Pumo Hniyyr

Pumo Hniyyr is the mother of the great Nuosu culture hero Zhyge Alu in the Hnewo Teyy (Book of Origins). She is introduced weaving under the eaves of her house when three drops of blood shed by eagles and dragon-eagles wheeling overhead fall upon her, whereupon she conceives. The child she bears is so strange-natured that he refuses her milk, her bed, and the clothes she weaves for him, and, unable to keep him, she places him in a cave where dragons rear him, giving him the dragon-element in his name. As the mortal woman through whom the sky's raptor-blood enters the world, Pumo Hniyyr stands at the threshold of the epic's heroic age, the human mother of a half-celestial son.

Domains

• ancestry and progenitors
• miraculous birth

Powers

• to conceive the culture hero from drops of eagle and dragon-eagle blood

Epithets

• Pupmop HnixyyrBender, Mark. "Tribes of Snow: Animals and Plants in the Nuosu Book of Origins." Asian Ethnology 67, no. 1 (2008): 5-42. (secondary)

Relations

• mother of: Zhyge AluShe is the weaving woman upon whom the drops of dragon-eagle blood fall, and so the mother of the hero Zhyge Alu, whom she later places in a cave to be raised by dragons.Bender, Mark, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu, trans. The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. (secondary)

Sources

• Pumo Hniyyr is the weaving woman of the Nuosu Book of Origins who miraculously conceives the culture hero Zhyge Alu when drops of eagle and dragon-eagle blood fall upon her, and who, unable to nurse the strange child, gives him over to be reared by dragons.: Bender, Mark, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu, trans. The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. (secondary); Bender, Mark. "Tribes of Snow: Animals and Plants in the Nuosu Book of Origins." Asian Ethnology 67, no. 1 (2008): 5-42. (secondary)