Totoima

Totoima is the cannibal ogre of the most celebrated Orokaiva myth. Part man and part tusked boar, he takes a human wife and devours each child she bears him. When she at last carries twins she hides them, and they are reared in secret by her mother; grown to manhood and armed, the brothers hunt Totoima down and kill him. F. E. Williams recorded the tale in the 1920s as the charter of male initiation, in which novices are ritually swallowed and reborn much as Totoima's victims are consumed, and the boar's tusks furnish the initiate's regalia. Erik Schwimmer read the slaying of the devouring father as a founding statement about exchange, taro cultivation, and the passage of boys into men.

Children

• The twin sons of Totoima

Domains

• cannibalism
• wild boar and hunt
• male initiation

Powers

• devours his own newborn children
• takes the shape of a great tusked boar

Epithets

• Totoima the boar-tusker

Relations

• spouse: The wife of Totoima
• child: The twin sons of Totoima
• enemy: The twin sons of Totoima

Sources

• F. E. Williams, Orokaiva Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), myth of Totoima
• Erik Schwimmer, Exchange in the Social Structure of the Orokaiva (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1973)