Toward Understanding Headhunter and Cannibal Religion  or  Hainuwele and Headhunting Reconsidered

Karl W. Luckert, copyright 1999

Suggestion:  For easier entry to the subject matter of this essay, it is recommended that you first read the introductory essay, What is Religion?   There you will find, among other things, a section on the evolution of religion that might help you see the material better within the dynamic flow of human time.

If one surveys the evolution of religions at large, one does find that each type of religiosity corresponds to a certain type of culture or economy. What defines normalcy, sin, or salvation in hunter-gatherer societies is different from what is typical among those who live somewhere within the culture stratum of domesticators, or who participate in still more recent evolutionary phases. Primitive hunters committed most of their sins of aggression in the form of violence against fellow "animal people."  Moreover, a primitive hunter traditionally has owned very little. He owned the weapons he made and carried, and the clothes he wore. Beyond these he owned what he was able to kill and whatever other foods he gathered.

In their effort of acquiring these things, and more,  later domesticators became entangled in all kinds of problems pertaining to the titles of ownership. Hunter religion had to adjust to domesticator culture, and in the process it became domesticator religion. To justify the capture of potential herd animals, and to exercise sustained control over them, domesticators needed proof of ownership above everything else. The assurance of ownership of herd animals, vegetation and seeds, land and shelter, were usually given by gods who created--and who therefore owned these things beforehand. The alleviation of guilt that might result from theft required sacrifices, that is, payments to the original owners. With some ceremonial hype and haggling, the size of their offerings had to be adjusted appropriately to the size of the purchase.

The transition from gathering, scavenging, and hunting to domestication began happening only recently in human evolution--some twelve thousand years ago, perhaps, along the Fertile Cresent in the Near East. At a few rare places on this planet, a small tribe or group of gatherers and hunters are still only now making the transition from the chase to the domestication of animals (even as late as now, while I type these words into a complex machine that specializes in chasing electronic impulses).

How this transition was made, and when, had very little to do with the average intelligence quota of a group. People adapted to domesticaton and planting not because they had become more intelligent, but because economically they had to. Perhaps for over three million years, the ancestors of  humankind have learned to compensate for their natural deficiencies by way of becoming "artificial hunters." It was the use of tools that gave them an edge over better equipped predators who, because they roamed as greater-than-human beings, were previously ranked among the hunter gods. We will probably never find our ancestors' first wooden tools. But once these hominids began utilizing sharp-edged stone splinters as scrapers and knifes, they started leaving an archeological track record of their progress. As their tools got better, their hunting became more effective. They brought home more meat, and their families, that is, the entire human population increased significantly. As today, approximately fifty percent of their children were male and were therefore potential hunters. This human success gradually put so much pressure on the animal populations that species after species became endangered. Some became extinct.

The hunters' adaptation to domestication, including the the taming of animals, was a natural process on the steppes and prairies where inadequate rainfall prevented the women from planting gardens near the home camp. The men adapted to the decline in the animal populations by claiming for themselves  the remnant herds that were still available. Doing this, they had to enter into a special covenant with the divine owners of those herds. Under the environmental conditions that prevailed on steppes and prairies, the transition into domestication was easiest for the men. Their women fared less well. Without an independent economic basis of their own, they had no other choice but to cede authority to the men.

In tropical forests the opposite economic conditions prevailed. Still, these conditions did not create a paradise for the women. In these environments the men were prevented from choosing the adaptation by herding. Animals in the jungle wander quickly out of sight and are lost. Nevertheless, whatever intelligence was blossoming forth, guiding the playfully experimental hands of hunters and tool makers, it was inherited by males and females alike. When, as a result of the gradual decimation of animals, the male hunters in tropical forests returned to their home camps empty-handed, their women surely felt like scolding, or in any case like teasing them about their failure. But women could afford to reasonably do so only after they had shown themselves capable of producing food by planting gardens. Whether their mockery consisted of open scolding, or whether they mostly snickered behind the men's backs, the disdain was expressed just the same. Their attitudes whirled the men straightway into an identity crisis. Their traditional identity as providers of meat, which had been a few million years in the making, suddenly was no longer valid. As a solution to this crisis among decadent hunters, the beleagured men "unionized" into secret societies. Then, from these defensive social institutions they maneuvered to regain respect, ceremonially. Among their adaptations to this crisis situation--a situation that had crept up on them unnoticed--were headhunting and cannibalism.

The evolutionary phase of paleoplanter culture was first brought to my awareness in the class-room of  Mircea Eliade, during the 1960's. He taught us how to account in paleo-planter fashion for the mythical origin of various edible cultivars, and of death. And he showed us how to understand in this context also the philosophical-mystical orientation of cannibal and headhunter cultures. One got the impression that the extreme behavior of cannibals and headhunters was being rationalized as a tragic consequence of the paleo-planters' philosophical identification with plants--in short, as a philosophical plant mysticism. Most of this reasoning was based on books by Volhard and Jensen. The latter, for instance, portrayed the Wemale (Ceramese) Weltbild as being oriented around a different kind of primitive theology, featuring ancestral sacrificial dema divinities. In his lectures Eliade included Jensen's dema theology as part of his larger display of hierophanic patterns. (Hierophanies are manifestations of sacred realities; see Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religions, Cleveland, 1963).

