Muntu-untu

Minahasa · deity · Minahasa traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification

Muntu-untu (older Dutch spelling Moentoe-oentoe) is the chief of the gods of the indigenous Minahasan religion of North Sulawesi, the highest of the opo' or divine lords reckoned among the descendants of the ancestral couple Toar and Lumimuut. The missionary ethnographer Nicolaas Graafland described him as the supreme god of the Minahasans, glossing his name as 'the most exalted', and the Tombulu pantheon recorded by J. G. F. Riedel places him at the head of the divine order. His wife is the rice goddess Lingkan Wene, and the Indonesian government ethnography of North Sulawesi lists the pair, together with the lords Sawur and Manaroinsong, as the intermediaries of God who give rice to humankind. In one recorded Tombulu genealogy his wife is named Rumintu'unan and his sons are the mountain lords Rumengan and Pinontoan. The name Muntu-untu also lived on as the title of the paramount religious leader of the Minahasan confederation: tradition remembers successive leaders called Muntu-untu presiding over the great councils at the sacred stone Watu Pinawetengan, and the last bearer of the title is said to have been baptized, together with a noblewoman titled Lingkan Wene, under the Spanish missions in 1630. The god and the office thus mirror one another, the earthly presider bearing the name of the heavenly one.

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