Rawa Tukump

The rawa tukump, the 'spirits of rot', are the spirits of Maring who died of sickness or of causes other than warfare. They occupy the low ground, the wet and fertile country below, and stand opposite the red spirits of the high forest in the Maring scheme of complementary opposites: cool against hot, soft against hard, moist against dry, growth and decay against fire and war. Falling within the domain of Koipa Mangiang, they are bound up with the fertility of gardens, the increase of pigs, and the regeneration of life out of decay. Sources sometimes treat them together with the other beings of the low ground, and the boundary between the ancestral spirits of rot and the wider spirits of the low country is not sharply drawn.

Domains

• the low ground
• fertility and decay

Powers

• nurtures the fertility of the gardens
• receives the dead who did not fall in war

Epithets

• rawa tukump

Relations

• companion: Koipa Mangiang
• rival: Rawa Mugi
• companion: Mai

Sources

• Rappaport, Roy A. (1968). Pigs for the Ancestors. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Buchbinder, Georgeda & Rappaport, Roy A. (1976). 'Fertility and Death among the Maring.' In Man and Woman in the New Guinea Highlands, pp. 13-35.