Grandfather and Mother

Start in Gippsland, with Alfred Howitt’s Kurnai, because they say the thing most plainly. The Kurnai had two bull-roarers, a big one and a little one, and they were husband and wife. The larger, Tundun, means simply “the man”; the smaller, Rukut-Tundun, “the woman.” They are named for Tundun the ancestral being, son of the All-Father Mungan-ngaua, who cut the first two roarers and named them after himself and his wife. When the elders swing them at the Jeraeil, the boys are not shown an emblem of a spirit. They are introduced to a person — a forefather, and his mate — whose voice they have feared since childhood, and whom, initiated, they will help to become.

The detail that matters is that there are two of them, gendered, and married. It tells you the roarer is not being treated as an it but as a who, complete with a family. And once you go looking, the pattern is everywhere. Across Cape York the Wik-Mungkan and their Wiknatara neighbours pair moiya and pakapaka as moipaka, “the two bull-roarers,” cast in myth as husband and wife. On the upper Bian River the Marind name the broad roarer ezam, the “husband,” and its narrow companion uzum, the “wife.” In the Gazelle Peninsula the Taulil cut a male uka and a female tandaravakwe. Two instruments, a couple — and where there is only one, it is still a named relative. The question this page asks is a simple one: which relative, and why that one?

The male line

The answer starts to sharpen when you sort the kin-names by the cult that carries them. In the classic male-making initiation — the rite in which boys are taken from their mothers, frightened, cut, and returned as men — the roarer is almost always a male ascendant. It is the man, the grandfather, the Father.

On the Huon Gulf, where the whole cult turns on circumcision, the Kai call the bull-roarer ngosa, and ngosa means “grandfather.” Deep in the Ituri forest the Babali and Bakango use a single word, maduali, for the roarer and for the primordial father, the Urvater; among the neighbouring Balese, Paul Schebesta guessed — tentatively — that the initiation roarer’s name pahudjuhudju might mean “father hudju,” hudju being grandfather, the role the man who swings it steps into. In New South Wales the Wiradjuri mundjeegong carries the voice of Dhurramoolan at the Burbung, a rite the All-Father Baiame himself is said to have instituted. And on a Brazilian tributary of the Amazon, the Xipaya name for the roarer, warī warī sámį, ends — on Curt Nimuendajú’s reading — in the word for a male kinsman of the father’s ascending line. The same instrument, the same grammar of kinship, on three continents: an older man, upstream in the male line.

The female line

Now change the cult, and the sex of the relative changes with it. Where the roarer serves fertility — the growth of crops, the renewal of life, the mother-cults of the northern coasts — it is a woman, and an old one: the mother, the grandmother, the Old Woman of the myth.

At the mouth of the Fly River, Alfred Haddon recorded a crop bull-roarer called burumamaramu — buruma, a variety of yam, plus maramu, mother: “the mother of the yams.” It was brought out and swung when the yams were ready, an instrument named for the being who ripens the garden. Right across Arnhem Land the great fertility cult belongs to a female ancestor: the Mungarai call the large roarers Kunapippi, after the mother-being who first owned the sacred sticks, and among the Murinbata the roarer ngawuru is the emblem of Karwadi, “the Mother of All,” also called the Old Woman — the same All-Mother whose name, on the Daly River, the Nangiomeri gave to the instrument itself. In West Africa the Dogon sound their roarers for the carved serpent Great Mask, and both instrument and mask bear the name imina na — literally, the “mother of masks.” A New Guinea cult voice is glossed outright as atu gisagaru, “the voice of the old woman”; in the eastern Congo the Nyanga roarer nyabungubungu is a female spirit, the wife of Kabiri.

State it as this page’s observation, because it is not stated in the handbooks: the roarer’s sex tracks the cult’s business. It is not that men’s societies name it male and women name it female — women, in these places, are the ones excluded. It is that the work chooses the relative. Make men, and the ancestor at the centre is a man. Grow food, and it is a mother. The instrument is the same slat of wood; what changes is the forebear it is asked to be.

The names that mean soul

Under the kin-names runs an older, stranger stratum. In a scattering of languages the word for the bull-roarer is not “grandfather” or “mother” but the plain word for the soul of the dead — and, at its most concentrated, the word for the monster that swallows the boys at initiation as well. One word for three things: the ghost, the devourer, the instrument.

