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.