Tubuan

The Tubuan is the female masked spirit at the heart of the Tolai men's ceremonial complex, an ancestral mother-being embodied in a tall conical mask of dyed fibre and cassia leaves crowned with a solemn painted face. Conceived as immortal, she is said to be repeatedly reborn and to give birth to the ephemeral male dukduk spirits who accompany her. Her appearances from the sacred enclosure govern mortuary feasts, the raising and payment of tabu shell-money, the punishment of offences, and the passage of men through initiation; to look improperly on her secrets is a grave transgression, and her nature is concealed from the uninitiated and from women. Though the term also denotes the whole class of such masks, in ritual and myth the Tubuan is treated as a single continuing spirit-mother. Her institution is credited by some accounts to the creator To Kabinana.

Children

• Dukduk

Domains

• ancestral spirits
• law and sanction

Powers

• embody the immortal ancestral mother
• sanction and police through tabu

Epithets

• tabuan — the grown one / the ancestral oneA. L. Epstein, In the Midst of Life (1992) (secondary)

Relations

• child: DukdukThe dukduk spirits are conceived as her offspring.Frederick Errington, Karavar: Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual (1974) (secondary)

Sources

• The Tubuan is the female masked spirit of the Tolai ceremonial complex, an immortal ancestral mother-being embodied in a conical fibre-and-leaf mask.: Richard Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Suedsee (1907) (primary); George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians (1910) (primary); Frederick Errington, Karavar: Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual (1974) (secondary)
• She is held to be repeatedly reborn and to give birth to the ephemeral male dukduk spirits, and her appearances govern mortuary feasts and tabu shell-money.: Klaus Neumann, Not the Way It Really Was (1992) (secondary); Jacob L. Simet, Tubuan: The Survival of the Tolai (secondary)