Saub

There is a window in the roof of the sky, and every morning an old man opens it and leans out to count.

What he is counting is people. He made them, or presided over the making of them, and he wants to know whether they have grown and multiplied the way he intended. For a long stretch of mornings the answer was yes. Then came a morning when the numbers had gone the wrong way, and kept going the wrong way, and the old man understood that something at the other end of the world was eating his creatures faster than they could be replaced.

His name is Saub, and among the Hmong he is the opposite number of Ntxwj Nyoog, the lord of death who sits at the top of twelve stacked mountains and decides who is reborn as what. Where Ntxwj Nyoog is dreaded, Saub is fond. He is addressed as Yawm Saub, grandfather Saub, in the tone reserved for an elder who has retired from daily management but can still be gone to. One account places his house on the moon. Others put him vaguely in the far realms of the otherworld, still alive, still reachable, no longer especially engaged.

He is a deity of beginnings and of increase. He was there when human beings were made. He supplied the first seeds, and it was through him that the first hen laid. That is a small, domestic sort of divinity, and it matters more than it sounds: in a hill-farming life measured out in millet, maize, hemp and the yearly pig, the god who starts the seed and starts the egg is the god who decides whether anyone eats.

His most consequential intervention came after the water. A great flood covered the earth and only a brother and sister survived it, shut in a wooden vessel while everything they had ever known went under. When they came out onto the wet ground there was no one else. Saub told them the only thing that could be told: to marry each other and start again. What was born to them was not a child. It was a shapeless lump of flesh, smooth and limbless, and the pair were left holding it in the silence that follows a wrong answer. Saub told them to cut it into twelve pieces and scatter them. Each piece became a Hmong clan, which is why a Hmong clan name is not a surname so much as an address. The tellings vary in their details. In some the pieces land in the goat house, the pig pen and the garden and take their clan names from where they fall, and in some the scattering produces not twelve clans but the different peoples of the earth.

For a god this central he is remarkably unseen. The stories describe Ntxwj Nyoog’s cave and his herd of heavenly cattle in detail, and they describe Nyuj Vaj Tuam Teem behind his enormous writing desk issuing licences for rebirth from a terrifying throne, and they linger over Siv Yis in his rock-cut cave with a medicinal garden and a healing pool beneath it. Saub gets an adjective. He is old. Nobody who passed the stories down thought to give him a face, and the absence is consistent enough across the tellings to look deliberate rather than lost: he is a voice through a window and a decision, and the tradition seems content with that.

The decision that mattered most was to give his power away. Unable to be everywhere at once against Ntxwj Nyoog, Saub picked out a mortal named Siv Yis, whose name means the one who heals, and equipped him. Healing power. A winged horse to cross invisible space. A troop of auxiliary spirits. Weapons. Siv Yis went to war on the lord of death and by one account blinded him. He also, eventually, had to leave, and the leaving is the part every Hmong shaman inherits. Called back to earth after his ascent, Siv Yis promised to return on the thirtieth day of the twelfth lunar month, and when the day came he was halfway down the celestial ladder before he realised the people below had all overslept. He dropped his instruments. Whoever picked one up became a shaman, and those instruments are the equipment on a shaman’s altar to this day.

That inheritance is visible in any seance. The bench the shaman rides is the winged horse. The bowl of water on the altar is the pool below Siv Yis’s cave. In trance the shaman does not merely serve Siv Yis, he speaks as him. And when a shaman substitutes his own life-substance for a patient’s, and is therefore said to have died already and been given back a shortened life, the gossip is that men like that are living on an extension granted through the grace of old Saub.

So his powers reduce to three, all of them about supply. He starts life, in seed and egg and clan. He restarts it when it fails. And he lends out the authority to argue with death, which is not the same as having the authority to overrule it.

The limits are exactly as sharp. Saub does not hold the licence book; that desk belongs to Nyuj Vaj Tuam Teem, and the negotiating has to be done in person by a shaman who has ridden there. He cannot be summoned or compelled, only appealed to, and he has drifted far enough from human business that the appeal is understood as a long shot. He does not answer often. Even his great fix was a loan rather than a cure, and the loan has been depreciating ever since, because Siv Yis’s instruments never worked as well in anyone else’s hands as they did in his, and because knowledge, in the Hmong reckoning, is a thing that inevitably decays. The window still opens every morning. What the Hmong say is that the old man is looking, not that he is coming down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Saub in Hmong mythology?

Saub is the benevolent creator deity of the Hmong, addressed respectfully as Yawm Saub, meaning grandfather Saub. He presided over the creation of humankind, supplied the first seeds and caused the first hen to lay, and stands as the deity of life against Ntxwj Nyoog, the deity of death. He is said to live on the moon or in the far reaches of the otherworld.

What did Saub do after the great flood?

Saub advised the brother and sister who survived the flood in a wooden vessel to marry each other so that the earth could be repopulated. Their union produced a shapeless lump of flesh rather than a child, and Saub told them to cut it into twelve pieces. Those pieces became the twelve Hmong clans, though some versions of the story have the scattered pieces produce different peoples instead.

How is Saub connected to Hmong shamanism?

When Ntxwj Nyoog began killing humans faster than they were being created, Saub gave a portion of his healing power to a mortal named Siv Yis, along with a winged horse, auxiliary spirits and weapons. Siv Yis became the first shaman. When he later dropped his instruments while climbing the celestial ladder back to heaven, whoever picked them up inherited the ability to heal, which is how Hmong shamanism is said to have spread.

What does Saub look like?

No account gives Saub a physical description beyond his age. He is spoken of only as an old man and addressed as a grandfather, in contrast to figures like Ntxwj Nyoog and Nyuj Vaj Tuam Teem, whose mountains, cattle, desk and throne are described in some detail.

Is Saub the same as the Chinese creator gods Pangu or Nüwa?

No. Saub belongs to Hmong tradition, which is one of the peoples grouped under the label Miao, and he is not a borrowed Chinese deity. His story overlaps thematically with Chinese creation and flood accounts, particularly the sibling pair who repopulate the earth, but the twelve-clan origin and the transfer of healing power to Siv Yis are specific to the Hmong.

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