Temes Savsap
Malekula · numen · Malekula traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
In the Seniang district of southern Malekula the guardian of the road of the dead is a ghost-woman who sits beside a rock on which is traced the geometrical figure called Nahal, the path. As each ghost comes to her she erases half of the design; the dead must complete the missing half from memory to be allowed to go on, and one who cannot is destroyed. She is the same guardian, in her local name and setting, as the Le-hev-hev whom Layard describes for other districts, and the two accounts together fix the labyrinth-test as a belief held across Malekula rather than in one village only. The word temes, ghost or spirit, marks her nature as one of the dead who wards the passage of the newly dead.
Domains
- death threshold
- labyrinth
Powers
- sits at the rock on the road of the dead
- erases half of the Nahal design
Sources
- In the Seniang district Deacon records the guardian of the road of the dead as a ghost-woman seated by a rock bearing the design Nahal, who rubs out half the figure so that the ghost must restore it to pass; she is the district counterpart of Le-hev-hev.: A. B. Deacon, Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and Other Islands of the New Hebrides, JRAI 64 (1934), pp. 129-175 (secondary)