SA-Z1953-004 - ethnographic attestation
Apinaye me-galo soul-ghost toy
Eastern Brazil - South America
Play / practical
me-galo German / English extraction
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
me-galo: the Apinaye word for the soul, ghost, shadow, and image of a dead person, also applied to the bull-roarer.
Etymology. me-galo, the name of the Apinaye toy bullroarer, is their word for the soul, ghost, shadow, and image of a dead person. (high confidence)
Among the Apinayé, the bull-roarer had slipped into the toy basket — but its name, me-galo, is the one word for soul, ghost, shadow, and the image of the dead. The Apinayé dead linger at cemeteries and old village sites until a second death turns them into animals, tree stumps, or termite hills. Nimuendajú never explains why the whirring toy carries the ghost-word; among the neighbouring Sherente, whose usage he says it recalls, the answer is explicit — their bullroarer is 'the howling of Hieparo-wawe,' lord of the will-o'-the-wisps, whirled in the woods to make the demon appear. In the Apinayé fire myth, an ogre named for the me-galo tries to pass himself off as a lost boy's father before wrestling him into his carrying-basket.
Like the Eastern Timbira, the Apinaye call the soul, ghost, shadow, and image by a common term, me-galo; the Apinaye further apply the word to the bull-roarer, which recalls Serente usage.
Nimuendajú, The Apinayé (1939), p. 140
- Function
- Toy bullroarer named me-galo meaning soul; ghost; shadow
- Map confidence
- high - regional_anchor: Representative Apinaye/Tocantins coordinate; supports toy-decay and soul-name more than live rite
- Source location
Page references
109-110 (Childhood/toys; bull-roarers in fig. 25); 140 (Animism); 158 (Megalo-kamdu're in the fire myth)
- Spirit voice
- Toy / secular survival