Some twenty-five years later, after fifteen years of sporadic field work in American Indian religion, I revisited Jensen's data from Ceram. It was then that I discovered a dimension which the first time around I almost failed to see. Professor Eliade was fascinated by the mystic rationalizations by which Ceramese men, in secret societies, identified with plant essences. Philosophically this identification was understandable, because tubers were their primary diet. You are what you eat, and cannibalism therefore could be rationalized rather easily as eating some kind of super-tubers. Along the same line of interpretation, headhunting found a convenient allegory in the harvesting of coconuts. But in all these expositions of Ceramese dema theology, some important social dimension was being missed. My own fieldwork among the Navajo Indians, meanwhile, has sensitized me to this other dimension. The dynamic relationship between headhunters and their women turned out to be far more complicated than only their philosophical identification with the latter's garden produce. By hindsight, most of that philosophical plant mysticism does now seem to fall under the category of "excuses" and religious "justification."

Wemale men were obsolescent hunters who annually sacrificed a female Hainuwele victim. Surely, they did not do so only because the mythical origin of tubers involved the death of a female dema deity, but also because the obsolescent hunters competed with their women for status. The men made a last-ditch effort at regaining respect by transmuting hunter skills and violence into religiously and philosophically justifyable ritual practices. To expand our understanding of the Adolf E. Jensen legacy of Wemale religion, and to expose the roots of headhunter and cannibal religion to historical daylight, I am here presenting excerpts from "Hainuwele and Headhunting Reconsidered," an essay that I wrote during the later 1980's. It was published in the journal East and West (pages 261-279), in 1990, in Rome. These materials seem importent for the larger task of understanding the evolution and history of religions. I will therefore try to retrace my steps, and to resurrect some of these data for the worldwide web.

Before one can embark on a new discussion of Hainuwele mythology, it will be necessary to provide a fresh and slightly more extensive English translation and summary. The discussion of the Jensen materials, in English, has generally been limited to the brief extract, published in Eliade's Myth and Reality (pp. 104f) and in the anthology From Primitives to Zen (pp. 18-20), along with Jensen's own summary statement in Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. As we widen our angle of view, by including Jensen's data volumes, Hainuwele..., and Die Drei Ströme, one can expect that the historical and evolutionary dimension of Wemale religion will emerge more clearly.

In the days when the nine ancestral families of humankind emigrated from Nunusaku, they lived at several places in West-Ceram.... Among the people of that time lived a man named Ameta, he was unmarried and had no children. One day Ameta went out hunting with his dog. After a while the dog found a [wild] pig in the forest which he chased toward a pond. The pig ran into the water, while the dog remained standing at the shore. Soon the pig was unable to swim, and it drowned. When Ameta arrived at the place he pulled the dead pig ashore. At the tusks of the pig he found a coconut. In those days no coconut palms existed yet on earth.

[During a dream Ameta was instructed to plant the coconut, and he did so].... In three days the palm tree had grown to a considerable height. After three more days it bloomed. He climbed up the tree to cut the flowers in order to make a drink of them. Doing so he cut his finger, and blood dripped on a palm blossom. He went home to wrap his wound. When after three days he returned he saw that on the palm leaf (his) blood had become mixed with juice of the flowers; and he saw that a human being was taking shape there. The face of a person was already formed. When he returned after another three days the body of the person was there, and after another three days his drop of blood had become a small girl. [Commanded in another dream Ameta brought the girl to his home].... He called her Hainuwele [i.e. limb of the coconut tree].

The girl grew up quickly, and already in three days was she old enough for marriage. But she was not like ordinary people. When she yielded to necessity, her excrement consisted of valuable objects, such as China ware and gongs. Her father Ameta became very rich.

In those days a great Maro dance was held at Tamene siwa, which lasted nine nights. The original nine human families all participated. They danced in the pattern of a ninefold spiral. When the people dance the Maro at night, the women sit in the middle. They do not participate in the dancing, but they do hand out, to those [the men] who dance, Sirih and Pinang for chewing. During this great dance the girl Hainuwele stood in the middle and gave Sirih and Pinang to those who danced.... On the evening of the second night...she handed out corals instead. All the people thought the corals to be very beautiful.... During the next [the third] night... she distributed beautiful China plates, one to each of those who were present. During the fourth night she gave away still larger China plates. During the fifth night she distributed large bush knives, and during the sixth night she gave nicely worked Sirih containers made of copper. During the seventh night she gave earrings of gold, and during the eighth night beautiful gongs. In this manner grew the value of objects which Hainuwele distributed night after night. And these happenings seemed increasingly more mysterious to the people. They met and consulted with one another. They were very jealous [i.e. envious] of the fact that Hainuwele was able to distribute such wealth. And they decided to kill her.

