Wau-uta, the Toad-Woman

Wau-uta is the toad- or tree-frog woman of Warao oral literature, best known as the foster-mother of the canoe-hero Haburi. By a trick she obtains the infant and rears him to manhood; when at last he and his true mother escape her by canoe she is left behind, and in the telling she becomes the tree-frog whose night-call is heard as her voice. First recorded among the Warao and neighbouring Guiana peoples by Walter Roth, her story is a centrepiece of Levi-Strauss's analysis of the canoe-origin myth in the second volume of the Mythologiques.

Domains

• forest and amphibian theophany
• fostering and trickery

Powers

• to claim and rear the infant culture-hero by guile
• to turn into the tree-frog whose call carries her name

Epithets

• Wau-uta

Relations

• foster mother of: Haburi, Inventor of the Canoe

Sources

• Walter E. Roth, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians (30th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1915).
• Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes (Mythologiques II), trans. J. and D. Weightman (Harper & Row, 1973; orig. Du miel aux cendres, 1966).