Enda Semangko

Enda Semangko, the 'Spirit Woman', is the great female divinity of the Kyaka Enga, the easternmost Enga-speaking people, who live in the Baiyer River valley and Lumusa plateau north-west of Mount Hagen. Ralph Bulmer, who documented Kyaka religion in the 1950s, glosses her as the Fertility Goddess and lists her in traditional Kyaka cosmology among the categories of spirit-beings ranked by their significance to the affairs of living men, alongside the ghosts of the recent dead (semangko), the ancestral ghosts equated with forest spirits (epalirai), the storm-sending sky beings (yakirai) and the mischievous kilyakai demons of the watercourses. Unlike these anonymous classes she is a single named divine person, remembered in Kyaka myth as a renowned and omnipotent figure. Her worship stands in the family of Female Spirit fertility cults of the western highlands, comparable to the Amb Kor cult of the neighbouring Melpa of Mount Hagen, and is distinct from the sangai bachelors' cult of the central Enga, in which each celebrant courted his own spirit-wife.

Domains

• fertility

Powers

• to bestow fertility and well-being on those who perform her cult
• to accomplish whatever she wills

Sources

• R. N. H. Bulmer, 'The Kyaka of the Western Highlands', in P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt (eds), Gods Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1965)
• 'Melanesian Religions: Mythic Themes', in Lindsay Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn, Detroit: Macmillan Reference (2005)
• Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, 'Female Spirit Cults as a Window on Gender Relations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5/3 (1999), pp. 345–360
• Ralph Bulmer and Susan Bulmer, 'Figurines and Other Stones of Power among the Kyaka of Central New Guinea', Journal of the Polynesian Society 71/2 (1962), pp. 192–208