IV The Talanganay Myth Analyzed

1. The Creation of Man and His Food

The First Sacrifice

It is not known how Talanganay proceeded in making the first people. He made them in a concavity on the annayugan rock, a ledge with a flat surface that juts from the mountain slope along the river bank almost directly across from the stone on the other side of the river that is said to have been his residence.

The name of the ledge, annayugan, is an obsolete form for mansayugan, literally ‘where watering of plants is done,’ from sayug, ‘watering of plants.’ Throughout the myth, the first people and their descendants are referred to as sinayug, best translated as ‘watered to life.’ One narrator thought that the God poured water, in which herbs were mixed, over the bodies he had fashioned to make them alive. In another body of myths, the epic songs, the heroes, who only die in battle, are sent to a pool downstream to be masayug or restored to life. In these same epics also, the heroes commonly bring their newborn babies to the river, and pour water over them. By this repeated action, the children grow progressively through the main stages of childhood into young adults.

The word that commonly describes the God’s action in making the first people is bosa, ‘contrivance, invention, device, creation, fabrication.’ Used as a verb, bosalon, it means ‘to fashion, mold, invent, fabricate, create.’ A newly invented instrument, such as a new type of plow or harrow, weaving loom or instrument for making ropes, is known, for example, as bosa’n sudag, the invention of Sudag. Products, such as wicker work, a woven piece of cloth, or an axe whose maker is known, are referred to in the same manner. Similarly, the first people can be referred to as bosa’n talanganay, since they are his products. The terms panday for blacksmithing and duwin for pottery making are not used to describe the God’s creative activity. As a loan word from Ilocano, panday (blacksmithing, blacksmith’s product) is sometimes used as a synonym for bosa.

The more general term for making or doing, the irregular verb ko-on (mangwa, kingwa in some of its simpler forms) is also used. The verbal form sinayug (‘watered’) was also heard as descriptive of the creative action of the God. It can, thus, be said that the God sinayug, watered to life, the first three people; or also: nangwa’d sinayug or binsana’d sinayug, ‘he made/fashioned people.’ The term sinayug therefore designates their having being created.

Although the people do not have a definite picture of how the God proceeded in fashioning the first people, they point out that the surface of the ledge has an oblong, shallow concavity about 1.5 m. long, 1 m. wide, and 15 to 20 cm. deep. It was in this depression on the stone, they say, that the God conducted his creative activity. Some further commented that the concavity is large enough for two people to lie in.

The watering of plants, or sayug, is most commonly done in connection with the planting of sugarcane. The planting process is to cut off sugarcane tops (ngawoy), trim the leaves, put three or four in a single hole (abut) in the ground, and fill the hole with loose earth. If there is not enough rain, water is regularly poured into the holes until the plants take root and grow well.

More suggestive, perhaps, is the process of pottery making. The first step is to prepare a lukung, a shallow, wide concavity, as distinct from abut or deep and narrow cavity. The concavity on the annayugan stone is a lukung. The ledge is nalukungan (‘has a concavity’). The lukung for pottery making is prepared by first placing a pot ring or bayukag (a round, woven ring on which earthen cooking pots, whose bottom is rounded, are placed when taken off the fire to keep them steady) on the floor or some other flat surface. A thick layer of rags (gamet) is then draped over the ring as a cushion. (These rags are also used by women during menstruation. When worn for that purpose, they are referred to as agibay.) In the soft concavity or lukung, created by the pot ring covered with rags, the ball of sticky clay is then placed. The next step is the formation of the pot’s mouth. A large egg-shaped pebble1 is used to pound by repeated strokes, a hole in the mass of clay, as a first movement in the manual shaping of the jar’s rim. After about a day, when the rim is dry, the body of the pot is shaped, using the same stone inside the pot and holding the other hand against the outside wall.

The myth is completely silent about the material that was used in the formation of the first people, and also about the God’s actual procedure in molding them. There are other myths, however, in Kalinga in which the productive activity of the other creator God, Kabunyan, is described.

In Banaw, an area one region removed from Buaya, the following story is told according to one Buaya informant:

One day, Kabunyan found a woman who was excavating a mountain slope (to convert it into a rice paddy). He proposed that he take over, but she should not come to see him and wait for him in the house. After cooking her food later in the morning, instead of waiting for him, she went to the field to bring him food. There she found him with all his intestines extended from his belly, and busy excavating and leveling the earth. On seeing him, she shouted: “Kabunyan, I brought you your food.” The intestines quickly returned to his belly, and he said: “I told you not to come here. There will never be enough level land for your children.” That is why there are few level places in Banaw where rice fields can be constructed. After that he left her and went on his way.

In several places in Kalinga that I know of, Kabunyan is said to have started the construction of a stone bridge over the local river. In Balinsiyaga, Balatoc and Tulgao his work was interrupted in a similar way, while in Naneng he was called away because his son had died. In Tulgao, a region in southwestern Kalinga where, as among the Kankanay further south, there is not a single but instead several Kabunyan, the events are related, with minor variants, as follows:

A certain Kabunyan married here. He wanted to make a bridge in Pannao over there. Early in the morning he told his wife: “Bring my food at mealtime (around 9:00 a.m.) to Pannao, for I have something to do. Do not come near. Just put the food down at Pugu, and call me from that distance. I will go there to eat when I get hungry.” “Alright,” said the woman.

At mealtime, his wife brought his food but did not follow what the Kabunyan had told her. She went straight to Pannao and hid herself in the bushes to peep at what he was doing. There he was, making a bridge. He moved large boulders and licked them with his tongue and with his penis2 to join them, and they became one piece. It was nicely done.

The woman came out and called him. Thereupon the Kabunyan kicked what he was making, and said to his wife: “Your nature as human being is showing again. When we tell you something, you do not obey. Even though I told you to call me from above (from Pugu, from where he is still out of sight), here you are coming near. I was kind enough to make you human beings a bridge.”

He looked away from her as he said this, and wiped off his perspiration. That is the salty water at Pannao. They went up, and when they reached Madangdangla he abandoned the woman. She left, and came to tell what she had done. The people scolded her.

The story further relates that he shook off his perspiration once more, thus giving origin to another “salt spring” high on the mountain slope. He then crossed the mountain, and in the next village, Balatoc, remarried. There, too, he started work on a bridge in the same manner, but when the bridge was half finished he was again frustrated in his work in the same way.

The water that comes from the spring in Pannao is warm and sulphuric, and the flow-off is yellowish and odorous. Its color and smell are the same as those which are locally ascribed to semen.

In the Tulgao and Balatoc myths, the reference to sex organs is explicit; in the Banaw story it is not, unless the variant I collected was incomplete in this respect. In Tulgao and elsewhere in southern Kalinga, the people are hardly inhibited in their references to sex organs and sexual activity, both in their myths and epics and in daily conversation. In northern Kalinga, on the other hand, there is marked inhibition in this respect.

The process of pottery making was recalled because of the reference to a lukung (‘concavity’) in both the myth and pottery making. The successive steps of plunging an ovate, almost pear-shaped pebble into the ball of clay, followed by the forming of the outwardly extending rim of the pot’s mouth, then interrupting the work for a day or two until the rim has set, before molding the pot’s body all this provokes sexual imagery involving intercourse, arousal of the male and female organs, and the later expansion of the uterus during the growth of the fetus. Regular sexual intercourse after pregnancy is considered advisable for the formation of a healthy fetus. The comment of one of the narrators that the concavity on the ledge is large enough for two people to lie in is further indicative of unconscious reference to imagery related to sexual activity with reference to the process of creating and molding of the first people by Talanganay. The Tulgao-Balatoc and Banaw myths, like the present Buntuk myth, refer to creative activity by High Gods, the only gods in their pantheon who are capable of it. The fact that the Buntuk myth is silent about the material that was used in the creation of the first people fits not only the Kal-uwan people’s relative reticence about sexual matter, but also the fact that, for them, semen has a blood smell (lang-os), which is symbolic of human weakness (see De Raedt 1969b, 284-285 and 782-816 passim), a human quality which Talanganay transcends.

The Tulgao-Balatoc and Banaw myths are not commonly known in the Kaluwan area, but considering their origin from a common culture area, are supportive of the sexual content in the concept of the High God Talanganay that is already assumed here and will become more evident as the analysis of the myth proceeds.

There are two variants about one detail in the creation of plants from a human body. One, more common, version says that the God killed one of the three people he had made. The other says that he did not succeed in putting breath into one of them. Both variants go on to say that he dismembered the body and planted the head, arms and legs, which grew and became a coconut tree, sugar cane and betel nut palms, and bananas respectively. The hands and feet grew into sweet potatoes and yams. The first two people thus had plants to live on.

Both variants about the cause of death are correct and support a single interpretation, and either one could be used as the basic text for the interpretation which follows. For methodological reasons, I will first analyze the variant that says that the God did not succeed in putting breath into that creature.

The God’s failure in his attempt to put a soul into one of the three people—that is, to bring the creation of the third human being to a successful end cannot be ascribed to some flaw in his creative ability. What we witness is a first sacrifice. The dismemberment of the body after it was completely molded as one piece is clearly a sacrificial act; and the interred body parts gave origin to plants or the subsistence and welfare needs of the first people.

If the failure to infuse a soul into one of the first people cannot be due to divine initiative and decision, and much less, we may presume, to divine error or deus ex machina, the reason must be found in the creature. What the myth says is that man’s subsistence and welfare are not the result of a separate creation but come from man himself. This is an important notion in Buaya culture, to which we will have to return later in the analysis.

To the Buaya, not to have one’s breath means either death, illness (one of whose symptoms is unconsciousness), or trance. In all three cases there is loss of soul (‘soul’ [kadodwa] and ‘breath’ [angos] being synonymous). Death and illness occur because of physical deterioration, death being a permanent and illness a temporary loss of soul. Trance is also a temporary loss of soul, but is not illness or physical deterioration. Since the first people were created free from illness and death, only trance could have caused the body’s condition.

The Buaya know trance only in the context of sacrifice. During large sacrifices the medium sometimes goes into a state of trance after one of the offering rites. Her body becomes rigid and motionless, she falls over backward, and remains apparently breathless, and unconscious for about five minutes. She will ‘recover’ from this trance in the same manner that the patient for whom the sacrifice was made will recover from his/her illness.

The medium goes into this trance after she has completed any one of the three central sacrificial rites (see De Raedt 1969b, 617-618) during which the good spirits who then possess her bring metaphorical gifts to the leaders of the Beasts in exchange for the soul of the patient. The Beasts are evil beings, notorious for their greed. They ‘eat’ people. They do this by capturing the soul, resulting in the illness and eventual death of the patient. The medium’s trance is explained by the people as a revenge of the Beasts. They take it out on her by temporarily capturing her soul. The event of her trance is seen as a sign that the sacrifice was successful that is, that the Beasts have accepted the sacrifice and have reluctantly released the soul of the patient. But they retreat only after having taken out their spite on the medium.3 The Kal-uwan are familiar with such reactions. Personal grief is often the main motivation for an individual headhunter. His inner peace is restored after he has taken out his sorrow on the ‘enemy’ he has killed.

Viewed especially from the female’s point of view, the Buaya know of three types of sexual intercourse depending on the relationship between the principals: (1) rape, where a man forces himself on a woman, (2) the liaison between lovers, and (3) marital intercourse. In terms of pleasure, especially from the point of view of the woman (which is also the aspect which is the focus of the symbol here), intercourse between paramours is the most pleasant, and rape is the least pleasant and actually painful in many cases. Marital intercourse is intermediate between these two, and differs from them on account of its contractual component as opposed to the unstructured relations between lovers and in the situation of rape. Yet, all three can be symbolized by trance: state of shock in rape, the “absence” during intercourse of a woman and her lover, and the occasional pleasurable (or painful) intercourse of the married woman.

A woman’s pleasure in marriage is not assured, since it is universally accepted in Kal-uwan that she should never take the initiative. She is limited to the discrete expression of her desire, by, for example, asking her husband to scratch her back, or by pressing her legs tightly around his body, but this does not assure her of his response. He is not obligated to her the way she is to his advances. Some men beat their wives when they refuse intercourse for no good reason (such as menstruation and illness). When intercourse is ‘most pleasant’ (i.e., orgasmic), she feels like asking for a repeat, but is ashamed to do so. A man can fondle his wife’s breasts and vagina (uki)4 but it would be misplaced on her part to touch his genitals. A measure of equality of rights is exhibited, however, in the fact that a prolonged refusal to have intercourse by either partner after the usual interval creates suspicion in the other partner that a secret love affair is going on. While both partners are therefore aware of a mutual obligation, it is clearly carried out in terms that favor the male. On the whole, marital intercourse falls between the freer and the more spontaneous involvement between two paramours on the one hand and the unilaterally forced engagement in rape on the other.

The rules about the taking of initiative and the fondling of sex organs also apply to lovers, but there is an over-all atmosphere which differs greatly from that which prevails between married partners. Lovers meet at intervals and are not together everyday, and when they meet they interact in a manner that is quite different from marital relations. The woman prepares for their meeting by making rice cakes, and there is a mutual exchange of gifts. The man goes to the extent of cradling her in his lap something which husbands normally do not do. They have intercourse as often as three times during a single tryst. The men comment: “Why have it more often than once with your wife, since you are with her every night and are already satisfied the first time?”

Still viewed from the part of the female, these three types of sexual relations amour, marriage, and rape differ in several ways. Reference was already made to the degree of sexual stimulation and pleasure, and in the amount of spontaneity that enters the relationship.

These three major types of sexual intercourse (along these dimensions) parallel the three basic types of relationship with the ‘unseen’ (agsa ma-ila, the favorite universal term for the creator God, the Beasts and all other supernaturals): all deaths are caused by the Beasts, who are said to spear people when they go out on their ‘headhunts’; the God intended a love relationship between himself and his creatures; and during sacrifices a type of relationship is exhibited between man and the leaders of the Beasts, which is neither a love relationship nor one that is comparable to rape.

We shall see later that the direct relationship with either the Creator God or the Beasts leads to death, while the indirect relationship (through the medium and the supernaturals who possess her at the time) with the highest of the Beasts during sacrifices saves man from death.

The indirect role of the medium during the rite which precedes her trance needs further explanation. As already stated earlier, there are three high points in large sacrifices during which symbolic gifts, representing the animal (or, after a headhunt, the human being) that is being offered, are presented to the highest of the Beasts. During this offering, the medium is possessed by dwarfs (maman). These dwarfs are the best class of spirits in the Kal-uwan pantheon. (The creator Gods are now otiose.) They guide the people in battle, and possess only prophetesses or the most “pure” or accomplished of the mediums. It is therefore not really the medium who presents these gifts, but the dwarfs. These dwarfs, in turn, do not have authority over the Beasts and their leaders, but are (unlike the medium), because of their utter purity, completely immune from their attacks. They can therefore go and face the Beasts, and make the offering with impunity.

