Hongu Utux

The Hongu Utux, the bridge of the spirits, is the rainbow along which the Atayal dead travel to the land of the ancestors. It is a place of reckoning: only those who kept the gaga and bear the facial tattoo earned in life may set foot on it and cross in safety, while the untattooed, the cowardly and the guilty lose their footing and fall into the gulf beneath, in some tellings to be seized by a great crab or lost in the dark water. The bridge thus binds together the central concerns of Atayal life and death, tattoo, headtaking, weaving and the moral order of gaga, into a single image of judgement. The Sediq preserve the cognate hakaw utux with a comparable belief.

Domains

• death and afterlife
• judgment

Powers

• tests the dead at the crossing

Relations

• ally: UtuxThe bridge is the road to the ancestral spirits, who keep its far threshold.Ho Ting-jui, A Comparative Study of Myths and Legends of Formosan Aborigines, 1971 (secondary)

Sources

• Atayal tradition holds that the soul of the dead must cross a rainbow bridge, the hongu utux, where the properly tattooed pass to the ancestral land and the unqualified fall away.: Ho Ting-jui (何廷瑞), A Comparative Study of Myths and Legends of Formosan Aborigines, Indiana University / Orient Cultural Service, 1971 (secondary); Wang Mei-hsia (王梅霞), Atayal (泰雅族), Sanmin, 2006 — tattoo, gaga and the afterlife (secondary)