Hainuwele
Encyclopedia
Hainuwele, 'The Coconut Girl', is a figure from the folklore of the island of Seram
Seram
Seram is an island in the Maluku province of Indonesia. It is located north of Ambon Island. The chief port/town is Masohi.- Geography and geology :...

 in the Maluku Islands
Maluku Islands
The Maluku Islands are an archipelago that is part of Indonesia, and part of the larger Maritime Southeast Asia region. Tectonically they are located on the Halmahera Plate within the Molucca Sea Collision Zone...

. While hunting one day on Seram
Seram
Seram is an island in the Maluku province of Indonesia. It is located north of Ambon Island. The chief port/town is Masohi.- Geography and geology :...

, a man named Ameta found a coconut
Coconut
The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, is a member of the family Arecaceae . It is the only accepted species in the genus Cocos. The term coconut can refer to the entire coconut palm, the seed, or the fruit, which is not a botanical nut. The spelling cocoanut is an old-fashioned form of the word...

, something never before seen on Seram. Ameta took it home. That night, a figure appeared in a dream and instructed him to plant the coconut. Ameta did so, and in just a few days the coconut grew into a tall tree and bloomed. Ameta climbed the tree to cut down the coconuts but in the process slashed his finger and the blood dropped onto a blossom. Several days later, Ameta found in the place of this blossom a girl whom he named Hainuwele, meaning Coconut Girl. She grew to maturity with astonishing rapidity. Hainuwele had a remarkable, though rather unpleasant talent: when she "answered the call of nature", she excreted valuable items. Thanks to these, Ameta became very rich.

Hainuwele attended a dance in the village, at which it was traditional for girls to distribute nuts
Nut (fruit)
A nut is a hard-shelled fruit of some plants having an indehiscent seed. While a wide variety of dried seeds and fruits are called nuts in English, only a certain number of them are considered by biologists to be true nuts...

 to the men. Hainuwele did so, but when the men asked her, she gave them the valuable things which she could excrete. Each day she gave them something bigger and more valuable: gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...

en earring
Earring
Common locations for piercings, other than the earlobe, include the rook, tragus, and across the helix . The simple term "ear piercing" usually refers to an earlobe piercing, whereas piercings in the upper part of the external ear are often referred to as "cartilage piercings"...

s, coral
Coral
Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...

, porcelain
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including clay in the form of kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between and...

 dishes, knives, copper
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...

 boxes, and glorious gong
Gong
A gong is an East and South East Asian musical percussion instrument that takes the form of a flat metal disc which is hit with a mallet....

s. The people gradually decided that what Hainuwele was doing was sinister, for all distinctions were being eradicated, and they decided to kill her. They declared a dance festival of celebration that was to last for nine nights; in the interminable dances the men circled around the women at the center of the dance ground, Hainuwele amongst them, who handed out gifts. Before the ninth night, the men dug a pit in the center of the dance ground and, singling out Hainuwele, in the course of the dance pushed her further and further inward until with a shout she was pushed right into the pit. The men quickly heaped earth over her, covering her cries with their songs of jubilation, and danced the dirt firmly down.

Ameta, missing Hainuwele, went in search for her. When he found out what had happened, he exhumed her corpse and cut it into pieces which he then re-buried around the village. These pieces grew into the various tuberous plants, giving origin to the principal foods the people of Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

 have enjoyed ever since. In their harvest festival, the Seram dance nine nights, the men circling around the women, all as described in the myth.

The myth of Hainuwele was introduced to a reading audience by A.E. Jensen, after the Frobenius Institute
Leo Frobenius
Leo Viktor Frobenius was an ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography.-Life:He was born in Berlin as the son of a Prussian officer and died in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Piedmont, Italy...

's 1937–8 expedition to the Maluku Islands
Maluku Islands
The Maluku Islands are an archipelago that is part of Indonesia, and part of the larger Maritime Southeast Asia region. Tectonically they are located on the Halmahera Plate within the Molucca Sea Collision Zone...

. Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...

 first narrated it to an English-speaking audience in The Masks of God : Primitive Mythology. Jensen found versions of the basic pattern of this "Hainuwele Complex," in which a ritual murder and burial originates the tuberous crops on which people lived, spread throughout southeast Asia and elsewhere. He contrasted these myths of the first era of agriculture, using root crops, with those in Asia and beyond that explained the origin of rice as coming from a theft from heaven, a pattern of myth found amongst grain-crop agriculturalists. These delineate two different eras and cultures in the history of agriculture itself. The earliest one transformed hunting-and-gathering societies' totemistic myths such as we find in Australian Aboriginal cultures, in response to the discovery of food cultivation, and centered on "dema" deities (the Seramese termed their deities "dema" beings) arising from the earth, and the later-developing grain-crop cultures centered on a sky-god. He explores the far-reaching culture-historical implications of these and other insights in his Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963).

Further reading

  • Campbell, Joseph
    Joseph Campbell
    Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...

    , The Masks of God : Primitive Mythology 1959.
  • Eliade, Mircea
    Mircea Eliade
    Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...

    , Myth and Reality 1963
  • Jensen, Adolf E. and Herman Niggemeyer, Hainuwele ; Völkserzählungen von der Molukken-Insel Ceram (Ergebnisse der Frobenius-Expedition vol. I), Frankfurt-am-Main 1939
  • Jensen, Adolf E., Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, Translated by Marianna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
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