Igu Ake, the First Great Cause

Igu Ake is named in the Dongba religious literature of the Naxi people of Lijiang and northwest Yunnan as the first great cause and one of three supreme deities, alongside the heavenly god Saluwete and Heduwapa, the god of White Bones. Igu Ake is an abstract primordial principle: the source from which the manifest heaven and its gods come forth rather than a figure of narrative or active cult. The ethnographic record preserves a notable ambiguity of priority, since some Dongba texts present the heavenly god as emerging first and only then bringing Igu Ake into reality, so that the two are entwined at the very origin of the cosmos. The Dongba tradition that transmits this theology is preserved in pictographic ritual manuscripts inscribed on bark paper, a corpus recognized by UNESCO in its Memory of the World register as the Ancient Naxi Dongba Literature Manuscripts.

Domains

• primordial origin
• supreme divinity

Powers

• to be the first cause from which the gods and the world arise

Epithets

• Igu Ake

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).