Kalu Kumaraya, the Black Prince
Sinhala folk yakku · deity · Sinhala folk yakku traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Kalu Kumaraya, the Black Prince, is the demon of the lowland Sinhala pantheon most associated with the afflictions of women. Folk legend gives him a princely but ill-fated origin, after which he wanders as a yaka. He is compared by ethnographers to an incubus: he comes to women, and especially to girls at the threshold of womanhood, as a lover in pleasurable dreams, and is blamed for menstrual irregularity, troubled pregnancy and miscarriage. When a ritual specialist (edura) diagnoses his presence, the cure is an exorcism in which Kalu Kumara is drawn out and appeased with prepared offerings of rice, curries, breadfruit and fish, releasing the woman from his hold.
Domains
- afflictions of women
- erotic dreams and fertility
Powers
- to come to women as a lover in dreams
- to cause menstrual and pregnancy disorders in women
Epithets
- කලු කුමාර යකා (Kalu Kumara Yaka)Paul Wirz, Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954). (secondary)
Sources
- Kalu Kumara (the Black Prince) is the dark prince-demon of Sinhala folk religion who afflicts women through erotic dreams and reproductive disorder and is propitiated in the yaktovil with special offerings.: Bruce Kapferer, A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). (secondary); Paul Wirz, Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954). (secondary)