Sun

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.

Domains

• sun
• prosperity

Powers

• to father the immortal sky people
• to grant pigs, health and abundance when propitiated with sacrifices
• to look upon beings hidden from every human eye

Relations

• consort of: Moon
• father of: Sky People

Sources

• M. J. Meggitt, 'The Mae Enga of the Western Highlands', in P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt (eds), Gods Ghosts and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides, Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1965)
• Richard Feachem, 'The Religious Belief and Ritual of the Raiapu Enga', Oceania 43 (1973)
• Aletta Biersack, 'The Sun and the Shakers, Again: Enga, Ipili, and Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain, Part One', Oceania 81 (2011)
• M. J. Meggitt, 'The Sun and the Shakers: A Millenarian Cult and its Transformations in the New Guinea Highlands', Oceania 44 (1973)
• Jerry Jacka, 'Cults and Christianity among the Enga and Ipili', Oceania 72/3 (2002), pp. 196–214