During the ninth night of the great Maro dance Hainuwele was stood up again in the middle of the place, to distribute Sirih. The men, however, dug a deep hole at the place.... [Then] inside the slowly moving spiral dance formation they pushed the girl Hainuwele toward the grave and threw her in. The loud Maro song, chanted in harmony with three voices, drowned out the cries of the girl. Earth was thrown and heaped on her, and with their movements the dancers trampled solid the dirt on the grave. At the time when morning dawned the Maro dance was over. The people returned to their homes.

When the Maro dance was finished, and after Hainuwele failed to return home, Ameta knew that she had been killed.... [He went to the dancing place and] dug up her corpse and cut it up in many pieces. The individual portions of the body he buried over the entire area surrounding the dancing place. Only the two arms [which he had not cut up] he did not bury; but he brought these to mulua Satene--to that woman who in the beginning when people were created was transformed from an unripe banana. It was she who in those days ruled over the people. The buried pieces of Hainuwele's corpse, however, were transformed into things which hitherto had not yet existed on earth--that is, mostly into tubers which humans have used as their chief food, ever since then.

The stomach of Hainuwele became a large pot, which has been preserved to this day and is in possession of the village chief of Honitetu.... [At this point in the story are named nine body portions of Hainuwele and the nine fruits into which these portions have been transformed].

Ameta cursed the people, and mulua Satene was angry with them, because they have killed. She built a large gate at a place in Tamene siwa. It consisted of a ninefold spiral as it was fashioned after the Maro dance-formation. Mulua Satene herself stood on the trunk of a large tree at one side of the gate, and she held the severed arms of Hainuwele in both of her hands. She assembled the people at the opposite side of the large gate and spoke to them: "I will no longer live here, because you have killed. I will leave you this day. Now you all must come to me through this gate. Whoever comes through the gate remains human, and whoever does not pass through, with them it will be different." The people all attempted to pass through the spiral gate, but not all succeeded. Whoever failed to come to mulua Satene through that gate, back then, became an animal or a ghost. In this manner originated pigs, deer, birds, fishes, and many ghosts who live on earth. Formerly these were people, but they could not pass through the gate behind which stood mulua Satene....

Satene said, "I will leave you this day, and you will see me on earth no more. Only after you have died will you see me again...." Then mulua Satene disappeared from the earth, and she has been living since then as nitu [ghost] on Salahua, which is the mountain of the dead, in southern West-Ceram. Whoever wishes to reach her place must die first.... (translated and abridged from Jensen and Niggemeyer 1939: 59-64)

In 1976 Professor Jonathan Z. Smith explained this myth of Hainuwele, regarding the central act of Hainuwele's murder, as a "situational incongruity." He pointed to her "curious mode of production, the excretion of valuable articles." These trade goods, which on Ceram functioned as money, could obviously not antedate the spice trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during which they first appeared in the Moluccas. They may even belong to a much later time--a "cargo situation" that was brought about by the intensification of Dutch colonialism between 1902 and 1910.

The recent date of an "archaic" myth, suggested by Smith, need not surprise anyone nor be cause for alarm for those who all along have assumed its greater antiquity. Living oral traditions of the kind which I myself have found and recorded among Navajo Indians, are constantly being updated by each generation of storytellers--all the time and as a matter of course. Only thoughtless or poorly informed narrators will narrate by rote. Primitive narrators tell their stories for the sake of contemporary relevance and not in order to conform to some recorded antiquity--they have no recorded antiquity to imitate. Thus, if Chinese porcellan ware has been present on the island of Ceram, and if on top of that fact some such ware has been used in native ritual then, surely, an inclusion of it in relation to revered traditions was required of every teacher-narrator worth his keep.

For the time being, however, the concrete historical context of colonial circumstances under which Hainuwele became known as producer of "all sorts of valuable articles, such as Chinese dishes and gongs," is a most welcome benchmark for the history of religions. It helps us better define the frequently misunderstood dynamic of philosophical food mysticism among archaic domesticators. It is truly amazing how much historical depth a few imported dishes and gongs can contribute to our understanding. Nobody can deny that these goods had to be imported before Jensen's version of the story could be told.

However, the greater part of the question still remains: What is the archaic core of the Hainuwele tradition? The central ritual sacrifice of the dema girl Hainuwele, and the propagation of edible plants from her body portions, together appear significantly older than the contemporary currency or Chinese porcellans that were being distributed as gifts. I therefore suggest that the archaic core also included Hainuwele's creative activity and her mode of production. While her actions my seem absurd to modern urban intellectuals, Hainuwele's excretions cannot just be simply discarded as "filthy lucre" or a primitive version of "dirty money." The creative excretion motive has been recorded elsewhere in the world, much earlier and independent of Western colonialism, in ninth century Japan. In the Nihongi we read that the goddess of food, Uke-mochi no Kami, was killed by Tsuki-yo-mi, a heavenly messenger deity, who felt insulted on account of the dirty food that she offered him. From the dead body of Uke-mochi no Kami nevertheless continued to come forth domestic animals and foods for the future:

Where her hair was parted, on the head of this goddess, originated cow and horse; on her brow orginated cob-millet; on her eyebrows originated silkworm cocoons; in her eyes originated [another variety of] millet; in her body originated rice; in her vagina originated barley, large beans, and Adzuki beans. (from Florenz, 1919: 144f)

Likewise in the Ceramese materials, excrements and dirt [Kot and Schmutz] do not exist in opposition to life-supporting food plants. In primitive awareness, excrements are no more and no less than edible foods ex-pressed [pun intentional], contemplated, and then named in future tense. Moreover, the female dirty method of creation "between excrement and urine" is sufficiently highlighted at other places in Ceramese lore, wherever females do function as cooks and as presenters of food. For instance, in mythical primordial times female excretions were cooked to become edible sago. And an ever-so-dirty grandmother was transformed into a sago tree (see Jensen and Niggemeyer, 1939: 69f).

