Suminundu

Kadazan Dusun · deity · Kadazan Dusun traditional religion; continuing · deity

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.

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