Ata Tana 'Ai - Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. In Sara Tana 'Ai, the phrase Nian Tana hero Wulan (Land, Earth, Sun, Moon) is a synecdoche for the whole of the world and denotes as well the deity of the Ata Tana 'Ai. The universe consists of a division between two major realms: the earth, which is classified symbolically as female, and the firmament, which is classified as male. The terrestrial realm consists of seven levels or layers, whereas the firmament encompasses eight, an idea expressed in ritual language as Nian tana pi pitu // Lero wulan tédang walu (Land and earth of seven levels // Sun and moon of eight layers). In the myth of creation, the earth and firmament were originally connected by a golden umbilicus. In those days there were neither births nor deaths. Because the sun was near the earth, crops could not grow and the ancestors had nothing to eat. An ancestor cut the umbilicus of the earth and sky and the sun then drifted upward and the earth sank downward, cooling the land sufficiently for crops to yield fruit. With the separation, humans began to die and the sexual congress of men and women became necessary to produce new people. The separation is one element of a complex myth that charts the origins of a thorough system of dual symbolic classification by which the Ata Tana 'Ai represent relations of the cosmos and human beings and the constituent groups of society.

In addition to ancestral spirits, the forests are home to antipathetically malicious and dangerous spirits known as nitu noang. Nitu noang are the aboriginal inhabitants of Tana 'Ai who were banished to the forest, diminished by the ancestors who began cutting trees to make gardens. Only powerful ritual specialists know the names of the nitu noang, by which knowledge they can be controlled.

Religious Practitioners. In addition to a source of the domain, each domain includes ritual specialists responsible for the conduct of a number of different ceremonial cycles. Ritual specialists are men who are gifted in ritual language and who possess the recondite knowledge of the proper performance of ritual. They are able to summon ancestral spirits and to negotiate with them for assistance for the living.

Ceremonies. Individuals carry out small rites of sacrifice before entering forests for hunting or gathering. Individual mobo and lepo conduct the "cooling" of new dwellings. Lepo are responsible for burials. Clan branches conduct second-stage mortuary rites. Clans conduct ' lo'é 'unur, the third-stage mortuary rites, and gareng 'lamen, the male initiatory rite of circumcision. Annually ritual specialists of the lepo conduct the rituals of the horticultural cycle in each of the lepo's gardens. At least once a generation, the entire population of a domain gathers under the leadership of the source of the domain and the senior ritualists of the clans to conduct gren mahé, the culminai rituals of the ceremonial system and the only occasion on which the deity is invoked directly by human beings.

Arts. The Ata Tana 'Ai practice no graphic or plastic arts, except for carving and decorating implements used in gren mahé. Houses and ritual sites are unadorned. The principal medium of creative artistic expression is a complex and highly developed ritual language. Ritual language, which employs a recondite lexicon and special grammar, is marked by an aesthetic poiesis by which lines of four words form couplets or quatrains in which each word in one line is paired semantically and in parallel with the word in the same position in the complementary line.

Medicine. Illness and misfortune are the result of individual acts contrary to hadat, the classificatory order encoded in the parallelisms of ritual language, the largely unarticulated organon of tradition, mores, etiquette, and proper relations that guides and legitimates relations of individuals to others, groups to groups, and human beings to the world of nature, ancestors, spirits, and the deity. Acts not in accord with hadat lead to confoundings of categories with consequences detrimental both to human beings and to the world itself. Curing, which is the correction of such acts, is accomplished by a simple rite in which the curer seeks, in ritual language, the "source and origin" of illness in the past acts of the afflicted person. Having detected the cause of illness, the curer prescribes a simple sacrifice to correct the past wrong action, thereby effecting a cure.

Death and Afterlife. The living and their ancestors are bound together in a relationship of mutual dependence and service. The living perform the rituals by which ancestral spirits advance through three stages of the afterlife. Ancestors reciprocate by providing the living community with the power of fertility and animation on which life depends. The spirit of the newly dead, nitu maten, is "hot" and must be "cooled" in ritual. The cooling of the dead takes place in three stages. The first is burial, before which the nitu maten is confused, volatile, and potentially dangerous to the living. Between burial and the second-stage mortuary ritual of likon, the spirit paces the boundary between the house yard and the forest, and, by its presence, guards the members of the house from harm. After likon, the spirit reenters the house. Several years later, the final mortuary rite frees the spirit from its house, whereupon it takes up residence in the forests of the domain as a guna déwa spirit. Guna déwa no longer possess individual identity but can be summoned by their descendants when their assistance is required.