The problem of purity and impurity, to the extent that it has burdened primitive hunters, cannot be dealt with here in its entirety. Let it suffice to observe, therefore, that feminine secretions have, since the ape level some seven million years ago, been evaluated as life fluids that flowed in stark contrast to the masculine drive for hunting, killing, and death-wielding. The feminine opposition to masculine aggressiveness, even the confiscation of stone weapons clasped by males, has been observed in contemporary chimpanzee behavior. Relevant data pertaining to sexual polarity in chimpanzee life have been recorded and published by Frans de Waal (1982). Then there is also the evolutionary happenstance that human female resisters to violence, the men's partners in pleasure, have at some point in time succeeded in growing more nourishment for their paleo-planter households than their men could hunt. The evidence still lies scattered about worldwide, namely, that as the result of a change in livelihood male hunters have lost much of their self-esteem. Such basic evolutionary considerations go a long way toward explaining the Ceramese corpus of chauvinistic and scatological Hainuwele mythology.

A measure of common-sense equality is achieved when some Ceramese stories, again on the basis of elementary scatology, tell about how a male's act of urination could have produced pregnancy (Hainuwele, pp. 269, 356). In addition, one can learn how Ceramese men associate pollution with the presence of urine and excrement, and also with insult, and with the power to kill and to expel (Hainuwele, 172f, 177, 224, 327, 329f). But none of these chauvinistic negatives is sufficient to overcome the positive and creative significance of feminine excretion. That significance is supremely anchored in the universal feminine function of giving birth--and everyone who is alive has to acknowledge his or her derivative nature.

We must return specifically to Hainuwele's creativity. She created by way of excrements first, that is, without sacrificing her own body. Thus, during her first round of gift-giving her body served as a resource and container, as naturally as such a creative function can be for a womb. Only later, after her body had been cut into pieces, and after her remains decayed to a smelly substance of excremental quality, would edible bodies of tubers and of other plants begin to bud from her planted portions. In this context the reader is encouraged to contemplate the entire fertilizer-planting-burial-growing-digging-cutting-cooking-eating-nourishment-excretion cycle of a tuber, first with and then also without its detour through human digestive tracts. As soon as one contemplates reallistically this entanglement, of the planters' symbiotic relationship with humus, dung, and dirt, then everything concerning paleo-planter existence becomes clearer.

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that historians of religions who venture beyond the domain of sanitized written history, into dirty fields and primitive customs, must also dare to investigate beyond a historian's own theoretical "Sitz im Leben." Primitive religious folk know no toilet "seats." And primitive tuber planters must dig in dirt to obtain their sustenance. Categories from urban commerce, such as "filthy lucre" and "dirty money," are hopelessly out of context in the garden patches of Hainuwele's people. Moreover, the gold-shitting asses or cattle in Eurasian fairytales belong only half into the literary realm of fiction. Their concrete incarnations actually are grazing, still, all around us on pastures of the real world. Unto valuable fields of dirt, and unto the grass which in turn nourishes them, our animals bestow their very natural blessings.

Adolf Jensen has repeatedly expressed his own despair about his inability to explain the central fact of Hainuwele mythology, that is, its existential connection with headhunting as well as the implied necessity of ritual killing. My own interpretation of the central theme in Hainuwele mythology concerns not only Hainuwele's recent creation of foreign trade goods, but also her participation in the universal "dirty" creativity of womankind. The basic role which females universally have played as birthgivers, gardeners, cooks, and presenters of food were, of course, continually redefined by the responses of their men. All along one must remember that these men were nostalgic huntsmen who would rather have eaten meat that they hunted than accept vegetables or fruits from the hands of the more successful women.

A Ceramese foil to the Hainuwele excretion theme is on record and is most revealing. There is a tale that attributes the ability to create by excretion also to a heavenly hunter. A heavenly hunter went out hunting together with an earthly one. He excreted a kussu and urinated into existence a streak which became a snake. The earthly hunter subsequently killed this snake (Hainuwele, 77). Of course, everyone knows that earthly hunters who tell such a story are already in the habit of killing snakes and kussu. Is this dualistic hunter story therefore older than the Hainuwele theme of the planters' ritual killings? Or is it simply a late hunter myth concerned with such justification as still can be had for "dirty creativity" from the heavenly direction? Hunting as an occupation is mentioned here as a common denominator between the celestial and the earthly realms. Is this story therefore told to demonstrate how excreted or born creatures may rightly be killed by earthly hunters?

