Iri bab
Tabasaran · numen · Tabasaran traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Iri bab is a demonic old-woman of Tabasaran folk narrative, appearing also as Iri shiv ('Iri woman') and Ahyu bab ('great/old grandmother'). Ethnographers gloss her name as 'Red Grandmother', though the Tabasaran adjective iri is likewise rendered 'big' or 'great', and the sense is disputed. She belongs to the family of frightening hags — alongside the birth-demon Al and the grave-haunting Kaftar — through whom, in the scholarly reading, the personified powers of an older mythology survive as figures of the household terror-tale.
Domains
- night terror
Powers
- frightens and carries off the errant
Sources
- Iri bab (also Iri shiv, Ahyu bab) is a named demonic old-woman of Tabasaran narrative, one of the hag-figures into which images of the older 'higher' mythology are held to have descended.: Mifologicheskaya proza tabasarantsev: syuzhety i obrazy (kandidat dissertation abstract, Makhachkala) (secondary); M.R. Khalidova, Vestnik Dagestanskogo nauchnogo tsentra, no. 58 (2015) (secondary)