Baba Dummad
Guna · deity · Guna traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Baba, the Great Father, is one half of the paired supreme creator of Guna cosmology, invoked together with the Great Mother as Baba-Nana. From the highest of the golden heavens he brings the earth and its stacked layers into being and populates them with the first spirits and ancestors. In the chanted tradition and in the deliberations of the village gathering house his will is cited as the ultimate source of moral order, and after contact his name was extended to the Christian God. Guna theology treats father and mother as an inseparable dyad rather than a single high god, so that creation is consistently spoken of as a joint act.
Domains
- cosmogony
- sky and heaven
Powers
- create the earth and its layers
Epithets
- Baba Dummad — Great FatherJames Howe, The Kuna Gathering: Contemporary Village Politics in Panama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). (secondary)
Relations
- spouse: Nana DummadMac Chapin, Pab Igala: Historias de la tradicion kuna (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1989). (secondary)
Sources
- Baba Dummad, the Great Father, is the paired creator of the Guna cosmos alongside Nana Dummad.: Erland Nordenskiold, An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, ed. Henry Wassen (Goteborg, 1938). (secondary); Mac Chapin, Pab Igala: Historias de la tradicion kuna (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1989). (secondary)