The time has come to move a little ways beyond Hainuwele's scatological creativity, to another theme in the myth which happens to be central to the Maro sacrifice itself. In the narrative, translated and rendered above, Hainuwele's initial ceremonial function during the Maro festival has been identified several times. Her role was to distribute to the dancing men the customary Sirih and Pinang (i.e. medicine to heal and to revive) for chewing. She upstaged these traditional expectations when, in the course of events, she revealed herself as a divinity of plant life, food, and wealth. Thus, inasmuch as in that ceremonial context Sirih and Pinang (i.e. medicines to heal and to resuscitate) have been assigned centrality, the suspicion which has been raised concerning the recency of Chinese porcellan in Ceram--pertaining to peripheral updates and meaning--does shrink to insignificance.

The imported goods that are being identified as Hainuwele's excrements, do serve in the larger context of the story only the purpose of rationalizing the conveniently obliterated motive of a ceremonial murder. Hainuwele's killers were jealous (i.e. envious) about her ability to procure and to distribute wealth--or so goes the lame excuse of the storyteller. Judged in the light of an extended evolutionary sequence, this rationalization of the Maro sacrifice as a product of envy may, indeed, stem from the colonial decade when the older meanings already had gone out of focus. Certainly, it was not simple men-to-goddess envy that motivated archaic Ceramese men to kill?

The answer lies actually close to the surface. Wemale men sought ceremonial control over all of Hainuwele's food plants, over the village with its dancing place, and over the general domain of the women themselves. They envied the real economic status of their women--as contrasted with the unrealistic hunter nostalgia that they had left for themselves. They sought ways to become again real men, which meant, become again their families' chief defenders and providers. These men became violent nuisances, because that sort of behavior made them defenders of their kin during village skirmishes.  They filled-in their deficit as providers with ceremonial authority and with the terror of headhunting and cannibalism. Pathetically maladjusted for their evolutionary phase of horticultural domestication, these obsolescent huntsmen failed the balance test. Of course, they failed primarily by our standards because our standards are now based on perfect hindsight.

Before it can be approached again as a central myth of paleo-planters, the story of Hainuwele must first be explained in the context of the men's hunter religiosity. The onus of doubt which Professor Smith has unloaded on this tale, regarding its antiquity, fosters a welcome sense of unease. Indeed, it is truly amazing how uncritically the Hainuwele story has all along been accepted by scholars as a central and typical myth of paleo-cultivators. Such it is definitely not. And all of this misunderstanding happened in broad daylight--in spite of the fact that the hunter context of the plot is not in the least disguised. To begin with, the metamorphoses of people into animals or ghosts, at the close of the narrative, is a typical "prehuman flux" theme in hunter mythology worldwide. (for "prehuman flux mythology" see Luckert 1971, 1975)

As far as the sacrificial Hainuwele theme itself is concerned, the tale would have been better titled "Ameta and Hainuwele." The principal dema in the story, Ameta, comes unto the scene as one who has gone out to hunt a boar, and this hunting effort brought forth the first coconut seed. The man was put in charge of planting the seed--which he had hunted. The seed was his, because traditionally what a hunter has hunted that he owns. The events that followed did not only establish coconut trees to be among Ameta's possessions, but they also put the food goddess with all her internal treasures, and plant life in general, into his keeping. It was the man Ameta, who fertilized the coconut blossom with his own blood (an everpresent side product of hunting), and who then nurtured and raised Hainuwele, the coconut-limb girl. Then it was the men who danced the girl into her grave. And after that it was Ameta who cut her up and planted her passive portions. As a result of all these activities, men came to own the agricultural enterprise. And surely, in this process of ceremonially and mythologically claiming all edible cultivars their own, the men took possession of fertility, of the food goddess and whatever used to be her possessions. By implication all the lesser females, and whatever traditionally they claimed as their own, was categorically included.

I have long been pondering the Eskimo "Sedna" myth in relation to Hainuwele. The girl Sedna was cut and mutilated alive, and then drowned, by her own father who was a hunter of sea animals. Her severed fingers were transformed into a variety of sea animals, and Sedna herself became (i.e. remained) their ruling mistress. Henceforth all guilty Eskimo hunters had to serve her wishes if they wanted to hunt any of her animals. (see Rasmussen, 1929)

Jensen's Ceramese Weltbild (world picture) associates dema theology with paleo-planters. I have already shown from the outset how hunter perspective dominates the story of Hainuwele itself. So then, Eskimo dema mythology, the story of Sedna, has been found along the northern shores of the Pacific Ocean. It could conceivably be argued that the myth has drifted there from some Pacific island.

