Mawari, the Avian God of Origin (East)

Mawari is the creator-god of beginnings who presides over the eastern quarter of the Warao cosmos. He manifests as a swallow-tailed kite, and at the foot of the cosmic World-Tree-Mountain of the east he thinks into being the great cosmic egg, fashioned of hardened tobacco smoke, from which the ordered world issues. As the eastern member of the four world-quarter grandfathers (kanobotuma) he helps hold up the bell-shaped sky from the cardinal mountains, beneath the supreme grandfather Kanobo.

Domains

• creation and origins
• east world quarter

Powers

• to bring forth the cosmic egg from solidified tobacco smoke by thought
• to appear as a swallow-tailed kite bearing rattle and bow

Epithets

• Mawari

Relations

• companion: Hoebo, the Scarlet-Macaw God (West)
• companion: Uraro, the Toad God (South)
• companion: Nabarima, Father of the Waves (North)
• subordinate to: Kanobo, the Supreme Grandfather

Sources

• 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).
• Johannes Wilbert, Mystic Endowment: Religious Ethnography of the Warao Indians (Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, 1993).