Baigona
Orokaiva · numen · Orokaiva traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Baigona is the serpent-spirit of the cult of the same name, which swept the Northern District of Papua, Orokaiva country among it, from about 1912. Its adherents, the baigona men, held that the spirits of the dead dwelt in snakes, above all the python of the mountains, and that through the baigona they could divine hidden fault, cure the sick, and send illness. E. W. P. Chinnery and A. C. Haddon documented the movement in 1917, and F. E. Williams treated it beside the later taro cult as an expression of Orokaiva dealings with the ancestral dead. Sources differ on whether baigona names a single presiding serpent or the class of snake-borne ancestral spirits at large.
Domains
- serpents
- ancestral dead
- healing and divination
Powers
- empowers the baigona men through snakes
- sends and lifts sickness
Epithets
- baigona — the snake (of the dead)E. W. P. Chinnery and A. C. Haddon, 'Five New Religious Cults in British New Guinea', The Hibbert Journal 15 (1917): 448-463 (primary)
Sources
- Baigona is the serpent-spirit of the cult of the same name that spread through the Northern District, including Orokaiva country, around 1912, in which the spirits of the dead were held to reside in snakes and to grant divination, curing, and the power to inflict sickness.: E. W. P. Chinnery and A. C. Haddon, 'Five New Religious Cults in British New Guinea', The Hibbert Journal 15 (1917): 448-463 (primary); F. E. Williams, Orokaiva Magic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928) (secondary)