Sakuddei Myths: “Siusiubu Sigegeugeu” | Translation & Commentary by Dr. Reimar Schefold
Siusiubu Sigegeugeu
As related by Abel with translator’s supplements and additions from Abel and from Amanuisa
Translation by Dr. Reimar Schefold
Well, friends, brothers, the origin of taboos, the origin of ceremonies, the good life-giving ones, came from the boy Siusiubu alone. But from whom and how did Siusiubu come to know all of that? It came from his aunt, the crocodile. And why did the crocodile give these instructions to Siusiubu? It was because it took pity on Siusiubu and his younger sister, who had both been cheated by their family, who gave them raw and rotten fruits, who abandoned them, who deceived them. The motherless ones. The orphans.
The crocodile took pity and said: « What are you doing here, you children, you and your younger sister? Why are you crying? »
Siusiubu replied: "Oh, our companions have abandoned us, me and my younger sister!"
"So? And why did they abandon you? »
«Because of the fruits. We all came from home across the river to the gardens to pick fruit from the trees, tasty ones, Lakopa-fruits, Latso-fruits, and whatever else. They have given us nothing but the rotten ones to cheat us; they have us given the putrid ones. However, when we ate them, they suddenly became delicious. As they saw that the fruits had suddenly become good, they were frightened and abandoned us. They were doubly mean towards us. That they gave us rotten fruit to eat was pure meanness. And what made their meanness even worse was that they abandoned us. To cheat us, we, the children who have no mother anymore. And now we can't go back. We have no dugout canoe, we have nothing to get back across to the other riverside. »
"Oh, children," said the crocodile," then I myself bring you over the river, next to your uma."
"No, aunt, you just want to eat us, you want to kill us."
"There’s no way that I am going to eat you, children. I will not kill you, you are like my own children. »
"No, we are afraid, we are afraid that you will eat us, that you will kill us." They said that because the crocodile usually kills people. "Then bring our dog Njanja to the other bank first."
So the crocodile brought their dog Njanja to the other side. It did not eat the dog. And after it carried the dog over the river, the boy said:
"Now then, take my younger sister to the other side." Because, he thought: either you eat my sister, then I will take revenge for her. But if it’s me whom you are eating, then my sister won’t be able to take revenge. She is still too small.“ So it happened that the crocodile carried the younger sister over, it didn't eat her. Then Siusiubu said: "And surely now, aunt, you will eat me, and my sister will be brotherless."
"No, don't worry, my nephew." That's how the crocodile spoke. Thus he, for his part - jumped on the back of the crocodile, and it took him across.
So they got to the other side because of the pity for the orphans, the nephew, and niece, let's say, from their aunt, let's say. And the crocodile said:
"Build a community house, an uma, children, build a house for both of you and for your family. »
"Oh, aunt, we can't do that, we are still too small. I do not know how to cut and trim timber, I don’t know anything."
"Well, I'm still here as well, and I shall teach you. Do not worry. Get on with it. I shall take care of the cutting and trimming, I shall gather all of the timber here. Go on as if you yourself wanted to trim it as if you yourself were going to supply it. »
And then the crocodile revealed to Siusiubu everything that is relevant for the building of an uma, all the rituals, all the related taboos. It told him: "If you are building an uma, then these are the associated ceremonies, these are the sites for the offerings, for everything. Before meals, you must sacrifice first, before you eat common food, you must sacrifice first, at the close of a ritual, before you start to eat whatever is available, you should eat smoked meat first. Because if you do not, nephew, pain will hit your body, if you eat at random, disease will hit your body. And also, wipe your feet. Because your abode needs to breathe, your thoughts must also, so to say, be able to breathe." So it was that Siusiubu became aware.
And now, some from the house called out to him: "Have you come, you and your younger sister?"
"Yes" - these were some of the members of the family who felt sorry for him. But in the evening the whole group came together. Siusiubu said: "Friends, brothers, and you, the old ones, even if a child is telling you this, let us build now a place to live for us and for my younger sister, a home also for the aged among us."
But they replied:
"Oh, we have no confidence in you, you little one.”
"Even though I'm small, let us get started with it. I am the leader. You just execute the plan, you follow my directions, you react. I alone am the founder of our new uma. The master. »
"Well then, son," conceded the others.
