{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_sw_yml_yml53_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_sw_yml_yml53_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_sw_yml_yml53_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/nam/sw/yml/yml53.htm","summary":"This is a Yaqui oral myth, recorded with a brief comparative scholarly annotation, belonging to a widespread Mesoamerican and Southwestern tradition linking water monsters to floods and celestial combat. The story explains that seven-headed serpents arise when Yaquis commit incest: the transgressor transforms into a worm, enters a sacred hill, and grows one head per year until emerging after seven. A celestial figure named Suawaka \u2014 identified also as San Miguel, described elsewhere as a blond dwarf \u2014 watches for these serpents and kills them with a harpoon of fire, which is what humans observe as shooting stars; he then carries the meat to his heavenly family, whose patriarch Yuku is the god of thunder and whose wife is the rain. A frame narrative follows a fisherman who witnesses the hunt, travels to the upper world, and returns bearing a serpent scale as proof \u2014 functioning as the story's charter myth explaining why humans know of these events. The myth is distinctive in its syncretic layering of indigenous cosmology with Catholic identification (Suawaka = San Miguel) and in its moral logic connecting sexual transgression within the kin group directly to catastrophic weather. The annotation situates the serpent-monster belief within a broad Indigenous network stretching from the Aztecs and Huichol to the Zuni and Hopi, suggesting a shared cosmological substrate across unrelated language groups.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Yaqui Myths and Legends: The Stories: Suawaka","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":630}