Pareni

Pareni is one of the great primordial women of Matsigenka mythology, a culture-heroine of the ancestral age when the boundaries between people, animals, and plants were still fluid. In the cycle of tales gathered under her name she is bound up with the creation and transformation of the species: through her acts the many kinds of animals and plants take their present forms, and the myth of Pareni is remembered as an account of how the living world came to be sorted into its creatures. She moves through the narratives attended by a parrot reckoned her familiar. Her cycle is preserved above all in the river Picha tradition and in comparative Arawakan scholarship, where she stands among the transformer figures widespread in the southern Amazon.

Domains

• transformation
• origin of species

Powers

• turns beings into the animals and plants

Epithets

• Pareni — the primordial mother of the speciesPereira, Enrique. 'Pareni y la creacion de las especies: un relato matsigenka.' (secondary)

Sources

• Pareni is a primordial culture-heroine of Matsigenka myth whose deeds account for the creation and transformation of many animal and plant species; she is attended by a parrot familiar.: Pereira, Enrique. 'Pareni y la creacion de las especies: un relato matsigenka.' (secondary); Arias Segura, Esteban (ed.). 2011. Mitologia de los Matsigenka que pueblan el Rio Picha / Igenkitsaneegi Matsigenka Timaigatsirira anta Pichaku (Lima: Ministerio de Cultura). (secondary)