The people of Kal-uwan describe these rites as a means of ‘defeating’ the Beasts. The Beasts are seen as defeated because they accepted the sacrifice (or the soul of the victim) in return for the soul of the patient (or some other kind of welfare, which is also expressed in terms of souls). There is always great excitement during these rites. Throughout, all those who attend shout in unison, and the gongs are played with full force while the prophetess makes her offering dance, carrying the symbolic gifts on her head. The almost ear-rending clamor produced by the combination of the sounds of gongs and the yelling of two or three dozen people packed in a small house is an expression of fear for the Beasts, and at the same time of aggressive behavior toward them which the people can afford at this time while the dwarfs offer the gifts, and in support of them. As the rite comes to its end, the prophetess may go into a state of trance. What happens here is that the dwarfs have left her, because the task for which they possessed her has been accomplished. The leaders of the Beasts, who feel defeated and could not do anything to the dwarfs, take it out on her who is defenseless. She is, however, expected to recover from this temporary loss of soul. The Beasts cannot go to the extent of actually killing her, since they have accepted the sacrifice from the dwarfs. The medium, in her trance, thus also represents the sacrificial state of surrender. This state implies the loss of what was offered and at the same time the survival (or other benefit) that was gained. The Beasts do not “rape” the medium, for that would mean permanent death. The Beasts already “raped” (speared) the animal earlier in the sacrifice. The trance expresses the sacrificial attitude of the celebrants or hosts of the sacrifice.

Before we consider how contemporary sacrifice relates to marital sexual relations, the other two members of the triangle (mythical sacrifice and death at the hands of the Beasts) need further attention. First, the mythical sacrifice.

The Buaya have both animal and human sacrifices. But the greater is the need, the greater the sacrifice. Food being a basic necessity for human subsistence and here representing human welfare in general, the sacrifice is of the highest order a human sacrifice.

The sacrifice we witness in the myth is, however, of a peculiar nature and very unlike contemporary sacrifice. The mythical aspects of the event that led us to view it as a sacrifice should not obliterate the fact that the God is not sacrificing, i.e., destroying, this human being in the contemporary sense of sacrifice. On the contrary, he is trying to put a soul into that body as he did in the other two.

In Kal-uwan, sacrifice through self-immolation is equivalent to suicide and does not bring benefits. Suicides are not heroic acts, and heroic acts should never be suicidal or lead to one’s death. A man who dies in battle during a headhunting raid or in defense of the village, and a woman who dies in childbirth, among others, are not given an honorable burial. Suicides are always destructions out of despair. Altruistic suicides, such as the Christian crucifixion, are foreign to their thought and not appreciated. The typical form of suicide is by jumping from a height, and not by raising oneself in the process, as in hanging oneself (or being raised, as Christianity views the crucifixion of Jesus Christ).

Suicides and sacrifices have in common that they are voluntary acts. The trance of the human body that turned into (i.e., created) the plants, was also voluntary. Recall that for the Kalinga a person can be conscious and yet without a soul, eventually leading to death. The main difference between both types of sacrifices is in the attitudes of the victim and the sacrificer. In contemporary experience, the sacrificers are the Beasts. Before a man will actually stab a pig in the heart, there is a rite during which the medium is possessed by the leaders of Beasts. They (through her) hold a spear that is especially made for the occasion, and make stabbing motions toward the pig. The stabbing motion is an aggressive act which is resisted by the pig. The Buaya appreciate the din of the pig’s squeals during these rites. It means that the Beasts are going for the pig and will leave the patient alone. We thus have a combination of aggression on the part of the sacrificers, met with resistance on the part of the victim, and leading to the latter’s death in order to save the life or existence of that for which the sacrifice is made. The Beasts are invited to spear the victim in lieu of the celebrants. While the victim resists the onslaught of the Beasts, the celebrants exhibit a calculating attitude of surrender. They offer part of themselves (of their possessions) in the victim, as a vicarious act by which they are expected to profit.

In the mythological sacrifice, we also have a vicarious situation, and the sacrifice also terminates in the annihilation of the victim. Here, however, the giver and the victim are the same person, and the victim’s attitude is one of voluntary surrender or abandon. The creation of the plants, which are needed for man’s welfare, is the result of neither death resisted on the part of the victim, nor of calculation on the part of the giver, but of self-surrender or a refusal to live.

The attitude of Talanganay, the sacrificer who dismembered the body (a sacrificial act) and planted its parts, is not expressed in the myth. However, it cannot be the same as that of the Beasts, for Talanganay creates life while the Beasts destroy it. The action of the Beasts on their victim was compared to rape. Its reverse is a love relationship between the victim and the sacrificer. This latter opposition is temporarily postulated, but will become evident in the episodes that follow.

The original human sacrifice was not made to the Beasts. In fact, the Beasts did not yet exist. Part of the result of the drama that will unfold (though unstated in the myth) is a cosmos that is different from the one that pre-existed and in which the God created man. The present cosmos is one from whose center the God has withdrawn and in which man henceforth lives surrounded by the threat of the Beasts. The sky world in the present cosmos is populated by the chiefs of the Beasts, and not by good people as in the origin myth. The Beasts came into being as soon as human moral weakness became an established fact beside the pre-existing God and the initial attitude of total abandon in one of his creatures.

If the original sacrifice was not made to the Beasts, to whom was it made? In Kal-uwan, each sacrifice has mainly five characters: the victim, the giver, the recipient, the sacrificer, and the beneficiary. In contemporary sacrifices, the victim is usually an animal but sometimes a human being; the giver is the host of the sacrifice; the recipients are the Beasts; the sacrificers are the same Beasts (the actual later killing by a man also by stabbing does not have ritual meaning in Kal-uwan); and the beneficiaries are those persons or things whose welfare made the sacrifice necessary. In the myth, the victim is a human being; the giver is that same human being; the creature refused its soul; and the beneficiaries are the two other first human beings (or, mankind): the sacrifice will result in their subsistence and welfare. This leaves the recipient and the sacrificer. Who are they?

The God put a soul into the other two creatures, but the third refused its soul. It was “returned” to its origin, the God. Applying the model I have postulated, there is a complete response. In the situation of sexual intercourse, the condition of complete abandon on the part of the woman is induced by a male. This makes the God both the sacrificer and the recipient.

The love relationship between God and Man, as the rest of the myth will clarify, does not have for its purpose the procreation of other human beings, but human welfare. The love relationship should make man blissful. But there is a snag, for it leads to self-destruction on the part of the man. The other two human beings did not respond with complete abandon, and they lived. This suggests a moral ambiguity in man to which we must return later, and which, together with his physical compositeness, is the subject of the entire myth.

We are now prepared to clarify the discrepancy between the two versions of this initial human sacrifice. Most narrators state that the first human sacrificial act was by killing.They make the reference to sacrifice conscious to the narrator and his audience, and translate it into the contemporary experience of what sacrifice is and how it is done. Contemporary sacrifices (animal or human), by completing an act that was already ritually posed, are performed by killing, and then only by males.5 Only men go for headhunts and stab the pig in animal sacrifices. Like secondary revisions of dreams, this conscious statement (of making it a killing) is a rationalization, and our first example in the present myth of conscious control over myth thought and content.6

Talanganay is a male but not a killer. The Beasts are the killers. The state of trance or sacrificial, and therefore creative, attitude of one of the first people corresponds to the state of trance of female sexual orgasm in which surrender, creativeness and bliss occur simultaneously.7 Trance, surrender, and self-denial are basically “female” traits in the Buaya world view, as opposed to the “male” traits of alertness, assertion and dominance which are treated in another set of myths, featuring the headhunting culture heroes.

In both the mystical and contemporary sacrificial situation, the five characters can be reduced to three: 1) the giver and the victim; 2) the receiver and sacrificer; and 3) the beneficiaries. In the myth, giver and victim are the same human being; Talanganay is both the receiver of the returning soul, and the sacrificer; and mankind (the other two human beings) is the beneficiary. In present-day sacrifices, the victim is taken from the giver’s property or acquisitions (eventually a hunted human head); the Beasts virtually stab (and kill) the pig and receive its soul; and the beneficiaries range from domesticates and artifacts to kinsmen and village mates. A sacrifice is always (meant to be) productive; it implies the surrender of a prized possession or part of oneself, and is induced by an external agent.

Three contrasting relations with the unseen have been investigated: self-immolation in the myth, death at the hands of the Beasts in the present cosmos, and the mediating situation, also in the present cosmos, in sacrifice. These correspond, as postulated, to three contrasting experiences in sexual intercourse: total abandon on the part of the woman in a gratifying amorous relationship, the ravishing situation of rape, and the intermediary relationship in marriage.

Of the three sexual experiences, the situation of rape, and its correspondence to death as caused by the Beasts needs further comment. The correspondence between rape and death by the Beasts is proper for several reasons. Rape is destructive, and in legal categories treated as robbery. It is one of the provisions in peace pacts between regions. The major provisions have reference to killing, stealing, rape, respect for the established territorial boundaries, and their equivalents. Common in all of these provisions is the agreement not to take away an important element in the life situation of the other partner.

Women who have been raped, like women, either married or unmarried, who have borne a child, or have been someone’s public paramour, and the like, have lost a good deal of their prior eligibility as a marriage partner. Their social status has gone down. Their situation is not as bad as that of one (either male or female) who has been hacked such persons are socially dead but is akin to it. They have lost something of their social value that can never be restored. The physical and emotional experiences of rape, moreover, are such that they induce a state of shock often leading to unconsciousness (linguistically referred to as ‘death’). Rape is often a painful experience (though also somewhat for the man), and is known in some cases to have led to the woman’s death.

Typically, the relationship between the principals in rape is totally negative. There is no give and take as in marital relations, and the death or at least the loss of social value which results from it has no redeeming value, in contrast to the human welfare that originated from the mythical death.8

In sum, for the Kal-uwan, death, on the conscious level and in the present cosmos, is conceptualized as a spearing by the Beasts, and sacrifices are substitutions of animal and occasionally human victims in a quasi-contractual exchange a tit for tat, the exchange of the victim’s soul for that of the beneficiaries of the sacrifice. What is exchanged is part of human possessions. In the mythical sacrifice, we have a case of self-immolation, a total surrender or abandonment of the self resulting in the welfare of all mankind. Death in contemporary experience by the hand of the Beasts, and the death of the human being in the myth share the property of a unilateral decision. When the Beasts kill a person (pumatoy means both ‘to kill’ and ‘to spear’), it means that they could or would not be placated; and when the human being was de facto killed by Talanganay, it was the decision of that human being to surrender its soul in total abandon. Contemporary sacrifices, on the contrary, are bilateral transactions, with limited input (not total abandon) and limited results (the prolonging of life or the securing of other types of welfare for the time being).

Furthermore, contemporary sacrifices contrast with both the mythical death and death by the Beast in that the latter are spontaneous acts on the part of one of the partners, while the former is of the nature of a mutual gratification in which the Beasts (like the Buaya male) nonetheless have the final say. Sacrifices are not spontaneous acts. They are made because there is no other recourse. It is a trade-off between man and the Beasts, necessitated by the latter’s invasions, as headhunters do into others’ territories in order to principally take human lives, but also to loot heirlooms which are the traditional objects into which surplus is transformed and as such serve as a crisis fund.

One of the first three human beings died because of total response in a love relationship with the creator God, analogous to the “absence and abandon” experienced by the female as typical in a paramour relationship. The other two first human beings did not exhibit the same response to divine love, and they lived. They have the human nature, transmitted to their descendants, which the myth explores, and which will ultimately lead to divine withdrawal from any further relationship between Himself and the people, and the beginning of the present cosmos.

Human Nature

In the pristine sacrificial event, and throughout the myth, Man responds to his creator God. In contemporary sacrifices he responds to the Beasts. Man remains the creator of his own welfare through sacrifice but now by bargaining with the Beasts. He offers a deal, even a human head though always the head of an enemy or stranger. The purpose of contemporary sacrifices is, literally, to keep body and soul together (as the Buaya understand these categories), to prolong the fragile state of that for which the sacrifice is being made, man or another creature, so that it may not deteriorate or lose its soul. In the present order, a sacrifice is a trade with the Beasts, soul for soul.

One result of the first episode was to show man’s capacity for creativeness. All existing things today that have a soul are human creations, including human offspring. The Buaya do not believe that the God intervenes in the procreation of new descendants. The creativity, which man shares with the God, contrasts with man’s capacity for destructiveness which he shares with the Beasts.

The only things which the God directly created were people. Man is not something natural, but something made: a product. A common term for made or cultivated things possessed by man (or, as the case may be, by a mythological figure) is kokokwa (‘property, implement, constitution, nature’). The term is related to ko-on (‘do, make’). Under property (kokokwa) came slaves in earlier days; however, this same term never refers to ‘man’ as such, nor to one’s children.

All manufactured and cultivated things, or kokokwa, have a dual nature: they have a soul. Under the wider, unnamed category of cultigens come, for example, man, slaves, domesticated plants and animals, heirlooms, sugar cane presses and weaving looms, cooking pots, axes and spears, textiles, money and all other valuable things made with effort. It is from this category of objects that the proper sacrificial gifts are taken. Of course, they are also the things that need to be kept in existence by means of sacrifice. What was constituted and maintained through a moral act (the effort in making and maintaining) can be disposed of in a moral act (a sacrifice). Uncultivated and non-manufactured things, including edible vegetation and game animals, do not have a soul and therefore cannot be victims; nor are sacrifices made for them. Their use in sacrifices would result in a cosmic disaster. The anomaly amounts to playing a joke on the cosmos. Those who have been so presumptuous (by, for example, using a wild chicken for a sacrifice) are known to have drowned in rising waters or to have been buried (and drowned) in shifting mud.

The concept ‘man,’ however, has a wider semantic context in the plant and animal worlds. We already receive hints in the facts that the myth refers to man as a sinayug (‘watered’), a metaphor borrowed from one particular act of cultivation that is bestowed upon domesticated plants, and that those things which originated from the human body were plants (mula). Furthermore, the Buaya have a single term, kakayos. (‘crawling thing’), for both animals (either wild or domesticated) and the Beasts whose greed man shares in part.