But we cannot stop comparing after having looked at Sedna mythology. There is also a Navajo Indian myth that very closely approximates the plot of Hainuwele's dismemberment--and it most certainly is a story of hunters. The only element in the Navajo story that can possibly be attributed to planter influence, is the Navajo habit of classifying animal species in accordance with four directional colors. But that feature is a peripheral element--and is an accommodation to Pueblo Indian cosmography (which happens to be a frontier emanation of Middle American cosmology). At its core the Navajo dema story, a summary of which follows, represents mythological hunter burlesque at its purest:

In mythical times a maiden, wife of the primordial Coyote, succeeded in killing all her brothers, except the youngest. In an attempt to also kill him she transformed herself into a ferocious bear. But with the help of other divine animal helpers he managed to kill her instead. The youngest brother proceeded to resurrect his dead brothers. Then he butchered the carcass of his Bear sister. In typical Ameta fashion, he cut her into pieces. Nevertheless, true to hunter limitations, no word is said about he having planted any of her remains; he simply left the pieces to themselves. Somehow her vagina became wide-leafed yucca. One of her breasts became the pinion tree, which resulted in nut- bearing pinion cones that still today resemble the nibble on that breast. Her second breast became Porcupine. One arm became Black Bear, and the other arm became Blue Bear. One leg became Yellow Bear and the other became White Bear. Her intestines changed into slender snakes, and her colon became the head of Horned Rattlesnake. Her small intestines became Long Snake and her spine became Stubby Bear. (summarized from Haile 1984: 82-88)

At the very least, the possibility emerges here that some sort of dema mythology was thinkable already in primitive hunter situations. Indeed, upon closer reflection it seems quite obvious, that the killing and butchering of sacrificial bodies does fit best the lifeways of men who are full-time hunters. Actually, this theme fits much less into a basic planter economy--unless, of course, the planters are still hunters at heart and are compensating for having to adjust to the dull ways of domestication. Of course, domestic animals may also require killing and butchering. But such domestic animal-related activities are not the subject matter of Hainuwele mythology; nor are they among the goals that the sacrificial Maro rite was meant to enhance.

Now that we have started to consider hunters and planters in terms of an evolutionary dialectic, a new set of questions does emerge: Can it still be said that the Hainuwele myth, at its core, is a primitive planters' way of explaining Ceramese agriculture? Can such a conclusion be maintained merely on the basis that portions of Hainuwele are said to have been planted? What kind of a feminine rational planter mind would, by any stretch of the imagination, have devised such a procedure? Their livelihood rested on a clear knowledge of what was seed or capable of budding. Inasmuch as Hainuwele was killed by men, one must rather look for initial motives in the realm of the men's hunting.

Indeed, increasingly it appears as though the cutting up and planting of Hainuwele's flesh is a pure and simple maladaptation on the part of male hunters for whom the boundary of the realm of hunting got blurred. Butchering an animal would have been a more serious matter for them--as their occasional pig sacrifices would demonstrate. But having to "butcher" a tuber in order to survive--jams or tarro--seemed like an ipso facto silly parody in the eyes of the men. When, after extensive exposure to various primitive hunter traditions, an awareness of the basic hunters' sexual dualism finally began to dawn on me, I could no longer subsribe to Eliade's mostly romantic interpretation. He was right, of course, if male evaluations are the only ones that decide the meaning (and not only the fate) of Hainuwele. In that case the men's "justification" of their Maro ceremonial reduced the status of women to the level of tuber-"seed." At the same time this ceremonial of maladapted hunters reduced their victim, Hainuwele, in proportion to how their butchering activities were reduced to the level of theological burlesque. On the positive side, however, to the extent that the sameness of  tuber-meat and the flesh of the sacrificial girl was insisted on, the "Ameta and Hainuwele" myth places all edible plants into the ceremonial domain and under the jurisdiction of the men. More evidence to that effect will be forthcoming.

Jensen has collected information about two secret men's associations in West Ceram. These are the older Wapaulame society of the Wemale and the more recent underground Kakihan which had proliferated from the Alune across all of West Ceram. Whether one of these two secret associations has initially been more involved in ritual killings than the other is difficult to establish anymore from the records, especially in light of the fact that all insider information which could be obtained has been either secretive or apologetic. Moreover, neither of these two societies functioned anymore in Jensen's time as havens for men caught up in transition from hunting to domestication. Both societies had long ago developed into grand-domestication schemes and have subsequently cultivated warrior appetites. The Kakihan was still extant when Jensen visited Ceram during the 1930s. Decades earlier it has had a bout with Dutch colonialism and that, necessarily, brought warrior behavior to the foreground. And at the time of Jensen's visit this society has been outlawed for two decades. This itself explains its ideological distance from initial hunter nostalgia and from the old ambition of taking over planting. One should therefore not be overly surprised when Jensen recorded the primary function of a secret society to be the initiation of its members.

That the initiation of members--or even enlightenment about sexual matters, which Jensen adds--cannot be the real reason for a secret society's existence is a truism that resolves itself. No human enterprise was ever founded, initially, merely for the sake of its subsequent continuity. On the other hand, traces of a better reason for its existence can be detected if only one begins contemplating, together with Wemale men, their sexual mysteries within the broader societal dichotomy of maleness and femaleness. Sexual roles are nowhere defined in the abstract; they are inherited everywhere in the context of transitional phases of cultural evolution. And such traces are present in Jensen's notes; they can be gleaned from mythology as well as rituals; and they still speak loud and clear, as in the story which follows:

Initially the people (i.e. men) built a baileo (meeting house) to celebrate festivals there. To decorate the baileo they hung up there a variety of fruits, such as coconuts, bananas, and pineapple. But they did not consider these beautiful. They also hung up dogs, deer, and pigs, but they did not like it. Then they thought that a human head would decorate the baileo rather nicely; though, it was difficult to obtain such a head.

