Gauteóvan, the Great Mother
Gauteóvan, addressed by the kinship title Haba ('Mother') and also called the Mother of Songs, is the supreme being of Kogi cosmology. She is the primordial, unborn and eternal source from whom everything originates in darkness. Often described as androgynous, she impregnates herself and brings forth the lords of the seven points of the universe, and in myths recorded by Preuss she fashions the sun from her own menstrual blood. Her great creative act is mental rather than physical: she conceives every form first in aluna, the world of thought, organising reality as a ninefold structure of four upper worlds, four lower worlds, and the human world between them. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is understood as her body and the place where she first dreamed life into being.
Children
- Aldauhuíku, lord of cultivation
- Búnkuasé, the shining lord and patron of the priesthood
- Duginávi, culture-hero of cultivation
- Kashindúkua, the jaguar-priest and first curer
- Noána-sé, the jaguar lord
- Seukúkui, the law-giving lord
- Sintana, the first ancestor
Domains
- creation and cosmos
- motherhood and fertility
- sun and light
Powers
- to conceive the whole of creation in her mind before it takes material form
- to bring forth the sun and the first beings from her own body
Epithets
- Haba
- Gaulčováng