A brief look into the Buaya conceptualization of plants and animals should reveal more about the Buaya concept of human nature, both physical and moral.

Both the unseen (the God, the Beasts, and other members of the unseen) and the uncreated mundane world do not have a dual nature: they do not have a soul; they have a single existence. In the uncreated mundane world we have three categories. One of these includes the game animals, fruits, herbs and other kinds of vegetation that are useful supplements, as edibles or otherwise, for man’s welfare. A second category offers danger. Under it come chiefly poisonous snakes and vegetation and predatory animals. A third and residual category is neither useful nor harmful to man’s existence.

From the bush (tattalun), man who is also a predator and eater, as we shall see collects things that are useful to him. But the bush is on the one hand the uncultivated world (which is useless for sacrificial purposes) and therefore also an uncreated world, and, on the other, the “uncultured” or eating world. It is the natural habitat of the unseen Beasts who eat man, i.e., capture his soul, and to whom sacrifices are made (by surrendering the soul of made things) for the release of the human soul or the preservation of other made things (i.e., their soul).

Just as man lives on a patch of cleared ground, the village, eventually provided with a palisade against the invasion of enemies but always ritually fenced against the invasion of the unseen Beasts as well as potential human raiders, his main staple is grown on patches of land that are cleared of jungle growth, and must be weeded of new jungle growth that threatens the life of the plants, and fenced against the invasion of unwanted jungle animals, notably wild pigs. Both the plants and the villagers must be protected against the invasion of external forces.

Domesticated animals, on the contrary, are not protected from external forces. There are no predators on them. Among the domesticates, animals can take care of themselves; plants cannot. The domesticated animals are tame (na-amu) because they are accustomed (uminam) to people, but become estranged and difficult to catch (na-olom) when left alone or abandoned in a pasture for a long time. Eventually they become simalon or completely wild and aggressive, which is a state similar to that of the wild (na-atap) animals.

The Buaya do not conceive of domesticates (either plants or animals) as having been taken from a wild state.9 Cultivated plants, when left untended, die; they do not become wild. Domesticated animals, however, when not tended, do become wild and join the natural world of the bush. This is consistent with the fact that man’s staple is primarily plants,10 and only secondarily animals, and that no plants are ever defiling.

After death, people go to live in the bush and act very much like the unseen Beasts, whose proper habitat is also the bush and who threaten the life of the living. The dead are not beneficial to the living, and they can do harm. The ancestors often invade the gardens in the form of wild pigs. The association between evil spirits, the Beasts, and ancestors is so close that when conversing about the former, the latter are almost always recalled.

When man was created, he produced plants, i.e., subsistence and welfare; after his death he joins the world of the wild animals and retains only his ability to do harm. Plants are eaten and do not eat; animals eat and some of them, both wild and domesticated (the dog and to some extent the water buffalo), defile (causing death) when eaten. Some vegetation is actually poisonous, too, but this property is not part of the metaphor. On the other hand, all snakes are viewed as poisonous, including their meat.

During his lifetime, therefore, man, like the domesticated plants, needs to be protected against the evil forces that may annihilate him. But since man also has something of the beast in him, his behavior after his death resembles that of the Beasts. From that moment on, he is kept at a distance and ritually fenced out like the Beasts, because he has become dangerous in a manner analogous to domesticated animals that have lapsed into a wild state after a certain period of absence from the people with whom they have lived. Traditionally, the chief animal domesticate was the pig. Ancestors, as was said, turn into wild pigs when they invade the gardens. Wild pigs are actually the greatest menace from the forest to the gardens, whose chief production was root crops before the introduction of rice.

The brief look into the animal and plant concepts yields some important contrasts: domesticated animals, when untended, become wild and often aggressive; they can, in that state, like other animals roaming the wild, take care of themselves, and are always prone to predation. Dogs sometimes catch and eat chicks and piglets; chickens must be fenced in when the rice is in ear; pigs are fenced all the time; and tame water buffalos sometimes break their tethers and invade growing rice paddies where they cause considerable damage.

These contrasts form part of a general “male/female” contrast that includes the God/Beast and planter/hunter oppositions and many others, and which man straddles. Planting is a female task and hunting a male task.

The animal/plant contrast does not, however, apply universally, and the Buaya are aware of this. Weeds, in a sense, also suffocate the domesticated plants in fields and gardens, and not all domesticated plants, such as mature coconut trees and betel palms, remain weak and in need of protection and tending; conversely, not all wild animals are actually harmful. Still, the generalization illustrates two important contrasting categories in the Buaya world view.

The plant/animal contrasts, like the other “male/female” contrasts, have reference to man’s moral and physical make-up. He shares with the plants and animals their bad physical and moral qualities respectively. Physically, like the plants, he is threatened by invasion and annihilation; and morally, like the animals, he is a predator and aggressor. Conversely, he shares the plants’ good moral and the animals’ good physical qualities. He has the capacity both to surrender, and to fend for himself and put up a fight.

The “male/female” contrasts is put in quotation marks on purpose. Males share female attributes and vice-versa. For example, women do the harvesting of plants, and gather edible vegetation in the forest, an activity akin to hunting, though limited to plants. Conversely, when a man decides to have a sacrifice made for his family’s welfare, he does this with the “female” disposition of surrendering part of himself to the Beasts.

Man’s capacity to surrender is the subject of the present episode of this myth, his capacity to put up a fight is one of the main themes of the epic songs. This contrast will be dealt with later in the analysis. His physical weakness being a creature, is already evident; his moral weakness or greed (pawot) will be the subject of the episodes that follow.

God, Man and Beasts

Returning again to the God and Beast11 concepts, neither category falls under the cultigens. They have a simple physical nature. They are also simple in their moral attitude. The God is all-good and creative, while the Beasts are all-evil and destructive. The God produces and the Beasts devour. The God has the “female” quality of surrender, while the Beasts have the “male” quality of aggression. At the end of the myth, the God retreats in the face of an aggressive human attitude and does not put up a fight, in contrast with the heroes of the epic songs whose basic achievements are their headhunting exploits.

Man has a capacity for predation or greed, which he has in common with the predatory animals and the Beasts, and he has a capacity for its opposite surrender and sacrifice which he shares with the plants and the God.

Man was still in his creator’s hands when there was an initial total self-sacrifice that assured mankind of its food and welfare. The myth tells us that the gardens were small and so with the cooking pots; and yet there was abundance. The first people were not the voracious and greedy eaters that the Buaya consider themselves to be now.

The drama of the myth will be that man cannot make natural for himself what comes natural to his God. In spite of the God’s (naïve?) expectations, man cannot live on that level without interruption. He is ambiguous as a moral being and eventually passes into the precarious existence of contemporary experience.

The God is neither physically fragile nor morally ambiguous. He has a singleness of nature in being physically uncreated, like the rest of the natural or uncreated world;12 and he is morally unambiguous by being purely unselfish (and creative), in contrast to the pure greed (and destructiveness) that is found in the world of the bush. The God is physically self-sufficient and morally good. He is creative because of his moral quality, which is the source of his abundance and bliss. The Beasts, on the other hand, live in constant want, are morally evil, and maintain themselves by predation. Whatever wealth is obtained, notably by the chiefs of the Beasts, through their greed, does not satisfy it. Sacrifices are made to the Beasts, and never to the God. The God gives without losing, and the Beasts take without gaining. Both are bottomless pits.

Comparing God, Beasts and Man, two intersecting sets of contrasts manifest themselves, as shown in Figure 1. Vertically, the simplicity (natural) of the God and the Beast (albeit on different and contrasting grounds) contrasts with the compositeness (made) of Man. Horizontally, the destructiveness and selfishness of the Beasts contrast with the generosity and creativeness of the God. Man takes up an intermediate, yet distinct, position between them by sharing the attributes of both, and by differing from them in his ontological make-up.

This double, intersecting set of oppositions is not merely a matter of negations, as the terms ‘cultured/uncultured’ and ‘cultivated/uncultivated’ might imply. The terms ‘creativeness/destructiveness,’ with their reference to made things (as the Buaya understand them), express the contrast more effectively. Similarly, the term ‘natural’ in the ‘made/natural’ contrast does not merely mean ‘not made’ (and much less, non-existent) but refers to an existence that is both originated and maintained by internal elan, and without external assistance or effort.

As three distinct categories, God and Man share abandon, in contrast with the Beasts’ rapacity; God and Beast share simplicity, in contrast with Man’s compositeness.

When, together with the Buaya, we view man outside time (or within the time sequence of the myth), his ontological and moral conditions are intimately related. Physically he is neither God nor Beast; morally he can act like either, but may not because it is self-destructive. The God can be totally good and not die; and the Beasts can be totally evil and not die. For man, total sacrificial surrender leads to death, and the Buaya maintain that all errors and misfortunes are ultimately caused by some moral wrongdoing. Man does not share the moral attributes of God and Beasts in their total force, however. He could not, because he does not share their ontological simplicity. Though, like both of them, he has an ontology and a morality, he stands distinct from them both morally and ontologically. His moral ambiguity is the direct result of his ontological dualism.

I have already referred to altruistic suicide as totally unacceptable for the Buaya mind, and the social status of persons who die a violent death. The infants of women who die in childbirth seldom survive. Perhaps on account of this, any woman who dies in childbirth is disgraced, and receives an ignominious burial. Her death is as useless to the survivors as that of one who was killed by an enemy. The corpses of persons who were killed are treated with the same disrespect. This notion also finds full expression in one of the rites during larger (and longer) sacrifices (De Raedt 1969b, 544-3). Briefly, some of the Beasts are delegated to come and verify if it is true that the pig that was sacrificed was so large that the people had to cut away the house walls so that it could be brought out. The implication is that their sacrifice is so large that it represents all they possess and means the end of their existence. The rite, in covert terms, reminds both the celebrants and the Beast that sacrifices ought to be of measured proportions, and that they should never be self-destructive on account of their size. They would then lose their meaning by, paradoxically, being ineffectual.

We now can resolve the apparent inconsistency and naiveté in offering things of lesser value for things of greater value. Not only may man not offer his all, but more importantly contemporary sacrifices are offered to the Beasts who represent the evil streak in man, i.e., not all of man. In sacrifice, one offers a greater or lesser part of oneself, but not all of oneself. Such action would find support in neither his physical nor moral nature.

Two of the first three people lived because they did not refuse their soul, and so did their descendants. Their basic attitude toward, and relationship with, their God will be explored in the rest of the myth. As the story develops, the evil dimension of man’s moral nature is viewed as the cause of an ultimate state of physical helplessness (illness, hunger, death) that is the natural result of an initial physical condition that is not remedied by a moral attitude that equals, or at least approaches, that of the creator God. Throughout the myth, man is neither God nor Beast, but it was the God’s hope that man would act as the God does. Man’s physical nature limits or compromises his moral options.

2. The First Sexual Encounters

Siblings, Spouses and Paramours

The first man and woman those who survived the act of creation lived in pristine sexual innocence. The God had to instruct them (in fact, the woman) that they should procreate, and how.

The myth does not state that these two were siblings, but some of the narrators later asserted that they were.13 At any rate, their children were siblings and the same divine advice applies to them and need not be repeated in the text.

On account of their initial reluctance and the God’s advice, the act seems not to appear improper to the narrator and his audience. The myth completely passes over the fact that their children are also siblings, to state that two of these married and that the third sibling, a male, committed adultery with the married man’s wife.

Leaving the problem of incestuous union and the ‘sinfulness’ of the adulterous union for a later section, the first couple’s reluctance to copulate contrasts with the desire and adulterous union between the single man and the married woman. This reveals the base of the contrasts in the present episode, constraint vs. license, mediated by marriage. The present episode introduces us to the institutions that regulate human sexuality: sibling relationship, marriage, and romantic liaisons.

In Buaya kinship terminology, the term for sibling (sunud) ranges in meaning from true sibling to kinsman, either consaguineal or affinal. Its reference is primarily structural and is measured by clearly marked degrees of personal kindred. A first degree of relationship is that between ego and his direct ascendants and descendants. A second degree is marked off by his direct ascendants’ siblings, his own siblings and his siblings’ descendants. A third degree extends to his direct ascendants’ first cousins, his own first cousins and the latter’s descendants. The fourth and fifth degrees similarly include the second and third cousin degrees of relationship respectively. The third (or first cousin) degree represents the boundary of the incest taboo, and the fifth (or third cousin) degree forms the boundary of kinship relations.

Also included in ego’s kindred, as affinals, are the spouses of the above and, if ego is married, ego’s spouse and ego’s spouse’s personal kindred with their spouses. Ego’s spouse’s kinsmen within the first cousin degree, together with their spouses, thus also fall within the inner core to whom the incest taboo applies. Within this first cousin degree of relationship, food exchanges are statistically more common. They express and help to maintain the fraternal bonding that exists (or should exist) between ego and his/her spouse, i.e., the marital pair, and their respective first cousin degree kinsmen. These same food exchanges also occur between non-kinsmen who have developed fraternal bounds. The food exchanges, mostly in the form of vegetables, occur in a very informal manner, and a single household has such exchanges with about ten or less, the majority of them neighbors. The food is freely offered and as freely asked. This fraternal bonding and the attending food exchanges may extend beyond the first cousin degree, but then on a selective basis and with some modifications as to the propriety of sexual relations between such kin as will be indicated presently.

In the discussion that follows, the term Sibling will refer to the inner core of first cousin degree relationship where the incest taboo strictly applies, as well as the structurally more distant kin with whom a fraternal sentimental bond exists, expressed in vegetable exchanges. Reference to the wider kinship circle is inevitable in the analysis of Sibling avoidance in contrast with the sexual relationship between spouses and paramours, because it will lay bare contrastive elements that distinguish the three categories of human sexual intimacy. These fraternal sentiments obviously contain more than mere sexual abstinence. Kinship solidarity, or the totality of mutual obligations between true siblings as well as all other kinsmen, will be further discussed in the next section. Here the focus is on the sexual element in the relationship. (This assumes a Freudian account of interest.)

