Mother Earth is the terrestrial half of the Mambai primordial couple, the maternal body from which the land of Timor and its living beings take form. After her separation from Father Heaven she becomes the ground itself, and Mambai tradition dwells on a primordial death and burial within her: the first mortality institutes the funerary cycle, whereby life drawn from the earth must be ritually returned to its maternal source. As nurturer she yields crops, water, and the dead alike, and the autochthonous 'black' ritual houses claim precedence as keepers of the obligations owed to her. She is mother of the ancestral brothers through whom ritual and political authority are apportioned. Sources describe her both as an enduring cosmic parent and as the one who suffers the primordial death, a tension the ritual system exists to redress.