The Bullroarer Atlas

LOEB1929-008 - ethnographic attestation

Kaya-Kaya / Tugeri

Indonesia - Papua New Guinea borderlands - Dutch New Guinea near British territory - Oceania

Restricted

Marind bull-roarer, per the museum record used during boys' initiation to frighten the women — Wereldmuseum TM-2670-368 (before 1957)....
Representative image. Marind bull-roarer, per the museum record used during boys' initiation to frighten the women — Wereldmuseum TM-2670-368 (before 1957). Representative: the recorded function matches the Sosom cult, though this is not a documented Sosom instrument. Collectie Wereldmuseum (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen), TM-2670-368, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0 Image source

Sosom English

Source term: bullroarer

Sosom (also sasam) = both the whirled bullroarer and the mythical giant/dema it personifies among the Marind-anim/Tugeri; dema = a Marind-anim mythical creator-being.

Etymology. The bullroarer's name is an eponym: the instrument bears the name of, and is taken to be the voice of, the dema (mythical giant) Sosom. No recorded literal meaning of the word survives. (high confidence)

Among the Tugeri, or Kaya-Kaya, on the south coast of what was then Dutch New Guinea, the bullroarer and a mythical giant share one name: Sosom. The giant arrives each year with the south-east monsoon, and when he comes a festival is held in his honour and the bullroarers are swung; at the initiation of boys the instrument is Sosom himself, who kills the novices and brings them back to life — in van Baal's fuller account a swallowing, Sosom devouring all the neophytes, "each time he swallows one, disgorging another through his posterior parts." The myth also tells where the instrument came from. Sosom was a brute of a giant who, caught fast in copulation with a girl, could not free himself; the girl's mother cut off his penis with a strip of sago-leaf sheath, and a stork at last drew it out with its beak — and that severed member, van Baal concluded from the traditions, is the first bullroarer. In a coastal telling the organ fell into the river and became a watersnake; in another tradition the men invented Sosom outright, to frighten the women.

Similarly among the Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer, which they call sosom, is given to a mythical giant, who is supposed to appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he comes, a festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung. Boys are presented to the giant, and he kills them, but considerately brings them to life again.

Frazer, The Golden Bough, "The External Soul in Folk-Custom"
Function
At boys' initiation the bullroarer is anthropomorphized as Sosom, a mythical giant who kills novices and brings them to life again.
Map confidence
low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
Source location
Loeb 1929:253 (and note 18, p. 254); from Webster 1911:495; primary = Pöch, Vierter Bericht (1907); cross-ref Dema 1966:485ff., 534

View source Open this point on the interactive map