Romi Kumu - South American Goddess of Renewal

Romi Kumu is a major Goddess to the Baransama people of southeastern Colombia in South America.  Here she is considered to be the Great Mother who created the world as well as everything in it.  As such, she ruled the trees, the night, the earth, and of air. 

She was also the Mother of all people and a great female shaman who made a great grill out of clay which she placed in the mountains.  The grill became the sky.  When she opened the "water door" to the sky, water come gushing onto the earth ... and as a result, Romi Kumu created all of the creatures.

According to legend, Romi Kumu had a gourd that the Baransama people coveted.  They chased her and she fled into the East.  She tried fending them off by giving them a gourd, but the one she offered was not the one that they wanted.  Growing angry with the goddess, the people wanted to kill her.  To escape them, Romi Kumu climbed up into the sky and become the Pleides.

In his book Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations,  Professor E.C. Krupp advises that Romi Kumu's gourd was the same gourd in which shamans keep their beeswax, a  substance that is burned in specific rituals.  To the Baransama, the gourd's shape as well as the aroma from the smouldering beeswax had connotations with female sexuality.

Romi Kumu ages as each day passes - during the night time she is quite old; yet come the morning, she comes youthful again.  Her sacred gourd is attributed to this transformation which she goes through.

This South American Goddess of Creation is strongly connected to the rainforest and tigers.  Her sacred stone is the bloodstone, which is the symbol of the warrior.  She rules nature – the air, the earth, the night and the day.  Romi Kumu also resides over everyone as being the mother of all people.

One of her qualities is regarded as being her ability to encourage willpower.