Father Heaven

In Mambai cosmology Father Heaven is the celestial progenitor who, together with Mother Earth, forms the primordial couple from whose union the ordered world descends. In the beginning the two lay conjoined in darkness; their separation opens the space of creation, Father Heaven rising to the luminous upper world while Mother Earth settles below. From his height he sends down rain, light, and the vivifying breath that quickens living things, and he is invoked in agricultural and life-giving rites as the distant, ascendant source of vitality. Ritual casts him as the withdrawn, encompassing sky-father whose fructifying gifts must be answered by offerings returned to the earth. He is remembered as father of the primordial ancestors through whom the ritual and political heritage of Timor is divided.

Children

• The Younger Brother
• The Elder Brother

Domains

• sky
• rain
• vitality

Powers

• send rain and light from the upper world
• withdraw to the encompassing height

Relations

• spouse: Mother Earth

Sources

• Elizabeth G. Traube, Cosmology and Social Life: Ritual Exchange among the Mambai of East Timor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
• Elizabeth G. Traube, 'Mambai Rituals of Black and White,' in J. J. Fox (ed.), The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 290-314