Warao · quartigod · Warao traditional religion; continuing · quartigod
Hoebo is the dread god of the western quarter of the Warao cosmos, embodied as a deified scarlet macaw and reckoned the supreme Hoa spirit. He is lord of a place of the dead and the patron of the hoarotu, the 'dark' singing shamans, who direct the wasting hoa sickness and ritually mark out human souls to satisfy his hunger. With Mawari, Uraro and Nabarima he is one of the four world-quarter grandfathers who hold up the sky, but his quarter is that of affliction and death.
Domains
death and the west
affliction and sorcery
Powers
to claim and consume the souls marked for him by the dark shamans
to inflict the wasting hoa sickness through plant and animal theophanies
Johannes Wilbert, Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians (Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, 1993).
Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (Duke University Press, 2004).