Yomnok is a primordial ancestor of the Bimin-Kuskusmin, a Mountain Ok people of the West Sepik highlands of Papua New Guinea, documented in the ethnography of Fitz John Porter Poole. Yomnok is a feminized male being associated with the echidna and the fruit bat, the sibling and complement of the masculinized female ancestress Afek, who takes cassowary form; both descend from a powerful double-gendered monitor lizard. Both are imagined as hermaphrodites with breasts and a combined penis-clitoris: Afek gives birth through two vaginas, while Yomnok gives birth through the penis-clitoris. The pairing crosses natural categories, the cassowary being a mammal-like bird and the echidna a bird-like, egg-laying mammal. Certain Bimin-Kuskusmin individuals are initiated as lifelong sacred human embodiments of these androgynous ancestors and ritually re-enact their intersexuality in the great initiation cycle.
Domains
procreation and fertility
androgyny and gender
Powers
to engender offspring from a hermaphroditic body, giving birth through the penis-clitoris
to take the form of the echidna and the fruit bat
Sources
Fitz John Porter Poole, 'Transforming "Natural" Woman: Female Ritual Leaders and Gender Ideology among Bimin-Kuskusmin', in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Fitz John Porter Poole, 'The Procreative and Ritual Constitution of Female, Male, and Other: Androgynous Beings in the Cultural Imagination of the Bimin-Kuskusmin', in Sabrina Petra Ramet (ed.), Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, Routledge, 1996.
Fitz John Porter Poole, 'Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches: Anthropophagic Images among Bimin-Kuskusmin', in Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (eds.), The Ethnography of Cannibalism, Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983.