In the cosmology of the Enga-speaking peoples of the Papua New Guinea highlands the sun is a male celestial being paired with the female moon. Mae and Raiapu Enga traditions hold that the sun and moon together bore the immortal, fair-skinned sky people (yalyakali), whose sons descended to earth and founded the human tribes and phratries, so that the sun stands at the head of the genealogies linking living clans to the sky world. Among the western Enga and the neighbouring Ipili the sun is intimately associated with the sky deity Aitawe: the anthropologist Jerry Jacka records that Aitawe was symbolized by the sun, and that offerings might be made to the sun to avert catastrophe. This solar piety became conspicuous in the mid-1940s, when the millenarian movement that Mervyn Meggitt called the Cult of Ain swept through Enga country: enormous numbers of pigs were slaughtered for the sun, and participants who gazed at the sun and shook in trance hoped for renewed wealth and health, some expecting to ascend to the immortal sky world of the yalyakali.