Grandfather Crocodile

Across Timor, including the Mambai highlands, the island itself is told to be the body of a great crocodile. In the origin tale a small crocodile, saved and reared by a boy, grows vast and bears his human friend across the sea; at death the grateful crocodile's body swells and hardens into the mountainous island of Timor, its ridged spine becoming the central cordillera on whose heights the Mambai dwell. Revered as a grandfather and ancestor, the crocodile is treated with ritual respect as elder kin. Sources present the crocodile-island myth as a shared Timorese charter of the land's origin rather than the possession of any single group, the Mambai occupying the mountainous back of the creature.

Domains

• origins
• waters

Powers

• become the mountainous island of Timor
• carry the human friend across the sea

Sources

• Across Timor, including the Mambai highlands, the island is told to be the body of a great crocodile who carried a human friend and, at death, became the mountainous land; the crocodile is revered as an ancestral grandfather.: David Hicks, Tetum Ghosts and Kin: Fertility and Gender in East Timor, 2nd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004) (secondary); Elizabeth G. Traube, Cosmology and Social Life (University of Chicago Press, 1986) (on the Mambai highlands as the ridged spine of the land) (secondary)