In the conscious Buaya experience, human sexual relations are not of a kind that could become a metaphor of Sibling closeness and sharing. To have sex relations of any kind within the first cousin degree is to abuse one’s kin. Human sexual relations require distance. Romances and marriages (as said earlier) almost always occur between non-related individuals and the distantly related. Figures on the frequency of romances are obviously difficult to obtain, but there are rules. Paramour liaisons are formed between persons (kinsmen as well as non-kinsmen) who do not have food exchanges, i.e., who have become distant in this kind of reciprocities. If, however, the two are second cousins, marriage becomes permissible, and it is said that they should better marry. The main consideration is that the woman is degraded by a romantic affair, and such a behavior (of degrading) is not proper for a male toward a second cousin. It is more respectful to marry her than to have her as a paramour. Consanguineals and their spouses (and with equal force, a spouse’s consanguineals and their spouses) at that distance must still be treated as equals through the marriage contract. At the third cousin degree, which is the boundary of the effective range of kinship, there is no general agreement as to the existence of an obstacle to romantic liaisons. Those of the more lenient opinion insist, however, that there be no food exchanges between the households to which the couple belong. Actually, at this terminal degree of kinship people seldom act as kinsmen, and seldom maintain food exchanges. Many, de facto, do not know who all their third cousins are. The rules of required distance between paramours are thus stricter than those of required distance between spouses. Both marriage and romance have their built-in distance, the main requirement being a certain structural distance (to be at least second cousins) in the former, and, in the latter, a further structural distance (to be at least third cousins) according to some, paired with a particular sentimental distance through the absence of fraternal food exchanges, i.e., of fraternal sentiment.

The food exchanges referred to here are mostly in the form of vegetables, and will be further discussed in the next section. Such kinsmen have close sentimental ties. If certain events disrupt that “close” relationship, they become “distant” and the food exchanges are discontinued. The sentimental bond between “close” kinsmen is an extension of the fraternal sentimental bond that exists (or should exist) between siblings and first cousins, and is of a kind that contrasts with the romantic sentimental bond between paramours. For that reasons, they are incompatible and cannot co-exist.

A paramour relationship, therefore, implies two kinds of distance: structural distance and the absence of fraternal sentiment. At the third cousin degree of relationship, a structural relation that is seldom invoked, the relations with both affines and consanguineals become very weak, to the point where many members of the community cannot identify their own and their spouses’ kinsmen in that terminal degree of relationship. The greater the structural distance between a potential amorous pair, the less structured their relations (i.e., kinship is less frequently invoked and obligations are weakened), and the greater therefore the degree of spontaneity that can enter the relationship. The common contrast between fraternal bonding of kinsmen and marital ties of spouses on the one hand and romance on the other is structure vs. spontaneity.

Siblings express and maintain their fraternal relationship through food exchanges and spouses establish their contractual ties through a balanced amount of expenditures on the part of both the man’s and the woman’s side. Siblings and spouses make substantial exchanges, supported by and in support of their structural bonds. Spontaneous and anti-structural as they are, originated by mutual sexual attraction, paramour relations are nevertheless accompanied by certain minor, standard exchanges. In a licit relationship (with an unattached woman), the man must give her a blanket at the start of the affair. The blanket must be given ‘to cover the woman.’ We may see in it a recompense for the injury the woman always sustains in the relationship. (Notwithstanding this degrading aspect, the woman fully engages in it.) The other standard exchanges (between either licit or illicit paramours) are of little value. These mainly consist, on the part of the man, of betel leaves and cigars. Tobacco planting and tending is a male activity; and betel leaves are gathered by men by climbing the trees on which grow the vines whose leaves are used in the preparation of betel nut quids. Women usually prepare rice cakes for their dates. Most of the work surrounding rice, notably planting, weeding, harvesting, pounding and cooking, are female activities. The cakes are made of glutinous rice and dipped in coconut oil. They are called inandila (‘made like a tongue’).

Because of the absence (or distance) of structural relations, either consaguineal or affinal, as well as the absence of sentimental ties of the Sibling kind, the love affair is viewed and experienced as more adequate as a sexual experience. Spouses and Siblings share items of substance, while paramours share tidbits. The things exchanged and consumed during their dates are of little value but are expressive of the spontaneous and erotic nature of their relationship. The male and female erotic symbolism in their respective gifts is quite evident.

We may then distinguish three degrees and categories of sexual intimacy: 1) its suppression between Siblings; 2) its flowering between Paramours; and 3) its presence with certain constraints, as will be shown shortly, between spouses.

Within the category Man, we thus have a replica of the initial triad (Figure 1). These three major human institutions that revolve around intimacy contain two that are “natural” (Sibling and Paramour) and one that is “made” (Spouse).14 Sibling closeness is experienced as natural insofar as there is no structural distance and a high degree of identification. The sexual aversion is not experienced as a repression, but an expression of identification. Paramour closeness is experienced as natural insofar as it is not the result of pre-existing, compelling structures, for any existing structural relation between them is a very weak one, but of a free association driven by the natural drive of romantic interest. The Spouse relationship is “made” insofar as a structural relationship is created through the successive steps of the marriage contract, and sexual attraction is not supposed to be prior but eventually subsequent to their life together. The two “natural” forms of relationship contrast in their moral qualities of constraint (Sibling) and license (Paramour), while the third category (Spouse) takes an intermediate position between both. Marriages are not “natural” relationships but are forged, and exhibit the extremes of neither sexual constraint nor license even as there is something of both.

The nature of marital relationship needs further explanation. The presence of sexual activity between spouses is obvious; but it is accompanied by an amount of constraint.

That constraint normally exists between spouses finds emphasis and expression in the strict rules of public behavior between them throughout the Cordillera. Spouses are seldom seen sitting together and never give any public expression of intimacy, even in small circles. Such behavior would invite critical comment. Spouses doing their work at close distance are ridiculed as over-sexed. Their behavior is viewed as immature. To these strict rules of public behavior correspond habits of rather restricted private sexual behavior. Free and spontaneous exploration between couples (usually focusing exclusively on the genitals) most probably exists to any extent only between paramours. Despite the general cultural sanction for the desirability of paramour relations, a few have been heard to label paramours as licentious because they have sexual intercourse during daytime, ‘like animals.’ Using the marital code as a model, these few claim that the proper time for copulation of human beings is during the night under a blanket, and not spontaneously at any time or place. It is a controlled behavior.

Marriages are contracted through parental engagement, either at an early age or immediately before the marriage, although a few do result from a brief period of courtship the relation then being converted by the parents, as soon as detected, into a contractual one. The culture disapproves of premarital relations, and children who were contracted by their parents exhibit an extreme avoidance pattern out of a sense of shame (ba-in). They are seen to play with each other much less than with other age mates, and are periodically teased by the latter about the fact that they are ‘spouses.’ This avoidance carries on up to the day of marriage, which is followed by a period of sexual avoidance that may last for months. It is not surprising then that these strictures on behavior, both before and during marriage, lead to the culturally approved post-marital behavior of paramour relations as a sexual and emotional outlet. Extra-marital affairs are not infrequent, often occur soon after marriage, and most often do not last for more than a year or two. But, the way they are talked about, they take place in a more relaxed attitude of both partners, and are maintained by sentimental bonding. Prostitution, on the other hand, is unknown in Buaya, even to the extent that if a woman exceptionally accepts more than one lover simultaneously, i.e., over the same period of time, she is cheating them all and is severely criticized for it.

The relationship between spouses is ideally contractual before it is sexual, and is initiated and often terminated (even after the birth of children) on the basis of the general relationship of their respective parents and other close and influential kinsmen. The spouses’ personal feelings play a minuscule role. These are neither cultivated nor expected to focus on the romantic. Emotional bonding between spouses is not a prerequisite to either the origin or perdurance of a marriage. It is incidental and should not be overdone.

All human institutions are man-made, hence their internal contradictions. The main contrast between the Sibling and Paramour categories is between (sexual) constraint and license, but they share an ambiguity. The Sibling relation is ambiguous insofar as sexual avoidance exists in the presence of a high degree of identification and sharing, based on an enduring structural bond. [. . .]

Spouses take an intermediate position where the structural bond is strong though breakable, is not sentimental but contractual, and sexual relations are present but not necessarily, and commonly less than fully amorous. The Spouse relationship thus combines an amount of both (kinship) structure and sensuality, but has neither in pure form. Both in its structural and sexual aspects, it forms a compromise between constraint and license: it is breakable and not romantic. Its contractual nature contrasts with the sentiment that is common to both the Sibling and Paramour relationships. Marriage combines the advantages of structure and sexuality to a large degree, but disregards sentiments or love.

The Buaya are aware of these ambivalences, although they are least willing to consider them in the Sibling and Paramour relationships. These two are experienced as natural, in contrast to the Spouse relationship. The ambivalences in all three human categories of sexual intimacy relate to the creativeness/destructiveness contrast which Man straddles (see Figure 1), and will be taken up again in the third section of this chapter when human and divine notions of sexual intimacy will be compared. The common properties of each of the pairs of the triangle of human sexual intimacy, and their contrasting features with the third member of the triad are shown in Figure 2. The triple contrast is between sentiment and contract, structure and sensuality, and avoidance and spontaneity.

These contrasts were again not immediately based on the myth’s text. The myth does not say that the wife-husband relation was unfulfilling, but the love affair with the third man suggests it. The myth does not speak about a random couple, but about the first people and therefore about Man. The paramount consideration in myth analysis remains the people’s experience (belief and practice), i.e., the cultural context, to which we must return anew.

Household, Political Ties, and Friendship

The Sibling-Spouse-Paramour triangle of human sexual relations exists in, and is paralleled by, a wider and more encompassing triangle of social relations, namely, the household, political ties, and friendship. A rather detailed comparison of the categories of items of consumption in Buaya, and the contexts of their exchanges and consumptions, will allow the categories of human sexual intimacy the myth refers to in this episode to be placed in a wider context, and give firmer base to this initial triple categorization.

All items of consumption, with the exception of rice, which is the staple, and which will be discussed later, can be brought into four categories: the things consumed as side dishes in daily household meals; two distinct classes of consumptions during ceremonial occasions; and the class of things that can go under the name of “sweets” or “knickknacks.”

Traditionally, fruit trees, except for bananas, were not purposely planted. They grow mostly in the bush, and those that spontaneously grow near residences are not owned either. Anyone is free to collect the fruits. Bananas are planted in the swiddens after the rice is harvested. They are gathered unripe, mostly to be cooked as pig feed. When used as vegetables, they are also cooked. Some are kept over the hearth to hasten their ripening and turn them into fruits.

In the household and neighborhood, children have primary access to ripe fruits. Outside the household, fruits are shared and consumed in an atmosphere of friendliness between neighbors (maximum of 20 houses). For example, parents may call in their neighbors’ children to come and eat fruits with their own. (All neighbors have some degree of kinship relations because of the residence rule. See De Raedt 1993). Or, when a neighbor arrives with a great quantity of fruits he/she has collected, the neighbors are called to the house yard and the fruits are eaten by whoever cares to eat. There are no restrictions on consumption. It is a sentimental occasion, ideally open to all neighbors, since neighbors should maintain good relations. Should there be some temporary friction with one of the other household, the adult members may refrain from coming, but may allow their children to join. (Permanent disagreement eventually leads to the relocation of either household to another settlement, where they also have kin.)

Fruits do not have commercial value, and are not viewed as nutritive, but are appreciated for their taste. They are not viewed as having substance (bogas). This category of consumer items, henceforth referred to as FRUIT (F), also includes tobacco, coffee and honey. These have commercial value when exchanged in large quantities. They are sold outside the region, normally in the nearest lowland town, Tuao, in Cagayan Province. One or two leaves of tobacco (for smoking or chewing) or a cup of coffee are freely shared with others in a gesture of neighborliness. Other items in this category are a stick of sugarcane, molasses, young coconuts, one or two pieces of rice cake, etc.

These are also the tidbits that are shared between lovers. Oranges, lime, papaya, bananas, grape fruits, tobacco rolled into cigars, and rice cakes dipped in coconut oil can have conscious, erotic meaning, as indicated in their presence in erotic tales. They always have erotic meaning when shared between paramours. When sugar cane is eaten as a fruit, it is cut into short sections at the nodes, and pealed with an axe or machete. It is eaten by biting off small pieces to be chewed for their juice. Sometimes, sugar cane juice is jokingly referred to as an aphrodisiac in that it is said to give the eater kussit (‘male semen, female vaginal fluid’). (The Buaya believe that a man should not stay away from his wife during her pregnancy because he has to help form the fetus through intercourse.)

The Buaya also know personal friendship. It is same-sex, non-erotic, mostly with a single, non-related or distantly related individual, and it normally lasts a lifetime. You can have many friends, they say, but you always have a best friend. The pair always seek each other out to work, hunt, gather fruits or vegetables, to travel together, or to simply spend idle time together. They, too, share the tidbits of the F category. In case serious, even armed, conflict arises between their kindreds, their friendship is irrelevant to their respective kindreds. Either one could be killed by the other one’s kinsmen. Both neighborliness and personal friendship are here subsumed under the single term ‘friendship.’

A second category of edibles consists mainly of vegetables, either domestic or wild, and occasionally game animals (wild boar, deer and wild fowl), fish from the river and surplus meat after a ceremonial. These are cooked and eaten as side dishes, with rice as the main dish, in household meals. The side dish is an essential part of the meal. At a minimum it consists of pepper (sili) or salt. The items in this category of consumption, henceforth referred to as VEGETABLE (V), share with F that they do not have commercial value. V and F are never sold, even when available in large quantities (except, as stated, for coffee, honey and tobacco). The Buaya do not plant vegetables as cash crops and hunted meat is not sold. Items of the V category are shared with sentimentally close kinsmen in the same or other settlements, to be used just the same as side dishes in their household meals. These exchanges occur with up to ten other households, and are accompanied by a sex taboo like that which exists between kinsmen up to the first cousin degree of relationship (Siblings). The sharing of these V and F items have a functional side, since they have to be consumed over a brief period of time, and invite reciprocal exchanges over time, when these items are lacking and welcome in the other household. It is also customary for a household with such a relationship to go and ask for a cup of salt, for example, when it has run out of the item and could not yet travel to the lowlands for new supply. (Acquisitions in the lowlands are exchanged for coffee, tobacco and forest products and their derivatives.)

Meat obtained from domestic animals (chicken, pork, water buffalo) is the exclusive side dish during ceremonial (festive or mournful) occasions. All the items in this category, designated as MEAT (M), are nutrients, and have commercial value. They are chiefly appreciated on those accounts, and secondarily for their taste. None of these are ever killed or butchered for use in the domestic meals, but are reserved for ceremonial (religious or secular) occasions. Surplus animal domesticates are sold to others who need the meat for ceremonial purposes. They, unlike V and F, have a definite trade value.

During large ceremonials, three other items of commercial value, sugar-cane wine, glutinous-rice cakes and heavily sugared coffee (introduced during the first half of the past century) are part of the fare, except that no coffee is offered during animal sacrifices and during the sacrificial part of the headhunting feast, and neither coffee nor rice cakes are offered during funeral wakes.

