Grandfather Mailau
Mambai · numen · Mambai traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Tatamailau, 'Grandfather Mailau,' is the personified highest mountain of Timor (Mount Ramelau), venerated by the Mambai as an ancestral elder and the ritual navel of their upland world. Rising at the centre of the Mambai domain, the peak is addressed as a grandfather in whom ancestral potency gathers; its summit and springs are places of invocation and offering. As the head of the land it anchors the sacred geography the Mambai read across the highlands. Later Marian devotion has been overlaid upon the ancestral mountain without displacing its older standing as grandfather of the origin peoples.
Domains
- mountains
- ancestry
Powers
- gather ancestral potency at the summit
- anchor the sacred order of the highlands
Sources
- Tatamailau ('Grandfather Mailau'), the highest peak of Timor (Mount Ramelau), is venerated in the Mambai highlands as an ancestral elder and ritual centre of the upland world.: Elizabeth G. Traube, Cosmology and Social Life: Ritual Exchange among the Mambai of East Timor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) (secondary); David Hicks, Tetum Ghosts and Kin: Fertility and Gender in East Timor, 2nd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004) (on the sacred mountains of Timor) (secondary)