Kahausibware
Gela · deity · Gela traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Kahausibware is a primordial serpent-being of Makira (San Cristoval), known chiefly from the widely recorded myth of the origin of death. In the tale she lives with the first woman, brings forth pigs, taro, and other goods, and nurses a human child; when the child's mother strikes and kills her, or cuts her in anger, death, toil, and hardship enter a world that until then had known none. She belongs to the figona and vigona class of beings that were never human. Her name is cognate with that of the winged serpent Hatuibwari, and the two are sometimes treated by scholars as regional forms of a single creator-serpent, though the origin-of-death narrative attaches most firmly to Kahausibware.
Domains
- creation
- mortality
- serpents
Powers
- brings forth food and goods
- her killing lets death into the world
Epithets
- figona — the spirit-being (that never was a man)C.E. Fox, The Threshold of the Pacific (1924) (secondary)
Sources
- Kahausibware is a primordial serpent-being of Makira known from the myth of the origin of death, in which she lives with the first woman, produces pigs and taro, and nurses a human child, and whose killing brings death and hardship into the world.: C.E. Fox, The Threshold of the Pacific (1924), the origin-of-death narrative (secondary)
- Her name is cognate with that of the winged serpent Hatuibwari, and the two are sometimes treated as regional forms of one creator-serpent.: C.E. Fox, The Threshold of the Pacific (1924) (secondary)