Creator
Marshallese · deity · primordial · Recorded classification
Marshallese creator high-god; classed as deity. Native term Lowa (variant Loa, with the macron Lōwa in current orthography). Gloss 'Creator'. The creation-by-utterance ('Lowa, Lowa...') is the charter chant; he remains in the background after appointing the cardinal gods and the first beings.
Children
Domains
- creation
- the primeval sea
Powers
- chants the reefs and islands into being
Epithets
- Lowa The creator who, from the primal sea, hummed the islands and living things into beingMarshallese oral tradition (secondary)
Relations
- ancestor of: Fire TricksterCreator high-god; father of the first man Wulleb (encoded on Wulleb) and thus grandfather/ancestor of the fire-trickster Letao, Wulleb's son.Erdland, Die Marshall-Insulaner (1914); Tobin, Stories from the Marshall Islands (2002) (secondary)
Sources
- Lowa (Loa) is the supreme creator who, alone in the primeval sea, chanted the islands into being and stationed a god at each cardinal point.: Erdland, A. (1914). Die Marshall-Insulaner: Leben und Sitte, Sinn und Religion eines Südsee-Volkes. Anthropos-Bibliothek, Aschendorff, Münster (ethnography); Tobin, J.A. (2002). Stories from the Marshall Islands: Bwebwenato Jān Aelōñ Kein. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu (reference)