Degei

Also Known As: older English spellings Ndengei and Dengei, which write out the Fijian sound of the letters d and g
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Melanesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Degei is the great serpent god of Fiji, coiled in a cave in the Nakauvadra range of Viti Levu, whose turning over shakes the ground and brings thunder and rain.
Role in Mythos: He stands at the head of the Fijian gods as the oldest of them, the sender of the great flood, and the keeper of the mountain that the dead must pass.
Relation to Humans: The people of Rakiraki, below his mountain, fed him through a priest and an attendant who carried his share home from their feasts, though he had few temples and asked for little else. The spirits of the dead walk to his mountain on their way out of the world.

Somewhere under the northern end of the Nakauvadra range, on the big island of Viti Levu, a snake the size of a hillside lies in the dark and does almost nothing. He eats. He answers his priest. Now and then he shifts his weight from one side to the other, and when he does the ground above him shudders, thunder rolls down the valleys toward Rakiraki, and people in the villages look up at the mountain and know who is awake.

This is Degei, written Ndengei by the nineteenth-century visitors who tried to spell what they heard. He is the nearest thing Fiji had to a god over all the others, and he is a strange one to find at the top. The Wesleyan missionary Thomas Williams, who lived in the islands through the 1840s and published what he had learned in 1858, set down the picture his neighbours gave him. Degei feels nothing, they said. He has no anger, no pity and no curiosity. Of all the appetites he has kept exactly one, which is hunger. His body is a serpent’s at the head and for some way down, and then it stops being a body at all and becomes rock, as if the mountain had begun to swallow him or he had begun to become it.

A man called Uto looks after him. When a feast is held in Rakiraki, Uto goes down to it, waits through the dividing of the food, and climbs back up to the cave with whatever has been set aside for the god. It is the daily round of the oldest power in Fiji: a servant on a steep path at dusk with a basket that smells of baked yam and pork. The share was often small. Williams heard a comic song about Uto trudging home with next to nothing, and it tells a good deal about how the cult stood. Degei had few temples. He was honoured mostly in his own district. Elsewhere the gods who mattered were closer to hand, the founding ancestors of each clan, and the great snake was respected, far off and a little neglected.

He was not always so quiet. The best-known story about him begins with a bird named Turukawa, whose call woke him every morning. Two of his grandsons shot it and buried it to hide what they had done. The cave stayed silent at dawn, Degei sent his messenger to search, and on the second search the body was found. The young men would not ask forgiveness. They ran to the hills and took shelter with a clan of carpenters, who built a stockade around them strong enough to hold off the god’s fighting men for three months.

So he sent water. Rain fell until the lowlands went under and the sea climbed the hills, and the rebels sat behind their wall and watched it come. When it reached the fence they called on another god for help. In one telling Rokola, the carpenter god, came across the flood with canoes; in others the people were shown how to build their own, or kept afloat on great fruit rinds and bowls. They picked up who they could. When the water went down, eight survivors stepped out on the island of Beqa, and the chiefs of Beqa long claimed first rank in Fiji on the strength of it. Two whole tribes, the story adds, were drowned entire.

How Degei himself came to be is told in more than one way, and the ways do not agree. In the oldest recorded accounts he is simply there, first and without parents, a way of saying that something has always existed. Retellings printed in the twentieth century give him a creator’s work, hatching the first man and woman from the eggs of a bird. Then there is the version most Fijians learn today. The colonial official Basil Thomson printed it in the 1890s: three chiefs, Lutunasobasoba, Degei and a third, sail from a far western land in a canoe called the Kaunitoni, are wrecked on the coast at Vuda, and Degei leads the survivors east to Rakiraki and the mountain. In that story he begins as a man and ends as the serpent in the cave.

That voyage is not ancient. In 1966 the historian Peter France went looking for it in the early records and could not find it before the late nineteenth century. He traced it to mission schooling, where Fijians had been taught that their ancestors came from Africa, and to a written competition for a history of the people held under colonial rule. The canoe is now part of how the nation speaks about itself, and it is no less loved for being young. But the serpent is older than the ship.

What he can do is what a mountain can do. He shakes the earth. His stirring brings the storms, and with them the rain that swells the yams and hangs fruit on the trees, so that a restless year for Degei is a good year for gardens. He can drown a country when he is crossed. And his home is the first station on the road of the dead: every spirit leaving Fiji must walk to Nakauvadra before it can go on, and some accounts have him question the newcomers there.

His limits are just as plain. He cannot leave. Half of him is stone. He depends on one servant for his dinner and on one district for his worship, and three months of war against a wooden fence got him nowhere until he changed weapons. Even the flood left eight alive. The god at the top of the Fijian world is old, enormous, mostly asleep, and hungry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Degei in Fijian mythology?

Degei is the great serpent god of Fiji and the oldest and highest of the Fijian gods. He lives coiled in a cave in the Nakauvadra range on the island of Viti Levu, above the district of Rakiraki. Older English books spell his name Ndengei.

What does Degei look like?

Degei is an enormous snake. The missionary Thomas Williams, writing in 1858, recorded that only his head and part of his body are serpent and that the rest of him has turned to stone. He lies in his cave and moves only to turn from one side to the other.

Why does Degei cause earthquakes?

Degei causes earthquakes when he turns over in his cave under the Nakauvadra range. The same movement brings thunder and rain. Because the rain feeds the yam gardens and fruit trees, his stirring is linked with good harvests.

What is the story of Degei and the flood?

Degei sent a great flood after two of his grandsons killed Turukawa, the bird that woke him each morning, and refused to ask forgiveness. The grandsons held out in a stockade built by carpenters for three months until the rain rose to the walls. Eight survivors escaped by canoe and landed on the island of Beqa.

Did Degei arrive in Fiji on the Kaunitoni canoe?

A well-known story says Degei sailed to Fiji with the chief Lutunasobasoba in a canoe called the Kaunitoni and led the people to Rakiraki. The historian Peter France showed in 1966 that this story cannot be found before the late nineteenth century and grew out of mission schooling and a written competition. The serpent god in the cave is the older tradition.