"So now is the time to wash ourselves ritually. After washing, we shall make a lia - ceremony. And after the ceremony, we will go to cut the timber. »
This moment marked the origin of the ritual taboos. After the ceremony had been carried out, the following day, they felled trees. Everyone set about it until evening. But as far as the boy was concerned, he did most of the work. The timber, the posts, he supplied them. The crossbeams, he brought everything. And his fellows thought that it was actually him who had accomplished all of this. But in reality, it was the aunt who had supplied the timbers. Finally came the moment that the uma was to be set up. "Let's set up the house, you old ones!" And so they set up the house.
In the meantime, however, the group spied on him. "As small as he is, everything he has done has been so successful. He brought us the posts." And they began to feel ashamed, those who actually are called the old ones.
And it was standing, all the posts were standing, only the main post, the one at which the sacrifices are being made, had still to be erected. "Come on, son, go dig the hole for the post, so it's deep enough." And Siusiubu went and dug. » Make it deep, old man, make it deeper, it is still not deep enough." 1 And so he went down into the hole and further dug the hole for the post. Then they pushed the main post into it. They killed him because they were ashamed of everything he had done, small as he was. They pushed the big pole in: Bang! And they cheered with scorn in their hearts. "Ioo!" they shouted. But he, for his part, too, shouted at the top of the post - «Ioo!»
"What? He's still there, the old man!" They actually said "the old." There he is, our younger brother, the old one." His body was indeed down inside the earth, but his soul was up there.
And they kept working, working, working until it was done. "Our house is ready, brothers!"
"Yes, it's done." And they went to sleep.
The next morning Siusiubu’s voice came: "Go now and fetch a chicken in its basket for the consecration ritual, a mother hen who has already laid eggs three times. Don't get a lean one, not a frail one. One that lays a lot of eggs, fetch one of that sort. »
"Yes, brother."
Now Siusiubu had a married sister who had also been invited to the ritual together with her family. He said to her: "Listen, sister, you and my nephews, eat not at once. And you as well, my brothers-in-law, do not eat at once. Gather your goblets and your ladles, take care that the bamboo containers with flesh are well secured, bind them well together, and then you and my nephews go to the place where the bananas grow. It is there that you are to distribute the food, it is there that you are going to eat. He did not say, "Go to where the bananas grow because I will shake the earth." This he did not say, only: "Make sure that everything is properly tied up."
And they did it - firmly! But to the others who had been mean to him, he said: "How is it, you brothers, are you ready for the ritual?"
"Yes, everything is ready."
"Wait until I say 'blessings', only then will you go and get the meat that is for you, brothers."
"Well."
Done - when Siusiubu was done with the whole sacrificial act, the irik, he sat on top of the end of the tree trunk, which leads as a stairway up to the house. And they heard him call the blessing. «Blessings, blessings, blessings!", that is what they heard in the uma. But now their food got lost because the earth started to quake. It was his body there inside the earth that shook them, his body down there, on which they had pushed the post; what had cheered up on the post was indeed only his soul.
He shook everything – bang! And the broth slopped over, it scalded the children, and some died, others remained alive, others were slain. Broken was the uma that they had constructed together. He smashed the house, and only a part of it was preserved as an uma for him in the interior of the earth. It was the front part that he preserved for himself. From there, he looked at the back part.
"It's done for us, it's done for us!" The heads of some broke under the posts. It flung them back and forth. Some survived, some rolled to the river. And then a part of the uma sank into the interior, as an uma for him.
At the post for the sacrifices, he appeared once more: « You are assholes, you old people, you snotty ones. You said I was a little child. In reality, it is you who are younger, you who have betrayed us. You gave us bad and rotten fruits, and when you saw that they were ripe and good, you abandoned us out of meanness towards us. And now you have crushed me, into the interior of the earth, out of your meanness. What have I not given to all of you? I gave the posts for your house and did the work for it. I gave you meat. »
Only to his married sister and in-laws in the banana garden nothing had happened. And it was to them that he heralded: "If I let the earth quake again in the future, and it is noon, then enemies are approaching, then Illness is approaching, then danger for you is approaching. But if I let the earth shake when the cock crows in the morning, then don't be afraid, that means that the fruits will soon be ripe, that means life for you.
So the moment had come that the uma sank down. This is how the taboos came about, how the offering of a beverage from fruits was introduced, how the offering of shrimp was introduced, how ritual rules for the composition of meals came, all this originated from Siusiubu. This is the basis of our knowledge. What is small, what is large, what is short, what is long, everything, all the knowledge of the rituals for the uma, of taboos, here was the beginning, with Siusiubu. If an uma is built today where Siusiubu no longer exists, it is still Siusiubu that we follow. This was the origin of the uma, the origin of taboos, this and nothing else.