This category of cakes, wine and coffee will be referred to as WINE (W). All three items have commercial value because of the large quantities that are being served. They are offered between meals, somewhat in the style in which F is consumed, as we shall see. They are not taken for any perceived nutritive value, but for their taste and pleasure qualities.

During ceremonial occasions, therefore, two classes of commercially valued consumption items (M and W) are served, which differ in the mainly nutritive value of one (M) and the mainly pleasure quality of the other (W).

We thus have four different categories of consumption. Two (V and M) are considered nutrients, two (F and W) are appreciated for their pleasure quality, two (V and F) are of sentimental value, and two (M and W) are of commercial value.

Returning briefly to the earlier triangle of Sibling, Spouse and Paramour relations, V is related to Sibling relations, M and W to Spouse relations and F to Paramour relations. Similarly, V is related to domestic consumption, M and W to public meals, and F to relations of personal friendship and neighborliness. These wider categories of relationships need further elaboration.

Marriages are primarily political decisions. Half of the Buaya children are betrothed during their infancy by their parents, the boy’s parents taking the initiative. The initial step, simple in nature, through the exchange of items of little value, is followed by a series of festivities hosted alternatively by both households over the years, until this culminates in the wedding feasts. Poorer families do not betroth their children at an early age, because they cannot afford this series of festivities. The parents, however, have just the same the last word in the choice of a marriage partner by their children. In all cases, the bride-to-be, with the latter’s parents’ approval, is selected mainly in order to strengthen the household’s links with a kindred with whom these links have weakened over the generations, because of the bilateral nature of the kinship system, or to create new links with non-kin of the same region. Occasionally, however, marriages do occur between regions in order to create “go-betweens” between the regions, since the marriage produces the equivalent of dual citizenship and thus freedom to travel as go-betweens and messengers in case of armed conflict.

There are numerous occasions at which political ties with kin and non-kin are established and, especially, reinforced. Peace pact celebrations and their renewals involve entire regions. One or more of these celebrations are held every year, since Buaya maintains peace pacts with more than 20 other regions, all of which need periodic renewal. The local peace pact holder is the host and all co-regionists are welcome to participate. It is a prestige feast that enhances the political status of the host. Only ‘rich’ people are selected to be peace pact holders, since they can afford the M and W expenditures.

In number of attendance, marriages come next. Again, no one is excluded from attendance, provided a token contribution of about 2.5 kg. of pounded rice is brought per household irrespective of its size or the number of the household members who attend. Attendance in peace pact celebrations have the same provision for co-regionists. Next in importance are religious sacrificial rituals, which vary in the size and number of animals that are butchered (pigs or chickens) according to the need of the occasion and the wealth of the household. Wealthier households, when the male household head has political ambitions or status, sacrifice larger pigs. It is thus, in part, also a prestige feast. Attendance, in proportion to the size of the sacrifice, is restricted to kinsmen and the inhabitants of the settlement, or cluster of settlements not exceeding 20 households in all, who are all related.

Also well attended are funerals, depending on the size of the kindred of the deceased and his political prominence if a male, or the respect she has gained if a medium (priestess). Participants again carry a standard contribution in rice; they also bring funeral gifts, called adang, in the form of textiles, animals and wine.

All these occasions during which meals are served to guests are occasions for the initiation or strengthening (or termination, in funerals, as we shall see) of political ties. In peace pacts and marriages (and the steps that lead to them) this is a very conscious purpose, but has the same effect in all occasions on the political relationship between the host and the guests. Ceremonial occasions, through the attendance, consumptions, contributions to the occasion, and share in surplus food, establish and maintain structural relations between kin as well as non-kin. The success of a celebration is measured by the attendance and the expenditures it entailed.

All kinship relations, including those between siblings, have political overtones. Elder siblings exercise influence over younger ones, parents over their children, notably their marriage and divorce; and all first cousins are not of equal rank and influence. At the second cousin degree of relationship, kinship solidarity, a political relationship along kinship lines, begins to weaken, and becomes somewhat selective. It may become non-existent at the third cousin degree, the boundary of kindred as a category.

Kinship solidarity, as well as relations with non-kin need to be maintained through reciprocal, behavioral acts. Among the formal occasions we have religious and secular ceremonials accompanied by the direct exchanges of food and other contributions to these occasions, contributions to the payment of indemnities; and the shares received from surplus food after ceremonials and upon the collection of indemnities. These contributions and redistributions follow kinship as well as geographical patterns in the application of the flexible and expandable “neighborhood” (see De Raedt 1993) according to the size of the occasion. Collections and distributions of indemnities, however, are limited to the kindred, and the size or amount are more or less in proportion to the structural closeness or distance of the kinsmen. (Households with a special relationship of V exchanges contribute more and receive a larger share in the distribution of surplus meat and rice because of their sentimental, fraternal bonds with the celebrants.)

Kinship solidarity is based on marriages through the generations, but is rather selective beyond the first cousin degree of relationship, and thus needs to be nurtured. The above mechanisms seem to be the chief means of maintenance of solidarity, but there are others such as work exchange during the agricultural cycle, or the construction or repair of a house or granary. Kinship relations outside the household are therefore partly contrived. Political relations with non-kin are purely contrived, the chief instances being peace pact, marriage and leadership. Leaders (see De Raedt 1993) regularly give feasts open to the public, especially when an important visitor from another region is being entertained. Being contrived, these relations need to be cultivated periodically by expenditures.

As already stated, half of the marriages are the culmination of a series of ceremonials hosted by both parties. In all cases, the bride’s parents host the wedding feast, while the groom’s parents pay a dowry to the bride’s parents. During the wedding feast, the groom’s parents collect a modest cash contribution from the guests. All together, this results in equal expenditures on both sides. Similarly, peace pacts are celebrated in both regions, also resulting in equal expenditures. Leaders expend time during deliberations of disputes, but are compensated through the advantageous commercial deals they can close with their dependents. A leader, like a kinsman, always acquires property at a cheaper price.

Purely political relations, as in the peace pacts, create an enduring obligation, but not the “closeness” generated by Sibling relations. The ties that are made are of a rather negative nature; they have a rather “taming” effect to the extent that there is an agreement not to do harm to each other. This recalls to mind the balanced relationship that results in sacrifices (both animal and human) between the hosts of the sacrifice and the Beasts to whom the animals or human head are offered (see De Raedt 1989). It has, or is supposed to have, for effect that the Beasts’ ‘greed’ is held at bay. The Beasts receive the soul of the animal in an animal sacrifice, or the soul of the human whose soul follows the head in a human sacrifice, in return for the soul of the diseased, which they had captured (resulting in the illness). The most adept of the mediums once compared the effect of a sacrifice to that of a peace pact, with both having a balanced relationship and taming effect. All illness is traced to a sin (litug) against the ‘unseen’ (agsa maila), i.e., the Beasts. The sacrifice makes up for the transgression in the same way that indemnities do in a peace pact. When a person dies, this balanced relationship between him and the Beasts is broken. The Beasts have taken (‘eaten’) the soul never to return it again.

Intra-regional political ties, such as leadership and marriage, have a positive nature. These relations create interdependence between leaders and their village mates, between the affinals and between consanguineals. The relationship is one of deference on the part of village mates toward their leaders, and of the spouses toward the spouses’ parents and latter’s kinsmen in the same and upper generations up to the second cousin degree of relationship. This is reciprocated by the leader’s concern for his dependents (they can go to him for counsel and he represents them in disputes), and by the co-parents-in-law’s concern for their children-in-law and future grandchildren. As in the peace pact, the relationship is not one of closeness in the sentimental sense, in contrast to the closeness that exists, or is supposed to exist, in a household and between Siblings. Once grandchildren are born, a sentimental tie is developed, to the extent that they go and live eventually with one of their children and babysit their grandchildren when the parents are out to work. Upon the betrothal of their children, the co-parents-in-law initiate a fraternal (Sibling) relationship through regular V exchanges, and observe a sex taboo. Similarly, spouses observe a sex taboo with their spouses’ kin up to the first cousin degree of relationship, and household members of peace pact holders cannot marry their counterparts, much less have paramour relations. It is then clear that marriages, although created through a purely political act, generate a relationship akin to the Sibling relationship between consanguineals and their spouses, centered in the sentimental bonds that develop in the new household, especially when children are born. Individuals acquire more than one kind of relationship to others simultaneously.

Marriage is neither supposed to result from a romance, nor result in a romance. That there is sexual interest is obvious, but it exists mainly for the purpose of procreation and permanence, unlike the fickleness of paramour relations. Romances that may spontaneously occur between young adults who were not betrothed during infancy are discouraged by the parents if they are not politically feasible, i.e., if they are not contributory to the extension of ties with kindreds with whom relations have become structurally distant, or between non-kin, i.e., the fourth cousin degree or beyond. Hence the high frequency of marriages between their cousins (40%) and unrelated individuals (also 40%), based on actual headcount. Parents can also induce divorce, even if a romantic relationship has developed between the couple, e.g., after years of childlessness, or after the development of grave conflict between the spouses’ kindreds.

“Kinship solidarity,” a famous anthropological expression, thus has both political and sentimental bases.

The consumptions during ceremonials (M, W and rice), because of their commercial value, contrast with those in both the household meal and those between friends and neighbors. Neither V nor F have commercial value, and neither are offered during ceremonials.

Rice for home consumption does not have commercial value. Only surplus rice, like surplus animal domesticates, is sold. The rice consumption in the household meal, though of substance like the side dish (V), is of little quantity and is not considered as having commercial value. A household plants rice mainly for home consumption. Those with much rice for sale are few. Others exchange a couple of cups for matches, a small tube of toothpaste or a can of sardines and the like.

On account of their ingredients, the meals in both public occasions (ceremonial) and private occasions (household meals) have substance. They are food. They are consumed in the context of structure (the household and political ties), and so contrast with the context of spontaneity (friendship) in the consumption of F. Food is consumed for its nutritive value. F and W are not viewed as having substance. They are not food. Food is associated with structure; W and F are associated with sensuality. The place of consumption of these items will further illustrate this contrast later on.

All items in the M category are obtained from domesticates, and are butchered and consumed during ceremonials only, either secular or religious, all of which have a political nature. V items are obtained mostly from soulless plants (vegetables) and soulless animals (game animals and fish) or from raw meat obtained as a small share of surplus meat after a ceremonial (by then without commercial value and without its soul). In all ceremonials, including sacrifice (De Raedt 1989), there is a close association between the items in the M and W category and the host, to the extent that the meat and the wine offered during funerals are not consumed by kinsmen and friends who feel sentimentally close to the deceased. These kinsmen and friends obtain their side dish from one or more coconut trees that are cut down for the pith at the top of the tree from which the leaves sprout. The cutting down is symbolic of the loss of the deceased kinsman or friend. Those guests feel sentimentally close to the deceased and comment that eating the meat would amount to eating the corpse, because, for them, the meat has a blood smell (lang-os), which is repulsive (and a basis for food taboos regarding certain kinds of meat and fish). They further say that the smell of the dalong (‘effluence from a decomposing corpse’) goes to the wine.

During ceremonials, M and W are consumed with restraint. The portions are measured and no seconds are offered. There are, however two important exceptions. During funerals, the meat portions, for those who wish to eat it, are large. Young men may eat meat exclusively. The people recall that in the past the hosts often had to throw considerable amounts of meat away, since it spoiled, because the household would not eat it and it could not be shared with those who normally share in meat surplus, because of their sentimental closeness to the deceased. Wine is also served liberally. The same category of participants who refuse the meat also do not consume the wine. They either spit out their serving or pour it on the ground.

The second exception to the above rule applies in the headhunting feasts. While the meat that is served is measured (it is a part a political affair), the wine is not. Headhunting feasts traditionally resulted in orgies of drunkenness and sexual excesses. Wine is served liberally, without restraint, to the point that the participants, especially the men, vomit from over-satisfaction or induce vomiting to relieve discomfort, so they could start drinking again. The house yard becomes muddy, as in funerals, because of the spilled wine. Wakes are mournful events, while headhunting feasts are eminently joyful ones. During headhunting feasts, the captured head is raised in the middle of the house yard, placed on top of a bamboo that is split and woven into the shape of a basket. Conversely, during funerals, a coconut tree is cut down. Coconuts, which originated from the head of one of the first human beings, which was sacrificed, are symbolic of the human head. Headhunting feasts and funerals thus exhibit a contrastive relationship: joyfulness and mourning.

The unlimited consumption of meat during funerals seems to be related to an alteration in the relationship between the deceased and the visiting mourners. As stated earlier, those who attend funerals mainly on account of their political ties do not make a conscious identification with the meat and wine and the corpse. On the unconscious level, however, we can see an identification, though of a negative nature. The wake they attend, of their now defunct host, is also the occasion at which their mutual ties and obligations are terminated. The soul of the deceased has not yet departed to its new habitat in the bush, and is present at the wake. The breaking of ties, which had their restraints, as expressed in the restrictions on consumption during other celebrations (except for wine during headhunting feasts), is now expressed by the liberal consumption of both meat and wine. The relationship is no longer a measured and calculated one. The ties are broken and there is license.

The unrestrained consumption of wine during headhunting feasts expresses an atmosphere of bursting out of daily life’s constraints. Some informants commented that it is similar to a temporary return to primordial times that did not have today’s cares and limitations. From the Buaya’s point of view, it is a licentious affair. Women openly invite the headhunter to a secret affair later, and some couples unmarried to each other, have intercourse in the bush or elsewhere away from the house yard.

As already stated, when a person dies, the balanced relationship between him/her and the Beasts is broken. The Beasts have ‘eaten’ the person. Similarly, during wakes, the guests whose relationship to the deceased was purely or mainly political eat and drink without restraint the meat and wine offered by the deceased’s household. Those who feel sentimentally close to the deceased, either because of fraternal relationship or because of friendship, cannot share in this behavior.

V and M are consumed as side dishes with rice as the main dish. Both V and M are necessary ingredients of a meal. Together with rice, they are nutrients, or food. Food is associated with structure, while W and F are associated with sensuality. Food has substance, while the other double category, in the Buaya mind, does not. Most of the items in the F category, especially fruits, are eaten raw, but they are ripe. Fruits ripen by themselves, and do not need the human intervention of cooking before they can be eaten. The items in the W, M and V categories, and rice, are cooked, and thus form a contrast of their own with F. M, W, V and rice are associated with structure in contrast with F, which is associated with spontaneity. F is freely shared with friends and neighbors, without restrictions, whenever available. The items of the V category are shared with those who feel fraternally close, for consumption in their household meals.

