Nggwal Bunafunei is the fierce and dominant manifestation of the great spirit Nggwal, the tambaran of men in the full vigour of adulthood. Its revelation forms the dramatic and dangerous high point of the Ilahita initiation sequence, when the assembled cult mobilises its wealth and its terrors to overwhelm the novices. Sources treat Bunafunei and its aged counterpart Walipeine as two faces of a single spirit, the one ascendant and consuming, the other spent and reflective, so that a man's passage from the junior to the senior form mirrors the passage of his own life from strength toward age.