Wife of the Crop-Bringer
Kiwai · demigod · mythic ancestral · Recorded classification
Pekai is the female half of the pair of mythical beings around whom the Kiwai tales of the origin of vegetable food revolve. She is the wife of Soido, the bringer of garden crops, and her person is bound up in the tales with the first appearance of the cultivated plants that Soido afterwards transmitted to mankind. She is indexed as a figure in her own right in Landtman's corpus of Kiwai folk-tales.
Domains
- agriculture
Relations
- spouse: Bringer of Garden CropsSoido, the mythical bringer of garden crops, is Pekai's husband; the pair belong together to the Kiwai cycle on the origin of vegetable food.Landtman, Gunnar. The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans (Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae XLVII). Helsingfors, 1917. (secondary)
Sources
- Pekai is the wife of the crop-bringer Soido in the Kiwai tales that explain how vegetable food such as taro and yams first came to mankind.: Landtman, Gunnar. The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans (Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae XLVII). Helsingfors: Printing Office of the Finnish Society of Literature, 1917. (secondary); Landtman, Gunnar. The Kiwai Papuans of British New Guinea: A Nature-Born Instance of Rousseau's Ideal Community. London: Macmillan, 1927. (secondary)