Heduwapa, the Great God of White Bones

Heduwapa, the great god of White Bones, is named in the Dongba religion of the Naxi as one of three supreme deities together with Igu Ake, the first great cause, and Saluwete, the chief heavenly god. The epithet 'White Bones' ties the deity to the pervasive light-and-dark, white-and-black dualism of Naxi cosmology, in which a luminous 'white' principle of order and ancestry is set against its shadowed counterpart, a polarity that also organizes the Dongba heroic epics. Among the supreme triad Heduwapa is the most sparsely narrated, attested chiefly as a name and rank within the pantheon rather than through a developed myth cycle, and the theology survives almost wholly through the pictographic Dongba manuscripts and their priestly transmission.

Domains

• white bones ancestral purity
• supreme divinity

Powers

• to rule over the white bones, the luminous lineage of the world

Epithets

• Hédu Wúapa

Sources

• Pedro Ceinos-Arcones, Sons of Heaven, Brothers of Nature: The Naxi of Southwest China (Kunming: Papers of the White Dragon, 2012).
• Christine Mathieu, A History and Anthropological Study of the Ancient Kingdoms of the Sino-Tibetan Borderland — Naxi and Mosuo, Mellen Studies in Anthropology 11 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003).