Kahausibware
Kahausibware is a female hi'ona (the San Cristoval term for the creator-spirits elsewhere called figona) of super-human character who dwelt in the form of a snake on the mountain of Bauro in San Cristoval (Makira). In the myth recorded by Codrington she made men, pigs, coconuts, fruit-trees and all the food with which the island is furnished, in an age when death had not yet come. Left to mind an infant and vexed by its crying, she coiled about it and strangled it; when the returning mother chopped her to pieces with an axe the severed parts rejoined, until at last the snake departed weeping, 'I go, and who will help you now?', and made her way down to the sea, her track becoming a watercourse, swimming first to Ugi and then to Ulawa. With her going death entered the world, and snakes are thereafter revered in San Cristoval as her representatives. The severed and reuniting snake supplies the title image of Michael Scott's modern ethnography of Arosi society.
Domains
- creation
- origin of death
- serpents
Powers
- to make human beings, pigs, coconuts and the food-trees of the island
- to draw her severed body back together when cut to pieces
Epithets
- hi'onaR. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (1891) (secondary)
Sources
- Kahausibware is the female snake-spirit (hi'ona/figona) of Bauro in San Cristoval (Makira) who created men, pigs and the food plants and whose killing of an infant and departure brought death into the world.: R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk-lore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891) (secondary); Michael W. Scott, The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007) (secondary)