Hahuba, the Snake of Being

Hahuba is the great Snake of Being of Warao cosmology, the serpent who lies coiled in the waters that surround the world and whose breathing keeps time with the rise and fall of the tides; three days after a child is born she sends a gentle breeze to embrace it. In Wilbert's account of the bell-shaped Warao universe she is the four-headed serpent-monster of the nadir, her heads crowned with deer-horns that mark the four cardinal directions, bearing up the earth-disk from below at the centre of the cosmos beneath the world-axis tree.

Domains

• cosmic order and the nadir
• tides and the encircling waters

Powers

• to bear up the earth-disk on her coils at the nadir
• to breathe the rise and fall of the tides

Epithets

• HahubaJohannes Wilbert, Warao Cosmology and Yekuana Roundhouse Symbolism, in Myth and the Imaginary in the New World (1986). (secondary)

Relations

• subordinate to: Kanobo, the Supreme GrandfatherThe serpent of the nadir belongs to the same cosmic order over which the supreme grandfather Kanobo presides.Johannes Wilbert, Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians (Harvard University, 1993). (secondary)

Sources

• Hahuba, the Snake of Being, is the cosmic serpent encircling the world; in Warao cosmology a four-headed serpent-goddess of the nadir whose heads mark the cardinal directions and who breathes with the tides.: Johannes Wilbert, Warao Cosmology and Yekuana Roundhouse Symbolism, in E. Magaña and P. Mason (eds.), Myth and the Imaginary in the New World (CEDLA / Foris, 1986). (secondary); Johannes Wilbert, Folk Literature of the Warao Indians: Narrative Material and Motif Content (UCLA Latin American Center, 1970). (secondary)