Then the Latulisa (war chief and leader of the baileo) decided to get the head of his sister Silai. He told the people: "Go, and cut down my banana tree!" They did not understand what he meant, and when they returned they said: "We have found no banana tree!"

Then Latulisa himself went to his sister who, at the time, was weaving a kanune (a skirt worn by Alune women), and he cut off her head. He hung up the head in the baileo which now was nicely decorated.

From that time on people practiced headhunting. And when they went to war they said to one another: "Get this coconut!" Or: "Climb that kanari tree!" One who has never taken a head will not understand this. But the others know what is meant. (translated from Jensen and Niggemeyer 1939: 115f)

Transposed into a concrete evolutionary perspective, this story gives more than only an explanation of headhunting. It reveals why it is necessary to have men's associations and lodges in the first place. Their lodge had to be a very special place. Fruits and plants from the gardens of womenfolk were the least acceptable decorations for this haven of bruised hunter egos. Trophies from carcasses of hunted animals might formerly have sufficed to establish the status of a huntsman. But hunters who were able to keep themselves occupied by hunting animals on the range, for real, did not need to impress one another by way of sitting or dancing in lodges. Hunters who had become less and less successful in finding animals, whose procurement of animal flesh had diminished and whose dependency on the women's plant foods had increased, were pressured to find new ways of "saving themselves." In the forementioned legend not even a superior leader of a group of men could hunt enough animals anymore to earn respect. With the women and garden produce now determining the diet of proud male hunters, most of the time, and with women no longer showing respect for hunters who regularly return home empty-handed, men sought other ways to maintain their dignity.

The chief in this legend has forcefully reasserted his authority over his family--also his ownership--by way of cutting off the head of his sister. This show of force must likewise be understood over against an older hunter background. Traditionally, what a hunter could butcher he had already brought under his control. A primitive hunter owned first his weapon, and secondarily his victim. It goes without saying that broader religious justifications and explanations had to accompany this forceful new act of aggression, of ego-assertion, against a member of one's own family. And not surprisingly, upon closer examination much in the Hainuwele corpus of the Jensen collection seems custom-designed for justifying exactly the action of this chief, and of his followers. While females raised plant foods by some dirty method often approximating excretion and decay, members of the secret men's society assumed aristocratic responsibility not merely for the wider world of animals out there. They also found ways to become more relevant around the home camp. Realistically speaking, the home is the place where a planter family survives. But in order to sustain their vulnerable hunter egos, to sustain hunter nostalgia for a way of life that was long lost, traditional Wemale men had to kill a Hainuwele girl, periodically.

But then again, for the sake of marriage and progeny they also had to balance anew, regularly, the male/female relationships that by violent trespasses were easily disturbed. For that purpose the men went on the warpath and included among their victims other males. They brought home the heads of "enemy" men. The Golden Rule, of egalitarian co-existence with their women, demanded this gesture of inter-sexual fairness. Headhunting raids on other villages led, understandably, to perpetual reprisals and warfare between them.

The pathos of this fragile existence was generated by the weight of a hunter's evolution, several million years of it, which humankind at large has never quite managed to outgrow during subsequent culture phases. Amble evidence of this same pathos, in all phases of cultural progress, can still be found worldwide. We see it in modern men's clubs, military units, priesthoods, in guilds and sports, business men and veterans associations. It continues in scientific ambitions, technology, space travel, and in the arms race. Back in the days when defunct and defensively resourceful hunters formulated Hainuwele mythology, real men went headhunting. They danced Maro spirals and killed Hainuwele girls. They butchered and planted female flesh. And knowing themselves guilty, they told stories of justification, about how all that sacrificing was necessary to have enough feminine food to eat. Moreover, considering the women's important role in economy and creation, it should not come as a surprise when headhunting, too, has all along been attributed to the women's own innovation and fault:

[In the days when human beings still lived at Mainala the practice of going to war was still unknown]. The people then played only a game of contest without weapons. That game was Souwe. People fought with their hands, and whoever touched the head of an opponent he had won the game. The one who was defeated was considered dead and was out of the game. This they played together, frequently, and they also went to a neighboring village to play that same game with the people there....

Once when they played there, a predator bird came flying with a mouse in his beak. He tore out the hair from the head of the mouse and let the dead mouse fall to the ground. Then the people said: so we shall do it also in our game; he who defeats another pulls out his hair. But inasmuch as the pulling out was impossible, they cut off the hair with knives and bush knives. This new game by which the people of Mainala imitated the predatory bird was called Topiulu. The people of Mainala always won in this game whenever they met with the neighboring village....

