Dabeiba, goddess of rain and teacher of the crafts
Dabeiba is the great goddess of the Emberá-Katío of Antioquia and the Chocó, mistress of the rain and of the storms, lightning, winds and earthquakes that attend it. In the prevailing tradition she is the daughter of Caragabí, sent down among humankind as a beautiful woman to teach them the arts of settled life: to clear and plant the land, to weave cloth and make baskets and canoes, to build their dwellings, to shape pottery, and to dye their bodies and blacken their teeth. Her work done, she climbs a hill, the Cerro León in some tellings, and rises through the clouds to her father's house in the sky; thereafter the Katío say that when rain falls and the ground shakes it is Dabeiba caring for the fields and wishing to be remembered. Her name carries a long colonial afterlife: Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century wrote of a rich shrine of a goddess Dabaibe in the lands toward the lower Atrato, and the name survives in the Antioqueño town of Dabeiba.
Parentage
Domains
- rain and storm
- pottery and crafts
- agriculture
Powers
- to send the rains, storms and tremors that quicken the fields
- to teach humankind pottery, weaving, basketry and body-painting
Epithets
- DabaibePinto García, Constancio. 1978. Los indios katíos: su cultura, su lengua. Medellín: Editorial Granamérica. (secondary)
Sources
- Dabeiba (Dabaibe) is the Emberá-Katío goddess of rain, storms and earthquakes and the culture-heroine who taught pottery, weaving and the crafts, and who in the dominant tradition is the daughter of Caragabí, recalled by him to the sky.: Pinto García, Constancio. 1978. Los indios katíos: su cultura, su lengua. Medellín: Editorial Granamérica. (secondary); Isacsson, Sven-Erik. 1993. Transformations of Eternity: On Man and Cosmos in Emberá Thought. Göteborg: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Göteborg. (secondary)