SA-Z1953-009 - secondary catalog
Mehinaku
Central Brazil - South America
Restricted
matahu German / English extraction
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
matahu (var. matapu): the Mehinaku and Nahuqua name for the bullroarer; among the Mehinaku, Matapu is also the spirit of the hummer.
When Karl von den Steinen reached the Mehinaku on the upper Xingu during his second Brazilian expedition of 1887-88, he stepped into their flute-house and found, hung along a ladder-like rack beside twenty masks and a few straw pendants, a single bullroarer: sixty centimeters long, painted black and red, and shaped like a sword-blade. The Mehinaku and the neighboring Nahuqua called it matahu, or matapu; the Nahuqua instruments were carved in the shape of a fish and ornamented with the zigzag that stands for a snake. Von den Steinen noticed that no idea of secrecy clung to the thing -- the masks and the bullroarer alike were handed over to him without hesitation, and among the Nahuqua the men whirled it openly on the village square without driving the women away -- so that here, unlike on the Australian or New Guinea pattern, it was not a weapon hidden from the women. Among the upriver Bakairi the same kind of board went by yelo, their word for thunder, named (he was told) for its droning hum; and in later Mehinaku accounts the word matapu also names the spirit of the hummer, focus of a three-day ritual in which villagers make humming-boards, hang them in the men's house, and keep them at a distance from the women.
an dessen senkrecht stehenden, angebundenen Sprossen zwanzig Masken, einige Strohbehaenge und ein 60 cm langes, schwarz und rot bemaltes Schwirrholz von der Form einer Schwertklinge herabhingen.
from its upright, lashed-on rungs hung twenty masks, a few straw pendants, and a 60-centimeter-long bullroarer, painted black and red, in the shape of a sword-blade.
von den Steinen 1894:104
- Function
- Bullroarer hung near caiman dance masks in clubhouse; upper-Xingu mask-flute-men's-house complex
- Map confidence
- medium_high - regional_anchor: Representative upper-Xingu coordinate; exact ritual role uncertain.
- Source location
- v.d. Steinen 1894:104 (men's-house bullroarer, eyewitness); 327 (matahu/matapu, fish/snake form, Tafel 21-22); 81 (Bakairi yelo = thunder)
- Initiation rite
- Weather / fertility magic