One day thirty-one women from the neighboring village came to Mainala, to play Topiulu; because in those days the women competed as much as the men. They saw on their way that same predatory bird with a dead mouse. They saw how this bird bit off the head of the mouse and dropped its body. The women were angry about the fact that the people of Mainala were always winning and therefore said: "The predatory bird has shown it to us. We will from now on do it that way too, and cut off the head." When they came to Mainala all the people were still in their gardens. They only found an old man, and they cut off his head. They took his head home with them. On their way home they rested by Mount batu Kokoba and there placed the head on a rock. Only one of the women, who still had a three-month old baby, went straight home and told (her people) that they have cut off the head of an old man (at Mainala). Meanwhile the men of Mainala returned home and found the body of the man without head. They tracked the women and caught up with them at batu Kokoba. When they saw the head of the old man, on the rock, they attacked and beheaded all thirty of them. From that time on war was waged with weapons, and there was headhunting. It was agreed that women should never again fight. (translated from Jensen and Niggemeyer 1939: 113f)

As a typical story told by men to justify their practice of headhunting, this story tells it all. Universally in hunter religions, some predator animals served as exemplary divine models for imitation by human hunters. Thus, imitating a predatory bird corresponded to hunters' common sense. However, such justification by way of imitating a predatory divine tutelary was only proper for men. In this instance the men, in addition, chose to remember their lost hunter paradise as a time when they merely used to cut off the hair of their victims. As they saw it, the real problem began when ignorant women wanted to be hunters and killers, and also behave like men.

Transposed onto the current evolutionary phase this sentiment did imply, subconsciously, that the real trouble began when women usurped the place of men and became the chief procurers of food. We have already seen another story, earlier, which is more to the point regarding the culprit who started headhunting. There a chief of the men was given full credit for first cutting off the head of his sister. Our present story shifts the guilt to the women, but it is also more specific regarding the initial motive. As seen by the men, their killing and their headhunting has always been pursued for the welfare of their women and children.

We read between the lines, that headhunting was done in preparation for marriage to impress and assure females--in a similar fashion as males of certain species still do battle, and as fist-fights still serve that purpose in some human frontier societies. The practice of headhunting, and its necessity, has therefore in final headhunter analysis always been the women's fault. Moreover, not every Maro dance among the Wemale required an actual Hainuwele victim. Jensen also has reported that Maro dances traditionally used to follow in the aftermath of headhunting expeditions. Thus, raids of headhunting into "enemy" villages preceded human sacrifices at home. Men hunted heads among people in other villages for egalitarian balance. Back home Hainuwele victims were killed, perhaps more sparingly, for home-emphasis.

Those maladapted planters, who still dreamt of being hunters, also rationalized and told one another that their Hainuwele girl whom they killed during Maro festivals was in fact "planted." Inasmuch as ownership was traditionally implied regarding everything that men hunted and killed, and inasmuch as ceremonially they began to equate their killings with planting, the principle of ownership on the part of men was thereby extended to include agriculture and womenfolk. The women who hitherto "owned" the agricultural enterprise ceded control over plant foods, themselves included, to their menfolk. The men assumed this control ceremonially, by way of imitating their mythical dema. By their own stories they were justified, and by their ritualized actions women were kept in place.

The men's need for status and respect demanded, as did the crisis of transition from hunting to domestication, some drastic measures of ego re-assertion. A masculine hunter ego, shaped and forged over millions of years, was equipped to endure dangers of every possible kind, during encounters with greater-than-human beasts and divine tutelaries. A hunter was ready and able to sacrifice his own life in defending and feeding his family. He was, however, unable to adjust in a timely manner to his fate of becoming a humble domesticator and planter--of becoming a different kind of marriage partner and parent, and a less heroic, less free, and less important human being.

References and Background

Boas, Franz. The Central Eskimo. Washington D.C., 1888.

De Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. New York, 1982.

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Cleveland, 1963 (1958).

_____. Myth and Reality. 1963.

_____. From Primitives to Zen. New York and Evanston, 1967.

Florenz, Karl. Die Historischen Quellen der Shinto-Religion. Göttingen und Leipzig, 1919.

Haile, Father Berard. Women versus Men: a Conflict of Navajo Emergence. Lincoln and London, 1981.

_____. Navajo Coyote Tales, edited with an introduction by Karl W. Luckert. Lincoln and London, 1984.

Jensen, Adolf E. Das religiöse Weltbild einer frühen Kultur. Leipzig, 1939.

_____. Die Drei Ströme: Züge aus dem geistigen und religiösen Leben der Wemale. Leipzig, 1948

_____. Mythos und Kult bei den Naturvölkern. Wiesbaden, 1951.
English Translation: Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Chicago, 1963

Jensen, Adolf E. and Heinrich Niggemeyer. Hainuwele: Volkserzählungen von der Molukken-Insel Ceram. Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt, 1939.

Kroeber, Clifton and Bernard L. Fontana. Massacre at the Gila. Tucson, 1986.

Luckert, Karl W. "The Geographization of Death in Melanesia," in Numen--International Review for the History of Religions 18. Leiden, 1971.

_____. The Navajo Hunter Tradition. Tucson, 1975.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. London, 1950.

Smith, Jonathan Z. "A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: a Study in Situational Incongruity," in History of Religions, 1976.

Rasmussen, Knud. Iglulik Eskimos. Copenhagen, 1929.

Volhard E. Kannibalismus. Stuttgart, 1939.

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