Rutbe is the water-sprite (nymph of the river) of the Ngäbe creation cycle recorded from the seventeenth-century account of Adrián de Santo Tomás. When the creator Noncomala had shaped the earth and waters but the world still lay in darkness, he waded into a river and encountered Rutbe; from their union she bore the twin luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, whose light first illuminated the created world. She belongs to the wider Chibchan and lower-Central-American pattern in which celestial bodies are born of a primal water-being, and she is among the few individually named female figures of the early Ngäbe pantheon.