Piai'ma, the 'great shaman', is a named individuated being of the Kapon highlands: a giant, mountain-dwelling ogre of the forest who abducts and eats humans in a large cycle of cautionary tales, yet who is simultaneously regarded as the archetypal master of piai, the shamanic art. Roth recorded ogre tales about him among the Guiana peoples, Audrey Butt Colson documented his role in Akawaio shamanic ideology, and Neil Whitehead analysed his continuing importance among the Patamona of the Pakaraima mountains.
Domains
shamanic power
mountain wilderness
Powers
to grant or withhold shamanic knowledge and songs
to abduct, deceive, and devour unwary humans in the forest
Sources
Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death, Duke University Press, 2002.
Audrey Butt, 'The Akawaio Shaman', in Ellen B. Basso (ed.), Carib-Speaking Indians: Culture, Society and Language, University of Arizona Press, 1977.
Walter E. Roth, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians, 30th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1915.