Oi Adai
Jarai · deity · Jarai traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Oi Adai is the Jarai supreme being, a remote high god associated with the sky and set above the multitude of yang that animate the natural and social world. In the everyday religion of the highlands it is the lesser yang, of rice, water, mountain, hearth, and ancestor, who receive the bulk of sacrifice, while Oi Adai remains a distant guarantor of cosmic order, invoked in oaths and solemn assurance. His name pairs the honorific oi, grandfather or revered lord, with the divine name Adai, cognate with the Ede supreme god Ae Die. The concept proved durable enough that Christian missions later took Oi Adai as the Jarai term for God, a continuity that has sometimes blurred the earlier, more diffuse indigenous conception.
Domains
- sky
- creation
- supreme authority
Powers
- orders the cosmos and its yang
- witnesses oaths and truth
Epithets
- Oi Adai — Grandfather / Lord AdaiSalemink (2003). (secondary)
Sources
- Oi Adai is the Jarai high god, a remote sky-associated supreme being standing above the many yang; his name was later adopted to render the Christian God in Jarai.: Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003). (secondary); Anne de Hauteclocque-Howe, Les Rhades, une societe de droit maternel (Paris: CNRS, 1987), on the cognate Ede supreme god Ae Die. (secondary)