F and W are not part of a meal, and are not viewed as food. Too much intake of either, they say, gives an upset stomach. During ceremonial occasions, the guests move to a specially designated area for their meals. They usually stand, in double lines, facing each other, along a lamesa (from Sp. la mesa), an elevated bamboo structure on which the rice and meat are placed, out of reach of the dogs. It is an ordered affair and the guests are called by identifiable groups, such as their place of origin, to take turns at the table.

Items of the W category are not served at table, but are carried around and served to the guests, between meals, and consumed whenever they may find themselves at the moment outside the area reserved for meals, either squatting or standing somewhere in the house yard, sitting on benches or house porches, or moving about as they choose. It is a rather unrestrained event. The items of consumption, though measured in their reference to structure, are not deemed to have substance or nutritive value.

The consumption of W, like that of F, occurs in an ambiance of freedom. When offered, it can be refused. A meal, on the other hand, can never be refused, except by those whose loyalty cannot be doubted. Even if as many as ten meals were offered to a visitor in as many houses during a single morning, for example, the visitor must go to the houses and sit with the others, and consume at least a mouthful or two. Not to do so is offensive and inexcusable. It means a break of relations.

The guests in ceremonial occasions are there on account of their political ties, either through kinship, or as members of the region, or both, or as strangers during a peace pact celebration or on occasion of a casual visit as for trade. Except for visitors from other regions for a peace pact celebration or whatever other reason, the guests are expected to bring fixed amounts of rice as their contribution. This again has a functional aspect in that a single household could never accumulate enough rice to feed all the guests, who may run into the hundreds, especially in the larger celebrations. Kindred, especially those within the first cousin degree of relationship, bring, when they can afford it, larger amounts of rice and other items such as glutinous rice, coconuts (for the production of oil in which the glutinous-rice cakes are dipped), coffee, sugar, wine, or already prepared rice cakes (W), and on certain occasions, such as funerals, animals (M). All this will be reciprocated when they host celebrations of their own. Here, an element of sentiment (they are Siblings) is present. Sentiment and structure are not exclusive of each other, as we have seen: they are not in contrast.

The structural relationship in which V is the side dish is the household. It is a relationship that is viewed as “natural” when compared to the gatherings that are of a political, i.e., contractual, “made” nature, and in which M is served. Moreover, family life is characterized by sexual constraint between siblings, between parents and children, and between the spouses in the presence, or with the knowledge, of other household members.

The loci of consumption in the household run parallel to those during ceremonials. The household meal is taken in a designated place, near the hearth. The household members sit in a circle around the pots of rice and the side dish, each with their own bowl, traditionally a coconut shell. They must consume their food without leaving their place, except for an emergency. There is an atmosphere of constraint. Young children are allowed to wander around with their bowl, since they do not yet understand this cultural rule of constraint. This behavior is symbolic of the sexual constraint (avoidance) in the household. Furthermore, no over-indulgence is allowed; and obese people are ridiculed. (The Kalinga are known for their leanness, and for being generally taller than the rest of the Cordillerans.) Also, constant desire for meat (from game animals) draws criticism.

Items of the F category are never part of a meal. They can be consumed anytime and anywhere, and individually, for example, sitting on the house porch, or leaning through a window. Items of the V category are therefore consumed in an atmosphere of constraint, while those of the F category are freely availed of. These items, though with their own contrast with the V category, are consumed in a “natural” setting of their own by persons between whom structural relations are either absent, or who find themselves together for reasons other than eventual structural relations. These are lovers on a date, neighbors who share a basket of fruits or invite each other for a cup of coffee, or a household member who picks up a piece of fruit from above the hearth at any time of day or night.

The most valued consumptions, M and W, are served during those occasions that celebrate relationships that are not “natural” but “made.” These occasions recur frequently, at regular intervals. In contrast with the other occasions for consumptions, these are expensive to the point of depleting the celebrants of their disposable wealth, or bringing them into debt. Typical of such ceremonial occasions are wedding feasts and peace pact celebrations, where contracts are established. These and other public celebrations, like periodic peace pact renewals, are political in nature in that they either establish or nurture ties that are neither of a fraternal (Siblings and the household) or friendship (erotic and non-erotic) nature. Political ties are created and maintained through expenditures. They are, in a sense, “bought.”

The W category, whose context of consumption is the ceremonial occasion, needs further comment. Sugar cane wine is of commercial value and is rarely offered outside the context of ceremonial occasions. The cakes, made of glutinous rice and coconut oil, are produced in large quantities at such occasions, and thus acquire a commercial value. The same is true for coffee, a cash crop, and the great quantity of sugar that goes into its preparation. All these items are consumed for their pleasure quality, which they share with the F category. Coconuts, when eaten as fruits, rice cakes and coffee, when prepared in small quantities, belong to the F category, considering their context of consumption. [ . . . ] M and W are cooked a human intervention and are served in a context of contractual relations. They are offered by celebrants to their guests, with whom the feast serves to establish or maintain structural relations of the contractual (“made”) kind.

Regular food exchanges between “close” kin are usually given raw, but subsequently cooked for household consumption. Their cooked state contrasts V, M and W with F, which is ripe. V, M and W, as opposed to F, thus exhibit a structure vs. spontaneity contrast.

M and W (and rice), during ceremonials, have commercial value. They contrast with V and F, which are never traded but freely given away. M and W taste good, are served in measured quantities (except with the noted exceptions during the extreme conditions in funerals and headhunting feasts), and thus straddle the constraint vs. license contrast.

Political ties, either external or internal, are contrived, “made.” In weddings and peace pacts, they are the result of negotiations. They are of a contractual nature and need periodic cultivation. In contrast, the solidarity, loyalty and identification, supported by sexual avoidance, in the household and between Siblings on the one hand, and friendly relations, characterized by spontaneity and unrestrained engagement either in the immediate neighborhood or with unrelated or distantly related individuals, either as same-sex friends or paramours, on the other, are viewed as “natural.” They are not cultivated through expenditures in public celebrations. Household relations are a daily constant, political ties are frequently reinforced, and friendly relations manifest themselves whenever the occasion arises.

While household relations have a political undertone, insofar as they originate from a marriage, which is a political act, the bonding is structure at its strongest. As was said, it is sensed as natural. On the other hand, household members, especially with the arrival of children and the eventual co-habitation of a member of the grand parental generation, develop and maintain a sentimental bond, which is similar to the sentimental bonding between neighbors and personal friends.

This long digression about the four consumption categories, with due recognition of the value of rice as the staple, has enabled us to place the Sibling-Spouse-Paramour triangle of sexual intimacy in a wider context of human relations that basically exhibit the same contrasts: sentiment vs. contract, structure vs. spontaneity, and avoidance vs. sensuality, based on the intersecting oppositions of constraint vs. license and “made” vs. “natural.”

A last item of “consumption” is the betel nut quid. It is a stimulant consisting of a section of a palm nut together with lime and some tobacco (when available), wrapped in a leaf obtained from a vine. The chewing produces a red saliva that is spat out, but the stimulant is absorbed through the mouth’s membranes. The exchange of quids, or their ingredients, was not discussed as a separate category of “consumption,” since it occurs in all six types of social relations. It thus encompasses all of them, and its meaning is specific in each context. It also figures during religious rituals, as an exchange with the spirits, but is not offered to the creator gods, who are otiose. When offered to the ‘unseen’ (agsa maila), it is intended to either placate or ask for help, or both. The betel nut quid is a most condensed symbol.

It should be noted that a single individual can have any or all of these relations. In the secular sphere, foremost are those of marriage and descent. Next comes the bonding in a single household. Then come the Sibling relationships, which are of a fraternal nature, supported by kinship structure. Next, we have relationships between leaders and their dependents. (Leadership is reinforced through ceremonials and legal advice. A poor man, who cannot host large ceremonials, does not qualify for leadership.) Then, relationships with other regions through the peace pact. Lastly, we have friendship, either erotic or non-erotic, which are purely sentimental and anti-structural.

The categories of consumption discussed above are not empirically neat categories. All the items consumed as V in the domestic meals are not vegetables, and not all the items in the F category are raw. What was important was to see how definite categories of consumption accompany specific kinds of human relations. All the V items are exclusively used in household meals, used in ceremonials, and all the items in the F category are tidbits of little value.

Incest is Divine

The Buaya recognize the possibility of opportunism and abuse between Siblings. Fraternal feelings and behavior are not always fully reciprocated, and may be manipulated to the advantage of one party. The same can be said of marital and paramour relations. One example of manipulation in paramour relations may be mentioned here. Men who neither have the courage nor the means to obtain redress for a crime or some other injustice or injury often find satisfaction in ‘fooling’ a kinswoman of the offender. This is not accomplished through rape, for then the actor becomes an offender, but by initiating a love affair with the woman. If the woman is attached (engaged or married) they must both keep it a secret, and he is quite safe; his conquest may be publicly known, however, if she is not attached, and his satisfaction is not a secret. Women obviously, because such a relationship is always somewhat degrading to them, cannot have such motivations, but can be manipulative in their own way.

More important are the behavioral consequences of the institutions themselves. One cannot divest oneself of an unpleasant consanguineal, and marital ties usually break up only on account of major abuse, if at all, because of the grave economic consequences. Paramour relations must be pleasant and gratifying for both partners if they are to last. As previously mentioned, these romantic affairs are usually of short duration and it is fair to say that the danger of being found out, when the liaison is illicit, is not the main reason for their early termination. These romances are generally not longer with unmarried than with married women. Nor must the men generally fear criticism from their wives unless she is, of course, a nagging wife or has become totally neglected. Paramours look for pleasant company beside the sexual gratification it brings. They have to be real lovers toward each other. The fundamental reason for the short duration of these romances is the presence of greed in the absence of a structural base. Their vulnerability to greed is their safeguard against it. In this and the liberation from structural constraint, i.e., the opportunity for spontaneity, lies their attractiveness and value. But still, by the sheer nature of the institution, they can be destructive in important respects. A married woman who engages in an illicit affair is an accomplice in endangering her lover’s life. That danger is very real and traditionally most of the intra-regional killings have been in revenge for adultery with the killer’s kinswoman. On the other hand, a man who initiates a romance with an unmarried woman provides little security for her. He makes her practically ineligible for a future marriage if she becomes pregnant and, by custom, gives only a minimum amount of property (by local standards) to the woman as the future inheritance of the child from its father’s side. Romantic liaisons are an escape from, and revolt against, structural constraint, but nevertheless contain important destructive elements.

As human, man-made institutions, Sibling, Spouse and Paramour reflect human nature. All three categories are at the same time creative and destructive to an extent. Fraternal love brings security and cooperation on account of its structural and sentimental referents, but requires sexual restraint.

When the paramour relationship was described in the section on human intimacy, it was noted that human paramour relations have an ingredient of greed. This was in turn related to man’s ambiguous moral nature. In the preceding section on the broader categories of human relations, structure was again seen as the main basis for, and mainstay of, human relations. Perhaps the emphasis on structure in conjunction with the admitted human moral ambiguity is best understood (together with the Buaya) as a statement that man cannot live without structured relations, that he cannot be really free. Or, at least, he cannot be at his best all the time. This moral weakness makes him unpredictable and postulates the need for external, structural control. He is born into structures (e.g., consanguinity) and creates his own (e.g., marriage and new political relations). He needs a frame or skeleton that carries, and around which he can build, his relationships. He differentiates, sets up divisions and demarcations, so that he may organize and create order.

The present episode introduces us to a fundamental difference between God and Man in their conceptions about social relations, and more specifically about human sexual intimacy. The God advises the reluctant siblings to eat a certain fruit. In other words, by divine standards, incestuous relations are perfect.

The fact that the God permits or rather, advises incestuous union cannot be a mere deus ex machina in the myth. The internal organization of such myths (when well told) is generally so perfect that each event has its significance as a necessary building block. If the adulterous union contains a message, then the incestuous union should also contain its own and preferably in contrast with that exhibited in the former, given the dominant mode of expression (through contrasts) in the myth.

The myth’s silence about incest is not surprising, for it deals with a topic that is unconscious to the narrator: that incest is desirable and advised by the God. This episode (like the rest of the myth) can be understood only if we accept that God and Man have different notions about sexual intimacy. Incestuous relations would be fine and proper if it were not for the fact that man’s moral nature requires the regulation of sexual intimacy (the prototype and favorite symbol of human relations and of man’s relations with the divine in the myth) through the institutions of marriage, incest taboo and paramour liaisons.

The reluctance of the siblings to have sexual relations thus reveals, as strongly as the adulterous union, man’s moral weakness and ambiguity, and introduces the progressive division between humans and between man and his God that we shall witness as the events of the myth take their course. It reveals a most fundamental (and initial) division that between siblings even though sibling unity is paramount in Buaya experience. The sibling relation is the common metaphor for all positive human relations, to the extent that regions that have made peace address each other as siblings.

When the first two people, as well as their son and daughter, initiated sexual intimacy, they acted and viewed each other as spouses; and the unmarried siblings, whose relationship was altered through the intervening marriage of the woman, acted and viewed each other as paramours. The God wanted the categories to collapse through the sexual intercourse of siblings. It would be more accurate to say that he does not recognize the categories which man has put up. The union of siblings should be eminently sexual (like that of paramours) beside its permanency (because of their consanguinity) and devoid of greed. In the God there is unity without division. He is incestuous and knows no greed.

The myth presents adultery as a corollary to the institution of marriage. In temporal sequence, sibling avoidance, marriage and adultery followed each other in that order. Marriage became the intervening event and relationship before sibling avoidance turned into its opposite, paramour (or adulterous) relationship. In the sibling relationship structure is at its strongest, while in the paramour relationship it is at its weakest. Institutionally, the opposition is resolved in marriage while, on another level, the God resolves it in the sexual relationship of siblings. As will be seen in the next episode, the God represents the ultimate, semantic resolution of the sibling/paramour contrast, while at the same time, in psychological terms, being the projection of sexual repression under structural constraint.

We now also understand why the initial adulterous act of which the myth makes mention is not an offense against the God, but purely secular. In Buaya experience, the woman’s husband (together with his kin) is offended (it becomes a sin) only when the act becomes known to him (and his kin). His contractual rights over his wife have been violated by both the third person and his wife. The adulterous pair pays equal damages to the woman’s husband. As a human offense against a human institution marriage adultery falls outside the scope of the God’s interests. He remains unaffected by the ‘sin.’ The sin of adultery the myth talks about is not the sin that brought an end to the initial dream world in which the God created man.