The clearest case is the Huon Gulf balum. Among the Bukawa and Yabim, across the whole gulf, and among the Gawac, balum is the ghost or spirit of the dead — and the same word names the swallowing initiation-monster and the roarer that is its voice. Their neighbours the Tami use kani in exactly the same triple sense. James Frazer, reading these accounts, put his finger on the thing:

“It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision.”

— Sir James Frazer, Balder the Beautiful, vol. II (1913), on the Yabim, Bukaua, Kai, and Tami

What Frazer did not press is how far the same equation travels. On the other side of the Pacific the Apinayé of Brazil call the roarer me-galo — “the word for the soul, ghost, shadow, and image of a dead person,” in Nimuendajú’s gloss, “also applied to the bull-roarer.” The Bororo swing the aige at funerals, sharing its name with the water-monster whose voice it is; the Kamoro hang the payu, “the voices of the dead,” in the ceremonial house; the Purari call theirs imunu viki, “the weeping spirit”; the Wayana of the Guianas whistle the yolok eu, the “spirit-whistle.” In the Banks Islands the sense splits neatly in two: on Mota the roarer is nanamatea, the “death-maker,” swung to drive a ghost away; on Merlav it is worung-tamb, “a wailer,” sounded to mourn the night after a death.

The word for the roarer is the word for the ghost, the shadow, and the image of a dead person.— the Apinayé term me-galo, in Nimuendajú’s gloss

And a few peoples heard the soul in the sound itself. The inland Yuki of California named the roarer aelamo’otom, “thunder breath.” The Māori called it pūrerehua, for the moth whose whirring wing it imitates, and in Taranaki mamae, where it sings a farewell to the dead — and Elsdon Best recorded the belief that the booming of a pūrerehua was caused by wairua, the free-soul itself. These are not metaphors reaching for a spirit’s voice. In these languages the object is the departed soul, and the initiation is the act of being eaten by it and given back remade.

From kin-name to noise-name

Set against all this, the European names are almost shocking in their emptiness. Where the instrument long ago slipped out of the men’s house and into the hands of children, the name has drained of every relative and every ghost and kept only the sound. The Dutch of Alkmaar whirl a brommer — a “hummer,” from brommen, to drone. In Sardinia it is the burriburri; in Suffolk the woozer; in the Scottish Highlands the srannair, “the droner,” from srann, to snore. Ukrainian children of Volyn spin the furkalo, “the whirrer”; Portuguese boys the zunas, from zunir, to drone and hiss; the shepherds of Béarn the burrumbo, from a word for a dull roar. In León it is simply the zumbador, the buzzer, and the bramadera, the bellower. Nobody’s grandfather; nobody’s ghost. Just the noise the wood makes.

The onomatopoeia is not a European peculiarity — the Carib of the Guianas call theirs wun-wun, for the roaring buzz, and the coastal Kiwai gave their secret madubu a second, public name, bigu, “for it called out its own name when whirling round.” But the two kinds of name are not evenly spread. They stand at the ends of a single gradient. At one end a serious cult is doing serious work — making a man, feeding a village, burying the dead — and the instrument at its centre is a named forebear or a soul. At the other end the work is finished, the secret is out, the roarer is a toy in a child’s fist, and its name has decayed to the sound it happens to make. You can read a people’s whole relationship to the object off the word it kept: kin-name where it still works, noise-name where it has retired.

A genealogy of names

The atlas records the bull-roarer under more than eight hundred and fifty local names. Laid out one after another they look like a word-list, the kind of thing that goes in an appendix. Read together, sorted by the work each people asks of the instrument, they are something closer to a genealogy. The roarer is a man where boys are made into men, a mother where the yams must ripen, a grandfather in the forest, the Mother of All under the escarpment, a death-maker where a ghost must be sent off, and a plain hum where none of that is asked of it any more. And a European folk relic keeps the last honest word on the matter: the children of Rovinj, on the Istrian coast, still call the thing they whirl la bus de la viecia — “the voice of the old woman” — the Mother’s name surviving in a plaything, long after the cult that gave it meaning has gone.

That is the pattern in one word. Wherever the instrument still does its work, it is remembered as a relative. Wherever it has retired into the toy box, it is remembered as a noise. The name is a record of how alive the thing still is — and the family it belongs to, when it is alive, is the same family from Gippsland to the Bandiagara escarpment: the grandfather and the mother, the man and the Old Woman, the ancestor whose voice you become.