Rutbe
Ngäbe · deity · Ngäbe traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
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.
Children
Domains
- rivers and fresh water
- motherhood of the luminaries
Powers
- to give birth to the Sun and the Moon
Epithets
- RutbeFrazer, James George. The Worship of Nature, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1926, pp. 633-635. (secondary)
Relations
- lover: NoncomalaRutbe is the river-dwelling water-sprite whom the creator Noncomala met and lay with; she conceived and bore him the Sun and the Moon.Frazer, James George. The Worship of Nature, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1926, pp. 633-635. (secondary)
Sources
- Rutbe is the Ngäbe (Guaymí) water-sprite of the creation cycle, consort of the creator Noncomala and mother of the Sun and the Moon.: Frazer, James George. The Worship of Nature, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1926, pp. 633-635. (secondary); Young, Philip D. Ngawbe: Tradition and Change among the Western Guaymí of Panama. Illinois Studies in Anthropology 7. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. (secondary)