Rabie
Wemale and Alune · deity · Wemale and Alune traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Rabie is the maiden of the Wemale moon-and-death myth, a mortal-born figure who becomes a celestial dema. The Sun Tuwale desired her, but when he came for her, her people tried to deceive him with a pig; in his anger the Sun drew Rabie down into the earth. Her family seized her by the hair to hold her back, yet she slipped from them and sank away below, and thereafter rose into the sky as the moon, whose waxing and waning mirror her passage between death and return. Like Hainuwele, Rabie is a slain maiden whose loss establishes a permanent feature of the human world; hers grounds mortality and the moon, and her tale stands beside the Hainuwele cycle as the second great origin-of-death myth of West Seram.
Domains
- moon and night
- death and mortality
Powers
- rise, wax and wane as the moon
- inaugurate death for humankind
Epithets
- Rabie — the Moon MaidenA. E. Jensen, Die drei Stroeme: Zuege aus dem geistigen und religioesen Leben der Wemale (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1948). (primary)
Relations
- lover: TuwaleObject of the Sun Tuwale's coercive courtship; his anger at her family's deception caused her death and transformation into the moon.A. E. Jensen, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, trans. M. T. Choldin and W. Weissleder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 88-171. (secondary)
Sources
- Rabie is the Wemale maiden whom the Sun Tuwale drew into the earth after her family substituted a pig for her; slipping from her kin's grasp she sank below and rose again as the moon, her story the companion death-myth to Hainuwele's.: A. E. Jensen, Die drei Stroeme: Zuege aus dem geistigen und religioesen Leben der Wemale (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1948). (primary); A. E. Jensen, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, trans. M. T. Choldin and W. Weissleder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 88-171. (secondary)