To recapitulate briefly, the first episode of the myth, the creation, yielded three fundamental (ontological and moral) categories: God, Beasts and Man. Man was seen to take a distinct though intermediate position between God and Beasts in that he is at the same time a cultigen, i.e., not self-sufficient or natural, and shares with the God his creativeness and with the Beasts their destructiveness. In the present episode the category Man is further explored and now yields three fundamental social (institutional) categories: Sibling, Spouse and Paramour. One category again, Spouse, takes up a distinct and intermediate position between Sibling and Paramour in that the association between spouses is artificial (now a human artifact) as opposed to the “naturalness” of the relationship between both siblings and paramours, and shares with both a degree of constraint and license respectively. It may be suggested that precisely because marriage is a human creation, only marriages among these three established forms of intimacy are celebrated, i.e., find ceremonial confirmation and emphasis. The others do not need it: common descent can neither be denied nor terminated (within a certain range) and the urge to establish paramour relationships is sufficiently acknowledged by the defenses built around it. (The same can of course be said about political ties vis-a-vis sibling solidarity and friendship.) Common to these three categories is their internal ambivalence of unity and division, which relates to man’s moral ambiguity of generosity mixed with greed and, ultimately, his ontological body-soul duality.

The present episode speaks of human sexuality, but in the process tells us something fundamental about the God. He favors the simplicity of incestuous union. For him, all should be one in accordance with the naturalness of his unity. Siblings should relate sexually. Their structural unity and sentimental bond should not exclude sexuality but instead find its fullest expression in it in the best tradition (to use an idealistic idiom) of romantic love: the woman is told to eat a fruit, a favorite symbol of erotic experience.

What we witness, therefore, is a fundamental (and in diachronic terms, initial) division that divides what is most one, namely siblings. They are divided on the basis of sexual repression and prohibition. The fundamental theme of the myth is the unity/division contrast: within man, between men, and consequently between Man and his God. The main symbol to represent the theme, and, I believe, not in an arbitrary way at all but based on deep and common psychosomatic experience, is sexual intercourse in which male and female, the two fundamental categories in Buaya culture, unite.

Incest is divine. It is not for man. The ethnographic context of the myth informs us that the Buaya recognize (not necessarily always consciously) in amorous relationships a flaw that would adversely affect sibling solidarity. It thus exposes in Man an immoral streak which the Buaya interpret as greed (the standard moral offense is stealing) whose control is best attained by making a virtue of necessity, i.e., make divisions and distances for the sake of creating order. To the Buaya, incest is inhuman and scandalous.

In the two episodes that follow, the moral content of Sibling and Paramour is further explored. Human moral nature is contrasted with the God’s moral nature. The first two episodes have set up the fundamental categories. As the story tells it, the following two episodes will be decisive with respect to man’s welfare the more explicit content of the myth.

There is still a final, interesting structural relation between the first two episodes that is worth pointing out. Each time, the myth speaks of three persons. The second episode identifies two males and one female, but the first episode does not identify the third person. That the man in the second episode goes to the house of the married woman (no doubt with her consent: the offense is adultery, not rape) to commit the sin fits his maleness. Greed (conquest, aggression) was also seen as a “male” characteristic, in contrast with the “female” characteristic of generosity (surrender, abandon). Further considering the symbolism that was postulated as underlying the relationship between the God and the creature who refused its soul, we receive strong hints that the human being was a female. The first two episodes would then to an extent parallel the two that follow, for the main human character in the third episode is a female and in the fourth a male. The woman will again be disappointing and the man offensive.

The act of creation itself seems, therefore to have sexual intercourse as its model. The three first people were made on a flat stone by the river. That flat stone is now partly covered but it is said that it has an oblong concavity “in which two people could lie together,” suggesting the image of a vulva.

3. The Test of Alternatives

Divine Romance and Female Inadequacy

The God has sublime intentions with the first people, and consequently all mankind. He wants to bring the people away from the earth to the sky world where there is eternal bliss. He builds a ‘ladder’ (in fact, a stone tower) that reaches the sky.

The model that underlies the ladder event seems to be coitus interruptus due to female sexual inadequacy. The God lies in a supine position; the towering stone structure is his phallus. Ladders are raised when in use, and later laid down again; house ladders are wider at the upper end than at the base. When the household is absent, they are placed in an inverted position as a sign that no one should enter the door in their absence. The door is locked and should not be forced open. In traditional houses this could easily be done, and is often done by passers-by who want to take a drink of water, but an inverted ladder signifies an explicit prohibition. The possible metaphorical implications are rather obvious.

Talanganay intended to make the trip a success and took the necessary precautions. He placed springs and resting places along the way, thereby making it into a leisurely and pleasant experience. The obstacle of fright was remedied by providing the woman with a blindfold.

But the attempt fails. By the time the God has led the woman, who represents all mankind (she carries her baby on her back), halfway up, she becomes self-conscious and is panic-stricken. The God’s attempt is foiled. His partner is unresponsive and the tower collapses.

The fault lay not with the God. It had not been a rushed affair, as the springs and resting places indicate. The God was patient in bringing her to the top the climax by stages, and had seen to it the best he could (by blindfolding her) that she would forget herself and the world.

Nor was the failure due to a defect of the ladder itself, which was the God’s part. The fault was with the woman, who looked down (and back). By the time the blindfold was accidentally removed, she had not forgotten herself. The white bark cloth is the main symbol by which the sacrificial attitude is expressed during sacrifices, and is in meaning very close to that of the Talanganay representation itself. The God can thus be viewed as enveloping (and embracing) the woman with his own attitude of selflessness and abandon. His supine position further expresses the “female” role of surrender which he invites the woman to share. Self-surrender and the absence of self-consciousness are notions closely related to self-denial. Successful sexual union brings trance and fulfillment. Translated into the belief expressed by the ladder event, self-denial (or trance in the sacrificial sense) brings welfare.

The woman did not reach the state of trance in spite of the blindfold and the distance they had already gone. Her state of mind was still that which was hers at the start of the adventure. She had never left the world, her ordinary existence. Her first reaction, when the blindfold was removed, was to look back. The woman was inhibited. When the blindfold was removed, i.e., when she realized what was going on, she was startled at the distance they had already traveled, and insisted that they return. Upon their arrival on the earth, the tower collapsed. The scattered stones are permanent testimony to this initial failure the inability of man to live up to divine expectations; the deficient human response to divine invitation.

The reluctance of the woman in the ladder episode parallels the initial avoidance between the first two people, with this difference that in one case we deal with intra-generational incest (between siblings) and in the other with the equivalent of inter-generational incest (between the God and the woman).

This latest inference may sound gratuitous, but there is some ground. Beside conveniently filling a logical slot of incestuous relations and extending the contrast between these two sexual unions, I can refer to one narrator who actually believed that the first people were Talanganay’s children. According to that version, the God killed ‘his child’ for the creation of man’s food. This is a second instance of a narrator making awkwardly conscious (rationalizing) an unconscious category and relation in the deeper structure of the myth. The myth evolves on two levels of awareness, the unconscious and the conscious. A slip from the first level to the second, or rationalization (akin to the secondary revision in dreams), on the part of the narrator may produce awkward situations. Only the collection of as many variants as there exist within the same community can protect the analyst from following these narrators in their errors. But seen against the other variants, these “errors” provide important clues for analysis, and a confirmation of what sometimes may appear to be (or run the danger of being) pure speculation.

There is still a second argument to support this interpretation. Human beings create their own children. They reproduce their own kind and the God has no part in human procreation. When the God produced the first people, he did not reproduce his own kind. He made something different from himself but nonetheless performed an act that is analogous to human procreation, and can thus be viewed as a parent. The first people were his artifacts (panday), and shared part of his (moral) nature as much as human artifacts share part of man’s (physical) nature by having a soul. The Buaya do not call Talanganay the father of mankind, just as they do not call inventors the fathers of their inventions. In neither case is there true procreation, but there certainly is a relationship of origin. Human beings, whether their origin is human or divine, are artifacts. The first people stayed with Talanganay in his house, where relations, as far as he is concerned, are incestuous.

The main foundation of the analysis is, of course, the community’s custom. Two contrasts must now be viewed at the same time: that between Sibling and Paramour relations, and that between human and divine notions of these intimate relations. (The contrast of the divine with the third human category, Spouse, would be superfluous since it contains the properties of constraint and license of both along one axis, and is even more human [“made”] than either on account of its contractual component.)

In the preceding episode, the woman of the second generation was sexually fulfilled in human terms: there was pregnancy in the marriage and there was romance outside it. Here, a named woman (the same woman, or perhaps a woman of another generation) is invited to a romance in divine terms. The purpose of the ladder event is not procreation (she already carries a baby on her back), but an orgasmic experience that symbolizes the elevation and transfer (or transport) to a blissful existence: heaven.

Of the three standard forms of human intimacy, only marriage aims at procreation. For that reason, childlessness is a frequent cause for divorce. The Sibling relationship obviously does not aim at procreation, but the paramour relationship needs further comment.

A paramour relationship generally does not have procreation as its aim. One exception occurs when a couple is childless, chooses not to divorce, and the husband, with the wife’s consent, fakes a paramour relationship with a single woman for the sake of creating an offspring that will subsequently be adopted by the married couple as soon as it is weaned. It also happens on rare occasions that a girl who no longer hopes to get married engages in a brief paramour relationship with a man until she is pregnant, for the purpose of having an offspring. In both cases, the paramour relationship is faked, and is not resumed after the child is born. On the contrary, in all cases of adultery by a married woman, she and her husband consider the eventual offspring as their own. All this shows that procreation and paramour relations are two distinct categories. When they overlap, this anomaly is resolved by either terminating the paramour relationship (when the woman is single) or considering the offspring as a legitimate child (when the woman is married). At the time of observation, there were two cases of public paramour relationships between a married man and single woman that were of long duration. Both women were conveniently barren.

Returning now to the myth, the union with the God is intended as pure romance on his part, but is impure from the human point of view and not successful, just as the union between siblings was viewed as impure by the first couples and as pure and desirable by the God. It became pure still according to the Buaya meaning of purity as soon as they began to look at each other as spouses or paramours. On the human level, romance is proper only when there is previous distance; on the divine level, it is the concomitant of an existing unity, either that of siblings or that of ascendants and descendants. (In the Buaya kinship reckoning, no distance is created by intervening generations between ascendants and descendant. For example, a grandfather’s first cousin is as closely related to ego as ego’s first cousin in his own generation.) The woman acts as an ideal “child,” with the same aversion that exists between siblings, while the God acts as an ideal “parent” from his point of view, with full sexual interest.

In contrast to the category Spouse in figure 2, the category God in figure 3 does not obtain its meaning in that it mediates the two others by sharing them in part, but instead by both embracing and transcending them. He stands above contract (marriage) or Spouse by containing the positive contents of the extremist sentimental counterparts, Sibling and Paramour, which Spouse mediates on the human level, and by excluding their negative components. He transcends them through the absence of ambiguity which characterizes both. These ambiguities, avoidance and fickleness, we remember, have their ultimate roots in man’s greed, which is absent in the God. When the woman refused (panicked), the tower collapsed, i.e., the God did not force his attentions upon her. The supine (“female”) position which he as a male took indicated from the beginning that it was not his nature to force his intentions upon his partner.

Human relations are ambiguous, even those that are felt as the most “natural” or the least “made” from the human (or Buaya) point of view, those namely of siblings and paramours as opposed to the mediating and more artificial or contrived relationship of spouses.

The God is both Sibling and Paramour, and is both in an eminent way. He is Sibling-cum-romance and a paramour-cum-endurance, because he transcends the constraint/license contrast by total simplicity. Both the Sibling and Paramour relationships are consequences of division and order. Man, on account of his moral ambiguity, needs the crutches of order. He regulates his moral weakness by creating certain structures (or divisions). The incest taboo is man’s response to the conquest or advantage motive; it safeguards the solidarity of sharing between siblings and other consanguineals. On the other hand, paramour relationships are a response to the neglect and repression of sexual needs in marriage. Marriage is in the first place a political institution, for Buaya is (what we used to call) a kinship-based society. The Buaya community, partly forged through intermarriages, is a political fabric.

Kinship structures (like other structures), however, are not all-encompassing. They have their boundaries and weaker fringes, thus allowing for escape from the structure or license but nonetheless preserving (or creating) a safe area of order that is most rigid at its center (in the present case, as far as ego’s ascendants’ first cousins and ego’s first cousins and their descendants). The chief focus of the myth is man’s sexual temperament, thereby perhaps affirming libido as man’s strongest drive and therefore most in need of regulation and ordering given the premise that kinship is an organizational tool. The human sex drive is further made the metaphor of aggressiveness or destructiveness. It is not devoid of greed, itself the chief metaphor of human moral weakness.

We thus find the incest taboo at the very center of man’s institutional intervention (in Buaya), and its main force, with marriage permissible at the peripheries of kinship solidarity and flirtation beyond it.

Man thus stands in his own way, both by his inherent greed in his relationships and by the limitations he imposes upon himself in the order he creates for the purpose of controlling that greed. His existence remains ambiguous, whether outside (as a paramour) or within the structure (either sibling solidarity or the marriage contract) he has created. It has its limitations in all three alternatives. He cannot consciously accept the liberation the God offers in the myth, but instead dreams about it in the same myth.

Figure 3, shows the individual contrasts between God and Sibling, Sibling and Paramour, and Paramour and God along the respective axes of endurance (continence/incest), society (identification/distance) and romance (surrender/conquest) that have been discussed. The God is solitary and romantic by excellence, since he does not live in a society. He lives in a community with sexual surrender and incest because there is total absence of distance and division, the human prerequisites for society or order. There is no ambiguity in the God’s relationship, but instead simplicity, because of his ontological nature. In him (in contrast with the Beast), there is no greed, only goodness or the ‘female’ quality of self-denial. The divine ‘order’ is pure simplicity. The basic contrast between Man and God (as well as the Beast) is ambiguity vs. simplicity. Man’s cultural constructs are an effort to control and limit the effects of his moral weakness.

The institutions the myth refers to are those that regulate sexual behavior. It is an open question whether this is so because Buaya society is a kinship-based society. As we have seen, the triple category of Buaya sexual intimacy has a wider referent. The myth does not only provide a guide to the analysis of Buaya society, but also speaks about human nature as the Buaya understand it. We may expect that it is conceived with reference to Buaya experience, notably social experience, but ultimately it says what man is. His moral nature is expressed in terms of human sexuality. Both the God and Beasts are sexual symbols, the God of repressed incestual desire and the Beasts of repressed raw sex. Both are projections in pure form that do not belong to this world, and in terms of which man himself is defined. The present episode has concentrated on the God/Man contrast of Sibling behavior, but its discussion inevitably led to the God/Man contrast of Paramour behavior (already shown in Figure 3).

