Sea-Spirits of the Masks
Elema · deity · primordial · Recorded classification
Sea-spirit class behind the great Hevehe masked cycle; rendered as deity (spirit-class), with the collective nature flagged. Sex unspecified as the ma-hevehe are a category (a male sea-spirit and his many daughters). The hevehe masks and eravo house are the attested cult-objects. Williams' Drama of Orokolo (1940) is the definitive ethnography.
Domains
- sea
- male cult and initiation
Powers
- BRING the mask-daughters up from the sea
Epithets
- Ma-Hevehe The great sea-spirit whose long visit and return is enacted in the Hevehe masked cycleF. E. Williams, Drama of Orokolo (secondary)
Relations
- companion: Things of GladnessReciprocal of elema_eharo.companion — The comic 'things of gladness' dance attendance on the great sea-spirit masks during the Orokolo hevehe cycle.F. E. Williams, Drama of Orokolo (Oxford 1940) (secondary)
Sources
- Among the Elema of Orokolo Bay the ma-hevehe are powerful sea-spirits; a ma-hevehe brings his daughters up from the sea into the keeping of the men's eravo, and over a ten-to-twenty-year cycle the men construct towering paired hevehe masks to embody them, danced at the climax and then burnt. The cycle, recorded by F.E. Williams, both initiated men and made peace with the dangerous spirits of forest and sea.: Williams, F.E. (1940). Drama of Orokolo: The Social and Ceremonial Life of the Elema. Oxford University Press, Clarendon. (ethnography); Williams, F.E. (1923). The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division. Territory of Papua Anthropology Report 4. (ethnography)