Suminundu

Suminundu, also recorded as Sumundu, is the divine consort of the creator Kinoingan and the female half of the primordial creator pair in Momolianism. The ethnographic accounts assign her a complementary creative role: while Kinoingan furnishes the sky, Suminundu forms the earth and the sacred Mount Kinabalu, and the two together fashion the first human beings. She is the mother of Huminodun, and in several recensions of the myth it is Suminundu, stricken by the famine afflicting humankind, who resolves that her daughter must be sacrificed so that food crops may grow. Later tradition further credits her with transmitting the rinait, the great corpus of sacred chant, to the bobohizan and bobolian priestesses who preserve and perform it at the Kaamatan harvest rites.

Children

• Huminodun

Domains

• creation of the earth
• ritual knowledge

Powers

• to shape the earth and the sacred mountain
• to hand down the sacred ritual chant to the priestesses

Relations

• spouse: KinoinganSuminundu is the consort and co-creator of Kinoingan, with whom she dwells in the heaven Libabou.Evans, I. H. N. (1953). The Religion of the Tempasuk Dusuns of North Borneo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (secondary)

Sources

• Suminundu (Sumundu) is the consort and female co-creator of Kinoingan in Kadazan-Dusun cosmogony, mother of Huminodun and, in the central myth, the one who decides upon her daughter's sacrifice.: Williams, Thomas Rhys (1960). 'A Tambunan Dusun Origin Myth.' Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 33(1): 95-103. (secondary); Low Kok On (2006). 'Reading Symbols and Mythical Landscape in the Tambunan Dusun Origin Myth of North Borneo.' IJAPS 2(2): 29-50. (secondary)