Dema Deities

Also Known As: from dema, the Marind-anim word for the beings of the first age; the phrase “dema deity” was coined by the German ethnologist Adolf E. Jensen in the middle of the twentieth century
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Melanesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The dema are the beings of the first age among the Marind-anim of southern New Guinea, ancestors who were at once people, animals and plants and whose deaths and changes left the world its food, its fire and its customs.
Role in Mythos: They are the founders of the clans and the makers of everything the clans depend on, and in Jensen’s wider theory they stand for any primal being whose killing gives a planting people its crops.
Relation to Humans: Every Marind clan traces itself to particular dema and holds their plants and animals as its own, and the great ceremonies brought the dema back in costume before the whole village. They were not prayed to like distant gods, since they were thought to linger close by in certain stones, pools and stretches of ground.

On the flat south coast of New Guinea, where the land is so low that the sea and the swamp trade places with the seasons, there are stones that nobody moves and pools that nobody fishes carelessly. Something is in them. The Marind-anim, whose villages once ran along this shore on both sides of what is now the town of Merauke, had a word for it. The word is dema.

A dema is a being of the first age. In that time, before the world settled, the ancestors of the clans walked the coast and the rivers, and they were not yet one kind of thing. A dema could be a man in the morning and a crocodile by afternoon. One was the first stork, another the first sago palm, another a boy who was also a banana. They travelled, quarrelled, made love, stole from each other and killed each other, and wherever something happened to one of them, something new stayed behind: a plant, an animal, a creek, a custom. Every Marind clan counts itself the child of particular dema and holds their plants and creatures as its own. The whole society was divided into two halves, and each half had its own share of the first beings and their stories.

The stories are often about food, and they are often violent. A boy called Yawi was killed by sorcery, and by the time help came it was too late to do anything but bury him. From his head grew the first coconut palm. Geb is tied to the banana, which first sprouted from his body, and in one telling he escaped his tormentors by climbing into the sky, where he is now the moon. Fire came from a couple of dema who could not be parted in their embrace until another dema shook them, and the flame that burst out scorched the birds standing too close and gave them their colours. A reader looking for a tidy pantheon will not find one. There are hundreds of these beings, and the ones that matter depend on which clan is telling.

The word itself is loose. The Marind used dema for the first ancestors, but also for anything strange or strong beyond the ordinary: an oddly shaped stone, an animal that behaved wrongly, a power in a place. The Swiss ethnographer Paul Wirz, who lived among them in the years around 1920, was the first outsider to set this down at length. The Dutch anthropologist Jan van Baal, who had been a colonial officer at Merauke and later governed the territory, gathered everything known into a book of nearly a thousand pages in 1966 and called it simply Dema. He wrote it with the help of a missionary, Father Jan Verschueren, who had spent decades on the coast.

What those observers saw was that the dema were not gone. On an ordinary day a man might walk past a certain waterhole with his voice lowered because the dema of his wife’s clan was said to be in it. On a great day the dema came back in full view. At the big feasts, dancers stepped out at dusk in costumes that towered over their heads, built of feathers, leaves, shell and painted wood, each one a named being from the first age, while drums thudded and the smell of coconut oil and woodsmoke hung over the beach. In the long initiation called the Mayo, the novices were treated as if newly born and were shown the foods and tools of life one at a time, each with the story of the dema it came from. The Marind were also feared headhunters, and the raids were tied to the same body of story. This is not a gentle religion.

That might have remained a matter for specialists in New Guinea. It did not, because of a German scholar and a girl from another island.

In 1937 and 1938 Adolf Ellegard Jensen, of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, led an expedition to Seram in the Moluccas, some distance west of New Guinea. Among the Wemale people he recorded the tale of Hainuwele. A hunter named Ameta found a coconut caught on the tusk of a boar, planted it, and cut his hand while tapping the tree; his blood fell on a blossom, and a girl grew from it. She could produce precious goods from her own body, and at a great dance that lasted nine nights she handed them out, finer each night. The dancers grew uneasy and then envious. On the last night they pushed her into a pit in the middle of the dance ground and trampled the earth down over her as they circled. Ameta dug up the body, cut it apart and buried the pieces around the village, and from them grew the tubers that people have eaten ever since. A divine woman, Mulua Satene, then set up a gate, and those who passed through it became mortal humans.

Jensen saw the same shape in the Marind stories he knew from Wirz, and he borrowed their word for it. A dema deity, in his sense, is a being of the first time who is killed, and whose death ends that time and gives people their staple plants, their mortality and their way of life. He argued that this was the characteristic belief of peoples who lived by planting roots and fruit trees, as opposed to hunters or grain farmers, and that their rites, from the killing of animals to initiation and even headhunting, were ways of repeating the first killing. He set this out in books of 1948 and 1951, and the second reached English in 1963 as Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Since then the label has been stuck on slain and dismembered beings all over the world, with varying care.

So the term has two lives, and they should be kept apart. For the Marind, dema is their own old word for a great crowd of ancestors, most of whom are never killed for anyone’s dinner. As a type, the dema deity is a theory, and it has been challenged. The historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith pointed out in 1976 that the treasures Hainuwele gives away are Chinese porcelain, metal knives and gongs. Those are trade goods. He read the tale as a people thinking through the arrival of foreign wealth, not as a relic from the dawn of farming. Others have doubted that myths from distant continents can be stacked into one stage of human history at all.

The power of a dema, as the Marind understood it, is the power to begin things. Nothing in their world simply exists; each plant, animal and practice was set going by one of the first beings and still carries something of it. A dema can change its form at will, and its presence in a place can make gardens thrive or bring sickness on the careless. Those who knew the right names and stories could call on that power in magic.

The limits are built into the same idea. The dema can die, and a good many of the stories are about how. The first age is over, and they no longer walk the coast openly. What is left of them is fixed in stones, pools and species, or has to borrow the body of a dancer for a night. They do not rule the world or judge it. They made it by living and dying in it, and then they stayed where they fell.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a dema deity?

A dema deity is a being of the mythic first age whose life, changes or death gave people their food plants, their customs and their mortality. The word dema comes from the Marind-anim people of southern New Guinea. The phrase “dema deity” was coined by the German ethnologist Adolf E. Jensen, who used it for a type of slain primal being found in the myths of root-crop planters.

Where does the word dema come from?

Dema is a word of the Marind-anim, who live on the south coast of New Guinea around Merauke, in what is now Indonesia. They use it for the ancestors of their clans in the first age and also for anything uncanny or unusually powerful. The ethnographer Paul Wirz recorded it around 1920, and Jan van Baal made it the title of his 1966 study of Marind culture.

Who is Hainuwele and why is she called a dema deity?

Hainuwele is a girl in a myth of the Wemale people of Seram who grew from a coconut blossom and gave away precious goods at a nine-night dance. The dancers buried her alive, and the tubers people eat grew from the pieces of her body. Adolf Jensen recorded the tale in 1937 and 1938 and used it as his main example of a dema deity.

Are the dema worshipped as gods?

The dema of the Marind-anim are not gods who rule the world and receive prayer. They are clan ancestors from the first age, believed to linger in particular stones, pools and places. The Marind honoured them by acting out their stories in costume at great feasts and in the Mayo initiation.

Is the dema deity theory still accepted?

Jensen’s theory has been challenged. Jonathan Z. Smith argued in 1976 that the gifts of Hainuwele are foreign trade goods such as porcelain and gongs, so the tale reflects contact with outside wealth and is not a relic of the earliest farming. Other scholars doubt that myths from far-apart peoples can be combined into one stage of history.