Culture Hero of Malekula

Ambat is the great culture hero of the myths of south-west Malekula, recorded among the Seniang people by the Cambridge anthropologist A. Bernard Deacon shortly before his death in 1927. When the ogress Nevinbimbaau, wife of Temes Malau, trapped Ambat's older brothers one after another in a ditch, they remained imprisoned there until Ambat came and set them free. Those same brothers later turned against him: envying him his beautiful wife Lindanda, they killed him. Lindanda learned of her husband's death when she saw blood appear on the comb he had left with her, and she escaped from the brothers who thought they had won her. The pattern of the clever hero beset by envious brothers closely parallels the Qat cycle of the Banks Islands, and comparative surveys of Oceanic mythology treat Ambat as the Malekulan counterpart of Qat and Tagaro.

Domains

• heroism

Powers

• to free his brothers from the ogress's trap by cunning

Relations

• enemy: The OgressThe ogress Nevinbimbaau trapped Ambat's older brothers one after another in a ditch, where they remained until Ambat came and freed them.A. B. Deacon (ed. C. H. Wedgwood), Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934) (secondary); R. Poignant, Oceanic Mythology: The Myths of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, Australia (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967) (secondary)

Sources

• Ambat is the principal culture hero of the Seniang district of south-west Malekula, who freed his brothers from the ogress Nevinbimbaau and was afterwards murdered by those same brothers out of envy of his beautiful wife Lindanda.: A. B. Deacon (ed. C. H. Wedgwood), Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934) (secondary); R. Poignant, Oceanic Mythology: The Myths of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, Australia (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967) (secondary)