Mahatala

Mahatala, also Mahatara and in institutionalised Kaharingan Ranying Hatalla Langit, is the supreme god of the Upperworld in Ngaju cosmology. He presides over the heavens from the summit of the primeval mountain, is imagined in the form of the great hornbill, and is bound to gold, the sun, and the upper right-hand half of the cosmos. In the account recorded by Hans Schärer the divinity is not a solitary sky-father but one half of a single total godhead whose other half is the watersnake goddess Jata of the Underworld; the two are at once a married pair and the two faces of one deity, and together they ordain the creation of the world and of humankind. The name is generally traced to Arabic Allah ta'ala, absorbed into an older indigenous high-god concept during long Malay-Muslim contact along the Barito.

Domains

• sky
• creation
• sovereignty

Powers

• reigns over the Upperworld
• manifests as the sacred hornbill
• ordains the creation of the cosmos and of humankind

Epithets

• Maharaja Sangiang — Great King of the Heavenly BeingsStöhr & Zoetmulder, Die Religionen Indonesiens (1965), pp. 133-145. (secondary)
• Ranying Hatalla Langit — Ranying Hatalla of the HeavensMartin Baier, 'The Development of the Hindu Kaharingan Religion: A New Dayak Religion in Central Kalimantan,' Anthropos 102 (2007): 566-570. (secondary)

Relations

• spouse: JataMahatala and Jata are at once a married pair and the two faces of a single total godhead.Schärer, Ngaju Religion (1963), pp. 13-30. (secondary)
• companion: SangumangThe trickster Sangumang belongs to Mahatala's heavenly household and is remembered in folklore as his nephew.Schärer, Ngaju Religion (1963), p. 41 (the heavenly retinue); Ngaju oral tradition of the Sangumang cycle. (secondary)

Sources

• Mahatala is the supreme god of the Upperworld, imagined as a hornbill and forming with Jata a single bipartite godhead.: Hans Schärer, Ngaju Religion: The Conception of God among a South Borneo People, trans. Rodney Needham (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 13-58. (secondary)
• In institutionalised Kaharingan the supreme god is invoked as Ranying Hatalla Langit, identified with the older Mahatala.: Anne Schiller, Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity Among the Ngaju of Indonesia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 30-45. (secondary)