Commentary
The story of the origins of the first Mentawai community house (uma) is well-known throughout Mentawai and has been recorded in several publications. The plot is striking because of its correspondence with Southeast Asian mythical and ritual traditions elsewhere, especially concerning the sacrificial killing in the post hole. The Mentawai story reveals the relatedness of humans and one close category of spirits: the spirits under the earth. It was related to me several times, especially by Abel of Sakelo village near Muara Siberut and by Amanuisa from the Sakuddei, and has been condensed in the present version.
In the myth Siusiubu, the hero of the story is helped by a crocodile. Crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) were endemic to Mentawai until recently. The pelagic animals come up the river from the sea and pose a constant threat to the local inhabitants. Mentawaians put this danger into perspective by making it dependent upon a certain form of unacceptable asocial behaviour, thus removing it from the threatening realm of uncertainty. The fact that the crocodile sometimes eats a person but sometimes it does not, is explained by someone’s having violated a rule in which the crocodile acts as a punishing authority. It is significant for which cases such punishment is apparently deemed necessary. They all refer to forms of antisocial behaviour within the community. Mostly such behaviour finds expression in an unwillingness to share meat.
These ideas are a response to a general problem in the Mentawaian social order. In contrast to external aggression, which is answered by counter-aggression from the attacked group, there is no sanctioning authority within the community to punish anti-social behaviour. It is the crocodile, the most dangerous animal in Mentawai, that is given this task. It grabs the wrongdoer in the water and devours him, or it makes him sick with its magical powers. It is not surprising that this same sanctioning animal is also given the key role in the creation of the community house, as our myth tells us.
The myth of the earthquake spirit receives special weight3 everywhere in Mentawai as an attestation of both the central position of the community and the importance of its most important periodic ritual, established at the occasion of the inauguration of the uma, the puliaijat. In the present performances of this ritual, he is the only spirit who is individually appealed to for his favour and obtains his own sacrifice. He is supposed to receive it at the foot of the main post of the uma, at the place where he had been killed as a human being in the past and where he still resides today as a spirit, together with his family, whose origins are not mentioned. When a new community house is built, and the hole for the main post is dug, he receives offerings there as well.4
The motif of killing a human being at the base of an architectural construction to strengthen it ("death in the posthole") is found throughout Southeast Asia as far as India and often refers to an actual human sacrifice. However, all Mentawaians strongly denied to me that human sacrifice had ever occurred among them. More important to them than the preservation of the building as such was apparently the continuity of the community that is inhabiting it. In this community, there was no central judging authority. Instead, the creature that had given rise to the uma in the myth, the crocodile, was regarded as the guarantor of this continuity until the present day.
2 The name Siusiubu for the boy was associated by the narrator with masubu, deceased, because of his pitiful status.
3 The mythical anchoring of the first house by the underworld goddess Jata associated with crocodiles among the Dayak is especially similar, cf. Stöhr 1967, 23ff.
4 Another offering to the earthquake spirit seems like a direct quotation from the myth: he is invited to the consecration of a new shaman with a decorated sacrificial tree stuck into a hole in the earth and is supposed to survey the event from its top.
Dr. Reimar Schefold
Dr. Reimar Schefold is Professor Emeritus Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Indonesia at Leiden University. He has a long-standing interest in material culture, art, and vernacular architecture, particularly that of Southeast Asia, which has been the subject of many of his scholarly publications and Museum exhibitions. He has conducted several extensive periods of fieldwork in Indonesia, notably among the Sakuddei of Siberut, Mentawai Islands, where he spent two years from 1967 to 1969 and several shorter stays later; the Batak of Sumatra, and the Sa’dan Toraja of Sulawesi.
He is, with Steven G. Alpert, editor and one of the authors of Eyes of the Ancestors: The Arts of Island Southeast Asia at the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven etcetera: Yale University Press. 2013) and, with Han F. Vermeulen, of Treasure Hunting? Collectors and Collections of Indonesian Artefacts (Leiden: Research School CNWS/National Museum of Ethnology. 2002). His most recent publication is Toys for the Souls: Life and Art on the Mentawai Islands (Belgium : Primedia sprl. 2017) where in the Bibliography more of his writings on Mentawai can be found.
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