312
I
n the beginning there were
two déma, or spirt beings:
Nubog, the female Earth,
and Dinadin, the male sky. Their
children Geb and Mahu (also called
Sami) are the mythical ancestors of
the Marind-Anim people of
Western New Guinea, who all
regard themselves as descended
from one or the other. Traditionally,
the ritual reenactment of the myths
about these déma, and the many
other déma they engendered, was
central to Marind-Anim identity
and culture. A yearly cycle of
reenactments began with the ritual
of the Mayo (a cult initiation) in the
dry season and concluded with a
headhunting expedition and a
celebratory feast after the Imo ritual
in the wet season.Humans take form
The story of how the first humans
originated begins with a great
feast that the déma were holding
underground in the far west ofMarind territory. As they ate
and drank, the déma gradually
burrowed eastward. Up on the
surface of the Earth, a déma dog
named Girui heard the commotion.
Wondering what was going on, he
tracked the underground journey
of the déma.
Girui followed the noise until
he reached Kondo, where the sun
rises. There the noise became very
loud and he scratched away at the
bank of a creek to discover its
source. As he dug, water poured
out of the earth, bringing with it
strange beings like catfish, with
no facial features and with arms,
legs, fingers, and toes that formed
part of their torsos. These were the
Marind-Anim people. A stork déma
then began to peck away at the
creatures, but they were so hard
that the bird’s beak bent, giving it
the slight curve that it has today.
Aramemb, the déma of
medicine men, warned off the dog
and the stork and made a big fire
of bamboo to dry out the fish
people. Each time the bamboo
stems cracked in the heat, their
bodies erupted and ears, eyes,
noses, and mouths sprang out.
Aramemb then took his bambooTHE DÉMA
Marind-Anim wear elaborate
costumes representing their déma
totems in a photograph taken at a
ritual reenactment of myth in Dutch
New Guinea in the 1920s.IN BRIEF
THEME
Foundation and fertilitySOURCE
Déma: Description and
Analysis of Marind-Anim
Culture (South New Guinea),
Jan van Baal, 1966.SETTING
Papua New Guinea.KEY FIGURES
Nubog The Earth.Dinadin T he sk y.Geb and Mahu (Sami) The
déma forefathers.Girui A déma dog.Aramemb The déma of
medicine men.Piakor Wife of Mahu and Geb.Uaba Son of Geb and Piakor.Rugarug-évai A déma hostile
to Uaba.Often when listening
to a myth being told,
I had the impression that
it all happened only a
few months ago.
Father Jan Verschueren
Missionary and ethnographerUS_310-315_Dema.indd 312 05/12/17 4:17 pm
313
knife and cut the arms, legs, fingers,
and toes free. The trimmings that
he threw away became leeches,
which are abundant in the Marind-
Anim lands to this day.
In fact, the dog had dug two
holes. From the second hole came
all the other tribes, or the Ikom-
anim (outsiders), who quickly
dispersed. Geb and Mahu then
arrived in their canoes and took the
new Marind-Anim humans aboard.
Geb and Aramemb took the people
who made up the Geb-zé and
Aramemb “phratries” (kinship
groups), and Mahu took charge
of the Mahu-zé people.A bamboo wife
The myths of the Geb-zé phratry
say that Geb is a self-created being,
whose face was pecked out of
a stone by a stork. In the west,
he grew into a red-skinned man
trapped in an anthill, where he
suffered unbearable heat from the
setting sun. Unable to find a wife,
he mated instead with a stem of
bamboo into which a stone axe
could be fitted. The stem bore
him several children.
After a while, Mahu, who lived
in a beehive nearby, brought his
two wives to visit Geb, who becameso excited at the sight of the
women that Mahu took pity on him,
and gave him one of his wives,
Piakor, as a gift. As the wife of Geb,
Piakor gave birth first to birds, then
to fish, and after that to two boys
and a girl. When the girl, Baléwil,
was in the final stage of pregnancy
herself, she went to the beach to
give birth. She was in labor for so
long that the tide carried her out
to sea, where she became a bank
of hardened loam.
Geb was a headhunter. He
kidnapped children, especially
red-skinned boys, took them back
to the anthill, and cut off their
heads in his fiery lair. Eventually,
the people decided that something
must be done about Geb, but the
men were reluctant to approach
the anthill. To encourage them, the
women brought water to quench
its heat. When they poured it onto
the anthill, Geb emerged, and the
people cut off his head.Sun, moon, and first fruits
Terrified by this assault, Geb’s
head fled underground and
eastward to Kondo, the place of the
sunrise, where it climbed up a yam
tendril into the sky to become the
sun. It then traveled through theSee also: The night barque of Ra 272–73 ■ Ta’aroa gives birth to the gods 316–17 ■ Tane and Hinetitama 318–19OCEANIA
When the first human
beings emerged, they
were like featureless fish.The Mayo rituals shape
them into true people.The déma shaped them
into true people.The uninitiated are like
featureless fish.Kinship groups
In many ways, the invisible
world of the déma was once
more important to the Marind-
Anim than the world in which
they lived. Jan van Baal, an
anthropologist and governor
of Dutch New Guinea during
the 1950s, observed that
everything comes from the
déma. Marind-Anim society
is divided into two strands
(moieties), each of which
comprises two kinship groups
(phratries), with their own
déma totems, such as dog,
stork, coconut, banana,
sago, and many more. In
a cohesive and relatively
peaceful society, the different
groups went headhunting
together, repelling outsiders
who could pose a threat.
While all Marind-Anim
share the same myth world,
each phratry has its own
specific myths, versions of
myths, or cycles of myths that
inform its particular rituals.
Some myths are shared across
the phratries, such as the
story of Uaba and Ualiwamb
(see p. 314) and the tale of the
origin of man. It was common
for phratries to visit one
another to view reenactments
of déma stories.sky to the western horizon before
returning underground to Kondo,
a journey it has repeated every
day since. Meanwhile, Geb’s
headless body was divided up
among the different clans and
became the land.
There are also myths of Geb
as the white-skinned moon. As a
boy, Geb lived on the beach near ❯❯US_310-315_Dema.indd 313 05/12/17 4:17 pm