Lingkan Wene

Minahasa · deity · Minahasa traditional religion; continuing · deity

Lingkan Wene, also written Lingkanbene or Lingkanwene, is the rice goddess of Minahasa in North Sulawesi and a symbol of fertility and abundance. In the rice-origin legend recorded from Tontemboan country, the ancestor Tumideng, seeking food for the starving people of Wale Posan and Telaga Seper in a long drought, climbs up to the sky-world (in some tellings called Kainawaan) and there meets Lingkanbene, the maiden who keeps the rice; through her the seed of rice comes down to earth and famine is ended. In some tellings she cannot see, and she is remembered as the watchful protector of the growing rice. She is the wife of Muntu-untu, the leader of the gods, and the government ethnography of North Sulawesi names 'Muntu-untu and Lingkan', with Sawur and Manaroinsong, as the intermediary lords of God who give rice. Her carved figure, read as the rice goddess and a sign of female fertility, appears among the ornamental motifs of the stone waruga ossuaries of Minahasa, and in modern times her name and image have been revived in the patterned Pinawetengan cloth. Like the name Muntu-untu, Lingkan Wene also survived as a title of high rank: tradition tells of a noblewoman of Kakaskasen bearing it in the Spanish period, baptized in 1630.

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