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.