Uchtsiti
Keresan Pueblos · deity · Keresan Pueblos traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Uchtsiti is the withdrawn creator-father of the Acoma Keres cosmogony recorded by Matthew Stirling. He fashions the world by casting a clot of his own blood into empty space, where it enlarges into the earth. Rather than shaping humanity directly, he places two seeds or two small beings in the fourth world underground and entrusts their nurture to the spirit Thought-Woman, so that his daughters Iatiku and Nautsiti will complete the peopling and ordering of the world. In the fully developed narratives he remains above and apart after the emergence, a first cause more invoked than personified, and much of the active creative agency passes to his daughters and to the war twins.
Children
Domains
- creation
- sky
Powers
- creates the earth from a clot of his own blood
Epithets
- Uchtsiti — the maker, father aboveStirling, BAE Bulletin 135 (1942), p. 1. (primary)
Relations
- child: IatikuStirling, BAE Bulletin 135 (1942), pp. 1-2. (primary)
- child: NautsitiStirling, BAE Bulletin 135 (1942), pp. 1-2. (primary)
Sources
- Uchtsiti is the remote creator father of the Acoma cosmogony who forms the world from a clot of his own blood and sets his two daughters underground to bring it to fruition.: Stirling, M. W., Origin Myth of Acoma and Other Records, BAE Bulletin 135 (1942), pp. 1-3. (primary)
- Comparative Pueblo scholarship treats Uchtsiti as the distant sky-creator whose creative work is completed by subordinate female and twin agents.: Parsons, E. C., Pueblo Indian Religion (1939), vol. 1, pp. 213-216. (secondary)