The Sky God

In Tao (Yami) cosmology the sky is a tiered world inhabited by luminous deities, the greatest of whom shaped the first human beings. Gazing down upon Pongso no Tao, the creator let fall a stone and a length of bamboo onto the summit of the island's central mountain; from the stone one man came forth and from the split bamboo another, and these became the two founding ancestors of humankind. Sources differ on whether a single supreme god or a company of sky-dwelling deities performed the act, and the creator's personal name is not consistently preserved in the recorded texts, where he is most often simply the god of the sky. He remains a remote figure, invoked in origin narratives rather than in the daily ritual life, which centres instead on the flying-fish cult and on the placation of the anito, the spirits of the dead.

Domains

• sky and heaven
• creation and origins

Powers

• create the first ancestors from stone and bamboo

Epithets

• tao do to — the one in the skyKano & Segawa (1956), An Illustrated Ethnography of Formosan Aborigines, Vol. I: The Yami. (secondary)

Relations

• companion: MagamaogMagamaog is reckoned among the benevolent sky-dwelling deities and, in some tellings, descends from the god's realm to teach humankind.Benedek, Dezso (1991), The Songs of the Ancestors: A Comparative Study of Bashiic Folklore, Taipei: SMC Publishing. (secondary)

Sources

• In Tao (Yami) cosmology a sky-dwelling deity created the first human ancestors by casting a stone and a bamboo onto the mountain.: Del Re, Arundel (1951), Creation Myths of the Formosan Natives, Tokyo: Hokuseido Press. (primary); Kano, Tadao & Kokichi Segawa (1956), An Illustrated Ethnography of Formosan Aborigines, Vol. I: The Yami, Tokyo: Maruzen. (secondary)
• The creator's personal name is not consistently preserved; sources differ on whether a single god or a company of sky-beings acted.: Benedek, Dezso (1991), The Songs of the Ancestors, Taipei: SMC Publishing. (secondary)