw down his skin, which had he kept it would have made humankind immortal, but the snakes seized it, and so they alone renew themselves by sloughing while people die. Sources differ on whether Souw thereafter wandered as an unseen spirit or passed wholly beyond the world.

Children

• Yaro

Domains

• creation
• death
• sorcery

Powers

• curses humankind with death
• sheds the skin that would have made humankind deathless

Relations

• child: Yaro

Sources

• Roy Wagner, The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and Alliance in New Guinea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
• Roy Wagner, Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
• 'Le travail du mythe', ch. 4 'Le changeur de peau ou la malediction paternelle' (Societe des Oceanistes; books.openedition.org/sdo/1224).