Sakina, God of the Mountains

Sakina is the mountain god of the Paiwan, named in the ethnographic enumeration of the people's deities recorded by the Paiwan minister-scholar Chun-fa Masegseg Tung and relayed in the survey literature on Aboriginal Taiwanese religion. The Paiwan recognise at least eight gods, headed by a creator god or gods and including distinct deities of the mountains, the rivers and seas, and the soil; Sakina governs the mountainous landscape in which the Paiwan live, the high country culminating in the sacred Mount Dawu (Kavulungan) that the people regard as the dwelling of gods and ancestral spirits. The cross-cultural Pulotu database independently records a mountain god among the principal Paiwan supernatural beings, corroborating the place of such a deity in the traditional cosmology.

Domains

• mountains

Powers

• to rule and watch over the mountains

Epithets

• Sakina

Relations

• subordinate to: Naqemati, the Creator

Sources

• Chun-fa Masegseg Tung, 'The Power Confrontation between Paiwan Traditional Religion and the Gospel of Jesus Christ' (Fuller Theological Seminary, School of World Mission, 1984), 13-15.
• 'Religious Beliefs in "Aboriginal Taiwan"', International Journal of Taiwan Studies 7, no. 1 (2024): 118ff., naming Sakina as a Paiwan mountain god (citing Tung 1984: 13-15).