Rai Feto
Tetum · numen · Tetum traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Rai Feto, the 'Female Land', is the earth conceived as a maternal, generative ground, the feminine principle at the foundation of the Tetum cosmos. In the ritual idiom recorded for Wehali the land itself is female, a womb from which life issues and to which the dead return, and the pre-eminence of Wehali as the 'female land' expresses this cosmological priority of the maternal earth over the mobile, masculine sky. The earth receives seed, buried offerings and the bodies of the dead, and is paired in ritual speech with the sky, Lalehan, in a generative union of earth and heaven. The scholarship of Hicks and Therik treats the feminine gendering of the cosmos as the central axis of Tetum religious thought.
Domains
- earth and generative ground
- fertility and agriculture
Powers
- bear and nourish life as the maternal ground
- receive the dead into the ground
Epithets
- Rai Feto — The Female LandTom Therik, Wehali: The Female Land (ANU, 2004) (secondary)
Relations
- spouse: LalehanEarth and sky are paired in ritual speech as a generative union.James J. Fox (ed.), The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia (Harvard University Press, 1980), on the rai–lalehan (earth–sky) ritual dyad (primary)
Sources
- In Tetum cosmology the earth is conceived as feminine and maternal, a generative ground and womb, with Wehali pre-eminent as the 'female land'.: David Hicks, A Maternal Religion: The Role of Women in Tetum Myth and Ritual (Northern Illinois University, 1984) (secondary); Tom Therik, Wehali: The Female Land (ANU, 2004) (secondary)