The Cassowary

The Cassowary is the great maternal being of Gimi thought, a wingless bird of the high forest imagined as a woman without a penis and as the archetypal, forbidden mother. Sources identify her closely with the First Woman, so that the primal ancestress and the cassowary-mother shade into one figure. She belongs to the wild alongside the dead of kore, and Gimi ritual and hunting imagery treats the killing or ritual assumption of the cassowary as a re-enactment of the son's severance from the maternal body. Her prohibitions, particularly around blood and menstruation, mark her as the pole against which male identity is defined.

Domains

• motherhood
• wilderness

Powers

• embody the forbidden mother

Epithets

• the wingless motherGillison, Gillian. 'Images of Nature in Gimi Thought.' In Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. (secondary)

Sources

• The cassowary is a female maternal being in Gimi thought, identified with the first woman and the menstruating mother, and central to male ritual imagery of separation from the mother.: Gillison, Gillian. 'Images of Nature in Gimi Thought.' In Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. (secondary); Gillison, Gillian. Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. (secondary)