PNG55 - ethnographic attestation
Bukawa / Yabim
Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
balum Bukaua and Yabim (Jabêm), Huon Gulf, Morobe, Papua New Guinea
ghost / spirit of the dead (the same word also names the swallowing monster and the bull-roarer)
Etymology. In Bukaua and Yabim speech, the one word balum names at once the bull-roarer, the monster that swallows the novices at circumcision, and a ghost of the dead; among the Bukaua each bull-roarer further bears the name of a particular dead man. (high confidence)
Among the Bukaua and Yabim of the Morobe coast, boys taken for circumcision were said to be swallowed by a ferocious monster called balum, who released them from his belly only after enough pigs had been sacrificed to make him vomit them up; in spewing them out he bit or scratched them, and that wound was the circumcision. The bull-roarer's hum, swung by hidden men, was the monster's voice, and the one word balum named the roarer, the monster, and the souls of the dead alike. The same dead had power in the gardens: Yabim men twirled the balum while naming them so that the taro would flourish. Women and uninitiated boys were forbidden to see the instrument on pain of death, and as the procession of novices set out the mothers watched weeping from a distance, believing their sons were about to be devoured. The place of operation was a hut a hundred feet long, narrowing toward the rear like the monster's belly, with great eyes painted over the entrance; lodged in the balumslum, the monster's house, the boys were held to be killed and restored to a new and better life — no longer boys, but men. The balum often took the form of a sea-snake, and a sea-snake was cut into the roarers themselves - a zigzag band that Lehner's old carvers explained as a warning against eating the creature. Below the ruling roarers stood the lesser 'serving' ones, and apart from both a third class, small and higher-voiced, that spoke not for the dead men but for their wives. The Bukaua account of how the men came by it begins with a woman: chopping firewood, she struck off a chip that flew up with a whirring sound and carried it home to her husband, who took it to the men. They agreed to keep it by killing her — and agreed, too, that he should be given a new wife in her place.
It is given out that the lads are swallowed by a ferocious monster called a balum, who, however, is induced by the sacrifice of many pigs to vomit them up again.
Frazer, The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Vol. I (1913), Lecture XII
- Object
- Bullroarer, sacred flute and slit-gong are all in use here.
- Function
- In Yabim use, twirled while naming the dead to produce a fine taro crop; the balum also voiced the swallowing monster of male initiation.
- Map confidence
- high - Village or district coordinate for the named people.
- Source location
- Table 1, row 55
- Spirit voice
- Snake-linked
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth
- Agriculture / crop magic