Hainuwele

Author: Traditional Wemale

Time Period: 2499 BCE–1000 BCE; 1901 CE–1950 CE

Country or Culture: Indonesia

Genre: Myth

Overview

The Hainuwele story is a traditional myth of the Wemale tribe on the island of Ceram, in eastern Indonesia. Ceram is one of the islands of the Maluku (or Moluccas) archipelago, which runs east of Timor and west of New Guinea. The inhabitants of the Maluku Islands have always depended on trade. Many of the islands of the archipelago have poor soil, making sustainable agriculture impossible, and few can grow enough rice to feed their populations. By trading locally available goods—such as fish, turtles, shells, and exotic birds—the tribal peoples were able to obtain the products they needed to survive and flourish.

The Maluku Islands have long been the source of wealth for outside merchants as well. From the early medieval period on, the Maluku Islands were a main source of spices such as cloves, mace, and nutmeg, valuable trade commodities that went east to China, and west to India, the Middle East, and Europe. As such, the Maluku Islands are better known to the outside world as the Spice Islands. Feathers from birds of paradise were also gathered on the Maluku Islands and were traded abroad as expensive luxury goods.

The constant flow of merchant ships in the medieval period, mainly from other parts of Indonesia, India, and China, to the Spice Islands brought a variety of goods to the people of the Maluku archipelago. Foreign treasures—such as ivory, gold ornaments, musical instruments, forged iron weapons, ceramics, and textiles—are still passed down from generation to generation among the families of the Maluku Islands. These vestiges of a bygone era of trade are evidence of the huge influx of wealth that the spices trade brought to the remote archipelago.

Hainuwele, the protagonist of story that describes the formation of the traditional social order of the tribes of western Ceram, has the unusual gift of excreting valuable goods. This detail surely reflects the fascination foreign treasure held for the people of the island. Despite her supernatural ability to give gifts, the people of the tribe grow jealous and eventually kill the young heroine. Hainuwele’s murder by people who do not understand her power, then, points to the potentially disruptive force of foreign trade.

The Western world first learned of the Hainuwele myth when German scholars from the Frobenius Institute (Frobenius-Institut), named for the famous early German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, led an expedition to the Maluku Islands in 1937 and 1938. The ethnographers working on the expedition recorded many of the myths of the tribal people they encountered throughout the archipelago. The Hainuwele myth was first described in Western academic literature by the German anthropologist Adolf E. Jenson.

Based on Jenson’s work with it, two prominent mythologists became interested in the Hainuwele myth. These were Mircea Eliade, a Romanian professor at the University of Chicago, and Joseph Campbell, the American who pioneered comparative mythology as a popular subject. It is through two scholars, and particularly Campbell, that the Hainuwele myth is now widely known within the English-speaking anthropological community, where it has become a template for understanding the myths of other peoples.

Summary

The Hainuwele myth begins by stating that the nine families of humans originally come from Mount Nunusaku, where they grew out of a bunch of bananas. They then settle in the western area of Ceram, between Ahiolo and Varoloin. These early families call the place the Nine Dance Grounds. One of the people of the original nine families is a man named Ameta, which means “dark,” “black,” or “night.” Ameta is a hunter and, according to some translations, one who mainly works in darkness. Ameta has no wife or children. On one hunting trip, Ameta’s hunting dog scares a wild pig, who escapes by swimming into a pond. The pig becomes exhausted and drowns, and Ameta pulls it out. When he gets the pig to shore, he sees that there is a coconut stuck to its tusk, which is a new sight to humans since coconut trees do not yet exist.

Ameta takes the strange nut home and covers it with a cloth decorated with a snake motif and goes to bed. He dreams that a man has told him to plant the nut in the ground so it could grow, and in the morning, he does so. Three days later, it is a tall coconut palm, and three days after that, it blossoms. Ameta climbs the tree to gather blossoms, but he cuts his finger and bleeds on a leaf, returning home to treat his injury. When he returns three days later, he finds that a human face is growing out of the leaf where his blood had spilled. After three more days, a body of a person is growing, and after three more, he returns to the tree again and finds a little girl.

When he goes to sleep that night, he dreams of a man who tells him to cover the little girl with the cloth with the snake motif and bring her home. The next day, he carefully carries her down from the tree and names her Hainuwele. Three days after being brought to Ameta’s home, Hainuwele has grown into a nubile maiden, and Ameta discovers that Hainuwele has an unusual power. When she defecates, she does not produce normal feces, but instead bears valuable gifts, such as Chinese ceramics and gongs. Ameta grows very rich because of his adopted daughter’s strange talent.

Not long after Hainuwele comes to live with Ameta, the nine families of people hold a sacred Maro Dance (which traditionally lasted for nine days and involved the women sitting in a circle handing betel nut to a ninefold spiral of men dancing around them). On the second day of the dance, Hainuwele is invited to sit with the women in the circle, which makes her happy. Instead of handing the men betel nut, however, she gives them coral, which delights everyone. Each night, Hainuwele gives the men more and more valuable gifts. On the third night, she distributes Chinese ceramics; on the fourth, larger Chinese porcelains; on the fifth, large bush knives; on the sixth, copper boxes; on the seventh, golden earrings; and on the eighth, large gongs.

The people grow jealous of Hainuwele’s talent and plot to kill her. On the ninth night of the dance, they dig a deep hole in the center of the dance circle, and the men dancing in the spiral slowly edge her into it and bury her. Her cries are muffled by the music of the Maro Dance. When his adopted daughter fails to return home, Ameta becomes very worried. He takes palm fronds and sticks them in each of the dance grounds used over the past nine nights. When he sticks the palm branch in the last one, it comes up with blood and hair, so he knows Hainuwele is down there.

“He [Ameta] descended cautiously, took her home, and named her Hainuwele. She grew quickly and in three days was a nubile maiden. But she was not like an ordinary person; for when she would answer the call of nature her excrement consisted of all sorts of valuable articles.”

Ameta then digs up his dead daughter, cuts her body into many pieces, and reburies it all around the dance ground. He keeps her arms, however, and presents them to the goddess Satene, who had emerged from an unripe banana when people came out of ripe bananas at the beginning of humankind. The pieces of Hainuwele that Ameta buried grow into beneficial plants that have never existed before, especially the tuberous food plants that the people of Ceram come to depend upon for food.

Satene shares Ameta’s grief and is very angry at her people for having committed murder. She builds a gate at the dance grounds and tells the people to try to pass through if they want to move to another place with her. The people try, but not all are able to pass it. The ones who do not come through are turned into animals that have not existed before. Those who do pass are smacked with Hainuwele’s severed arms. The people who approach Satene on her left have to jump over five sticks of bamboo; the ones who come to her right have to jump over nine.

Satene then tells the people that she is leaving humankind. If they want to see her again, she says, they will have to do so only after they have died and passed through eight mountains. She then goes to live on a mountain in the southwestern part of Ceram. From then on, the people are divided into the Fivers and the Niners, depending on whether they had approached Satene on the left or the right, and there are also all kinds of animals on the earth after this event, whereas only humans existed before it.

In Jensen’s original rendering of the Hainuwele myth, the deceased and dismembered coconut girl is ultimately reborn as the moon. This detail is not included in Campbell’s English translation. As Jensen explicitly explains, she remains in the sky as a constant reminder of the cycles of fertility.

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