Hainuwele

Hainuwele is the murdered maiden of the central Wemale myth of West Seram, the paradigm of what A. E. Jensen named the 'dema-deity.' She grew from a blossom of the miraculous coconut palm that Ameta had raised from the first coconut, quickened when a drop of his blood fell upon the flower. Within days she matured into a marriageable girl who voided precious things from her body. At the great nine-night Maro festival on the Tamene Siwa dance ground, she stood in the coils of the spiral dance distributing ever richer gifts, until the envious nine families dug a pit and, in the winding of the dance, trampled her down into it and buried her alive. Ameta found her body by the coconut-leaf oracle, disinterred and dismembered it, and planted the pieces about the ground, whence sprang the yams and tubers that are the staple food; her severed arms he carried to Satene. Her death thus grounds both the cultivated crops and, through Satene's response, the mortal condition of humankind. Sources differ on the precise gloss of her name, but the coconut element is secure.

Parentage

• Ameta

Domains

• agriculture tuber crops
• ritual wealth valuables

Powers

• excrete precious trade-goods from her body
• engender the tuber crops from her buried body

Epithets

• Hainuwele

Relations

• child: Ameta

Sources

• A. E. Jensen and H. Niggemeyer, Hainuwele: Volkserzaehlungen von der Molukken-Insel Ceram (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1939).
• A. E. Jensen, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, trans. M. T. Choldin and W. Weissleder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 88-171.
• Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 173-176.
• Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 104-107.