In sum, the woman (Man) views relations with the God as incestuous and resists his sexual advances. The God, on the contrary, views the woman (his “child”) as an ideal romantic partner whose surrender to union (or trance) should result in eternal bliss. Given man’s moral nature and the need for incest taboo, she has no other choice but to resist. The God is disappointed but not offended. The woman’s attitude could still be termed moral in human terms, since it is motivated by self-restraint. Where the present episode deals with sexual avoidance, the following episode will deal with unrestrained sex.

Divine Romance and Male Brutality

Ginipa-an was one of the first people the generation is not certain who still lived with Talanganay in his house. After the ladder event, the people went to live outside the house, and in due time they had become so numerous that they lived in several settlements at short distance from Talanganay’s house. It is at this time that the present episode occurs.

From their settlements, the people visit the divine residence taking turns, but they have to stay outside. They build scaffolds along the wall, and, like so many Romeos (and Romerettes) sealing the castle walls, can from there listen to the God and his household. They can talk to them and there are other exchanges. One man “who was faithful” (as opposed to the one who later acted offensively) was permitted to peep inside. What he saw was the summum of wealth and abundance by Kalinga standards: complete bliss and earthly fulfillment.

The exchanges with the family in the divine residence are across a barrier which the people cannot trespass. Ingress is not permitted. The exchanges occur during the night albeit in the moonlight and are not face to face. Neither enters the other’s house. However, the people still profit greatly from the presence of the Gods, and have an association with them that can still be called close, but is neither complete (or heavenly) nor constant (as in cohabitation). The enjoyment is intermittent and incomplete.

At the beginning of the present episode, there is still human interest (The people build scaffolds), and there is a state of welfare that is far above the general condition of the Buaya at present and apparently not different from that which the people enjoyed from the beginning. Incestuous union would have produced bliss as great as that of the God himself; now, the alternative, a mere paramour relationship (for which a certain amount of distance beyond the incestuous core is necessary) is tested out.

In the preceding episode, Talanganay played the role of the male suitor. The roles are now reversed. The God (together with his entire household, in fact) plays the female role of “catch me.” The music that is played in the house is most attractive.

Although the ladder event revealed something about man’s moral nature and led to a disappointment on the part of the God, he has not broken off communication completely. There are mutual exchanges between the divine household and the people. The people borrow musical instruments, and the members of the divine household borrow the people’s pestles to pound their rice. The musical instruments that are explicitly mentioned, the harp and the flutes, are female sexual symbols, while the pestles are male sexual symbols. The household has its own mortars and pestles, since two of the instruments left behind by it are a mortar and a pestle; yet, they borrow pestles. Actually, it is not unusual for neighbors to borrow each other’s mortars and pestles, even though they have their own. This mutual exchange of instruments thus clearly indicates a romantic relationship. The Gods borrow male and the people female instruments.

The relationship is not permanent but intermittent, as paramour relationships are. They are maintained through occasional visits. The people go and visit the residence, especially during moonlit nights, to hear the music, songs and tales, and to play, sing and tell their own. The God is not inviting the people to marriage but to romance. The God does not marry. Marriage is a human institution which he transcends. The other alternative, incest, in which the relationship is constant and permanent, failed.

In the previous section the God was treated as a direct ascendant of the first people. Intervening generations do not create structural distance. After the incestuous failure, a partial distance between the God and the people (and between the people themselves) has taken territorial form in that they have left his house to set up separate dwellings in villages, and in the divine withdrawal by neither permitting further access to his house nor entering theirs. The distance is analogous to that between paramours, who do not have (or consider) structural relations, do not cohabit, and develop mutual interest from that distance.

The new premise in the shift from sibling to paramour relations together with the reversal of the male and female roles seems to succeed. The divine household goes about its business and the bliss that reigns in the house, as evidenced by the music and witnessed by one man who was permitted to peep inside, forms a constant source of attraction. The situation is similar to the classic setting (in the epic songs) of the well-to-do nubile female whose attractiveness is underlined by her music and song.

By reversing the roles and mode of relationship, the God is apparently willing to give the people a second chance in which the initiative comes from them. It is a new formula whose net result like so many second chances is to make certain what until now was left in doubt. The result will be to make the division between man and his God complete. As a metaphor, the result resembles a romantic relationship whose frustration, now on the part of the female partner, leads to a complete break-up. Where in the preceding episode the woman, Ginipa-an, could not respond to the God’s advances because she viewed them as incestuous and therefore wrong, here we have an amorous relationship that lasts for as long as it remains without flaw.

The present episode is thus not a mere mirror image of the preceding. The initial situation is altered by the results of the ladder event. We start from different premises and the results will also be different. After the first refusal to enter into an incestuous relationship, the present inappropriate response to an invitation to a paramour relationship exhausts all the alternatives.

Subsidiary elements in the contrast between the two episodes are that in the first the woman refused to go up to heaven, while in the second the man is refused entrance to the house; that in the first the woman panicked, while here the God and his household panic; and that in the first the encounter takes place during the day and here at night. The real contrasts, however, is between incest avoidance, represented by female inadequacy in the first episode, and rape represented by male brutality here. The former is less offensive than the latter from the point of view of the God, insofar as the element of greed or the ultimate ground for sibling avoidance is quite remote from the immediate motivation for refusal, though present. The effect of surrender in the first episode would have been total bliss, equal to that of the God himself, while the maintenance of a paramour relationship with him in the second would have meant the continuance of a plane of earthly satisfaction similar to that of the heroes in the epic songs, whose romances and headhunting exploits are the two main themes of the songs, and far above that which is now enjoyed by the Buaya in their contemporary experience.

Where the appropriate word for the God’s perception of the human response in the first event is disappointment, here the word is offense. One man (in contrast with the woman in the earlier episode) breaks the rules of divine romance. He asks for a young vulva (or vagina), so that he may enjoy that rather than the music. Romance does not interest him: he wants raw sex, the kind that is equivalent to rape. His intention represents an instance of male brutality, insofar as it is totally impersonal. He asks for a woman’s vagina, and specifies that it should be one that can bring him full satisfaction.

Buaya men express preference for copulations in which the penis is inserted with some difficulty, thus ensuring a firm fit which, they say, increase erotic stimulation and pleasure for the man. Elsewhere in Kalinga, where little inhibition is evident in public references to sexual matters and where the epic songs are sung by men (unlike in Buaya where they are sung by women), the texts frequently describe copulation and emphasize this desirable feature of the act. A firm and ‘small’ vagina is a compliment, nevertheless, to the woman in the epic songs as well in real life; and it is what the man specifies when he asks for a woman.

The man’s request is met with total consternation in the divine residence. Silence is a reaction of grief on the part of the inoffensive, such as Talanganay. After an embarrassing period of silence, one member of the household speaks and suggests that they leave, but another also speaks and gives, as it were, a suspended sentence. The people should no more go and catch palilong fish within sight of the Gods and put them in their mouths. One version adds that they should be modest when they leave the water, and cover themselves. That the reference in the restriction imposed in this method of fishing pertains to sex is again fairly conscious in the latter version. Not any sex, of course—since the God, as we know by now, is eminently sexual—but what the English idiom calls raw sex.

The request and the subsequent action of the man are equivalent to rape: in the first case, male brutality (or what we usually term rape); and in the second case, female brutality (or female ‘rape’). The theme of the fish’s head in the mouth inverts the image of male brutality, and is isomorphic to a widely known myth in northern Kalinga and elsewhere in the Cordillera about a woman who killed all her consecutive husbands until it was detected that she possessed a vagina dentata that bit off their organs. In Kalinga, a man is not expected to survive when his phallus has been severed. Instead of pleasure, therefore, rape (either male or female) brings pain and eventually death.

The Gods referred to the fish in a mouth as eating “what is uncooked,” i.e., what is raw in the sense that it is not ripe and therefore needs some kind of cooking before it is consumed. Such people, the Gods further comment, might also eat their fellow human beings and the Gods themselves. Their greed knows no boundaries. The only cooking utensil left behind by the Gods when they left was a frying pan, aptly symbolizing a superior alternative (pure romance) to either plain boiling (sibling sexual avoidance) or raw food (raw sex).

The Buaya do not recall that cannibalism was ever practiced; if it had been a legitimate practice, it would contradict the myth. When the Gods therefore make the act of putting raw fish in the mouth equivalent to cannibalism, they refer to extreme greed, identical to that of the Beasts who do ‘eat people’, i.e., a lifestyle totally incompatible with theirs. Only animals eat raw food, notably the undomesticated ones. This brings us back to the first section and Figure 1, where the chief qualities of the God, and Beasts and Man were compared. The God-Man-Beast triangle compares with the fried-boiled-raw triangle. Man’s capacity for such greed makes him morally incompatible with the God. The latter’s character is defenseless against it. Unlike the epic heroes, the God does not retaliate when offended. At the end of the myth, he withdraws never to return again and it is not known where he is now. He is otiose—that is, he has nothing further to do with man.

NOTES

1. The name of that stone implement is bubuntuk, a duplication of the name of the major settlement, Buntuk, nearby, and was also used in blacksmithing before iron hammers were introduced.

2. The term for glans penis is also ‘tongue’(dila).

3. There are also other ways in which the mediums are expected to suffer from (tapilon) their mediumship. They must frequently perform sacrifices for their own welfare, since the liver omens sometimes indicate that the illness will transfer to themselves or their household. The medium will be discussed more fully in the section on mediums and headhunters.

4. The Buaya have a single term, uki, for both vulva and vagina.

5. In Tulgao in southern Kalinga, for unknown reasons, all sacrifices have been reduced to mere skeletons (though of the same structure as those in the north), or ritual activity is being totally ignored (which is most often the case). Where mediums do not ritually intervene, the killing of the animal(s), also exclusively by males, is just the same intended as a sacrificial act.

6. This rationalization that makes Talanganay kill further relates to another important domain of contemporary experience. Some individuals are known (or suspected) to possess ‘poison’. Their motivation to kill is said to be envy. Those who wish to poison other people must first apply the poison to their own child (or sibling or other close relative in the absence of a child) to make the poison effective. It is a perverse action but part of custom.

The poison is obtained from an herb held in the mouth or found in the stomach of a snake that has invited the user in a dream to come and find it on a stone in the river or brook near the settlement. All snakes and their entire bodies are considered to be poisonous and are the prototypes of the dangerous world of the bush. The symbolism that comes with poison inverts to a large extent the situation of creation and sacrifice, but should not detain us here, except to confirm, by inversion, the interpretation that has been proposed.

7. A joke told by Buaya men runs, in brief, as follows:

There was that man who was newly married. After some days of (customary) shyness on either the part of man or woman, there came the night of their first sexual intercourse. All went well, but when he disengaged himself and got up, his wife lay motionless. It frightened him. He jumped out of the house and roused the entire neighborhood. “My wife is dead; my wife is dead! I think I killed her!” They all rushed to the house. The commotion brought the wife to her feet, asking what the excitement was all about. “I thought you were dead, because you did not move,” he said. The neighbors then asked what he had done. After some hesitation he told them that they had intercourse, and that she lay motionless afterwards, making him believe that she had died as a result. (Laughter.)

Buaya women describe female sexual arousal and orgasm as a tingling feeling, and compare it to an electrical current that pervades the entire body. Conception occurs, they say, when intercourse is most pleasant (kaganasanna) , i.e., when orgasm is either achieved or intense. It is then, they say, that the uterus meets the penis, and opens up to suck in the semen.

8. These negative relations between the partners in rape, as well as other aspects of rape are well expressed in the following myth:

Once upon a time a demon (alan) kicked a rock.

A woman was planting yam there in Puyu, across from Kabbilan. That individual (the demon) looked at her as she was stooped all the time while planting yam. [She had her back turned toward him while planting on the mountain slope across from where he stood.]

“I cannot miss hitting that person who is stooped all the time,” said the demon. [Her constantly bent over position makes her an easy and compelling target.]

He threw a bamboo spear at that one who was planting yam in Puyu. But he also kicked the stone [with one foot while throwing the spear], and it was cleft in the middle. The yam planter in Puyu was felled down, for the missile that killed her was a direct hit.

However, after a short while the mosquitoes gathered and were milling around him [pestering him].

One important element in the story is that the demon speared the woman from the back. I see in it the image of animal intercourse. The demons are ‘animals’ (kakayap, Beasts). Animal intercourse may be viewed as being as impersonal as rape. The image of rape also fits because of the fact that the woman dies. She was therefore approached from the back in an aggressive manner, leading to her death. The deep gap created in the rock he used as support while throwing the spear brings up the image of a wound, and more specifically of a raped vagina. The theme of the mosquitos who punish him for his action is very pertinent here. They retaliate by pricking him all over his body.

9. The Buaya are aware that all domesticates have wild counterparts, but quick to point out physical differences. They do not view the domesticates as having originated from the latter. The Tulgaos of southern Kalinga have a story that long ago the animals emerged from the earth at the edge of the village, the wild ones running for the forest, and the domesticates entering the village.

10. Man is viewed as primarily a vegetarian. There are folktales in which overindulgence in meat is punished.

11. The Beasts are not the only supernaturals that are conceived as influencing the Buaya’s life today. Others are chiefly the village guardians, the benevolent characters in the ritual myths, and the helpful spirits that (aside from the Beasts) speak through the mediums during sacrifices notably the ‘dwarfs’ (maman) who carry the offerings to the chiefs of the Beasts and assist the headhunters in the planning and execution of their raids. Their discussion, however, is not immediately relevant to the analysis of the myth. All these and other supernaturals share the qualities of either God or Beast, or of both, to a greater or lesser degree.

12. We now also understand why the God’s creation does not include the natural or uncultivated world.

13. The flood myths of the Ifugao (Coronel 1967,191-194; Lambrecht 1938, 450-551) state explicitly that the only two survivors were siblings, and that the Gods advised them to marry so that humanity may not become extinct. Similarly, a creation myth of the Kankanay, recorded by Vanoverbergh, states that the two first people were siblings, and that they were reluctant to have intercourse. The God told them: “Promise me to copulate, if I can make you laugh.” He could make them laugh and they copulated.

14. The quotation marks in “natural” and “made” express the reference to human institutions here, as different from the earlier, ontological opposition between natural (God and Beasts) and made (Man).