Hainuwele

Also Known As: Wemale, usually glossed as Coconut Branch; known in English as the Coconut Girl
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A girl born from a man’s blood on a coconut blossom, she produces precious foreign goods from her own body, and after her murder the buried pieces of that body become the tuber crops of Seram.
Role in Mythos: Her killing at the first great dance is the act that ends the primal age of the Wemale story, bringing food plants, death and the division of humanity into the world.
Relation to Humans: She gives the dancers gifts so rich that they cannot repay them, and they bury her alive for it. From her body come the root crops people still eat, and from her death comes the mortality every person afterwards inherits.

A man is cutting palm blossoms for their sweet sap when the knife slips. A drop of his blood falls on a flower. Nine days later, at the place where it fell, there is a child.

The man is Ameta, and the child is Hainuwele, the Coconut Girl of the Wemale people of Seram, a long, mountainous island in the Maluku group of eastern Indonesia. Her story is one of the strangest origin myths ever written down, and one of the most argued over, and it begins with a pig.

Ameta belonged to the nine families of the first people, who in the Wemale telling had themselves come out of bananas. Out hunting one day, he found a coconut caught on the tusk of a wild boar. That night a figure came to him in a dream and told him to plant it. He did, and within a few days a palm stood where there had been bare ground, and soon it flowered. Climbing it to take the blossoms, he cut his finger. From that drop of blood on a flower came the girl, whom he took home, raised, and named after the branch of the palm.

She grew at the speed of the tree that bore her. Within days she was a young woman. She also had a gift that made Ameta rich. What came out of her body was not waste but valuables: fine plates and dishes, metal goods, things worth a fortune. In the household of a man who had nothing, that is a practical miracle, and Ameta’s fortunes changed overnight.

Then came the Maro dance. For nine nights the people gathered on the dance ground, moving in a great slow spiral, and the girls handed the dancers betel and areca nut, the ordinary gift of hospitality. Hainuwele took her place among them and gave betel too, on the first night. On the second she gave coral. After that her gifts climbed in value, night after night: gold earrings, porcelain dishes, bush-knives, copper boxes, and at last great bronze gongs, heavy and booming, the kind of treasure that changed hands as a bride-price. The dancers took them and grew uneasy. Then they grew envious. Then they made a plan.

On the ninth night they dug a deep pit in the middle of the dance ground. As the spiral of dancers wound closer around the hollow, they pressed Hainuwele toward it and pushed her in, and went on singing while they heaped the cold earth over her. When the dance ended the ground was smooth and the girl was gone.

Ameta knew she had not come home. By divination he found the place, dug her up, and cut her body into pieces. He buried the pieces around the dance ground, and from each one grew a new plant, the tubers and roots that became the staple food of Seram, crops that had never existed before. Her arms he did not bury. He carried them to Mulua Satene, the being who ruled over the first people, who built from them a gate in the shape of a spiral and summoned everyone to pass through it. Those who made it through stayed human, but now they would die, and they were split between two peoples, the Patasiwa and the Patalima, the groups of nine and of five into which the societies of Seram have long divided themselves. Those who failed became animals and spirits. Then Satene left the earth for good, to rule the dead.

The plain fact is that everyone who hears this story in English hears it from one man. The German ethnologist Adolf Ellegard Jensen spent about four months among the Wemale of western Seram in 1937, on an expedition of the Frobenius Institute, and in 1939 he and Hermann Niggemeyer published *Hainuwele*, a collection of 433 myths from western and central Seram. Jensen built a large theory on this one tale. He called beings like Hainuwele dema deities, borrowing a word from the Marind-anim of New Guinea, and argued that a slain divine being whose body becomes the food crops was the founding religious idea of the world’s earliest planting cultures. Joseph Campbell retold the story in *The Masks of God* in 1959, and from there it entered every comparative mythology shelf in English.

The theory has not aged as well as the story. German anthropologists turned against Jensen’s culture-historical reconstructions from the late 1950s onward, and later work rejects the label dema deity for Hainuwele as an imported frame. The goods she produces are telling. Chinese porcelain and bronze gongs were never made on Seram and reached the island only through trade, no earlier than the sixteenth century, so the myth in the form Jensen heard it cannot be a fossil from the dawn of farming. The anthropologist Michael Prager, writing in *L’Homme* in 2005, reads the dance as a reversed headhunting rite and Hainuwele’s treasures as gifts that could never be returned. A people with no way to repay her, in that reading, solved the problem the oldest way there is.

Her power is the power of the coconut palm: fast growth, abundance, and a body that gives everything away. Her weakness is the same thing seen from the other side. A gift that cannot be answered shames whoever takes it, and the girl who made the dancers rich gave them nothing to give back but the earth over her head. Even dead she keeps giving. Every yam dug from Seram’s red soil is, in the story, a piece of her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hainuwele?

Hainuwele is the Coconut Girl of the Wemale people of Seram in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. She was born from a drop of Ameta’s blood that fell on a coconut blossom, and her body produced valuable goods. She was murdered at a sacred dance, and her buried body became the island’s tuber crops.

Why was Hainuwele killed?

Hainuwele was killed because the dancers at the nine-night Maro dance grew jealous of her gifts. Each night she handed out more valuable treasures, from coral and gold earrings to porcelain and bronze gongs. On the ninth night the dancers pushed her into a pit in the middle of the dance ground and buried her alive.

What happened to Hainuwele’s body?

Ameta dug up Hainuwele’s body, cut it into pieces and buried them, and from the pieces grew tubers and root crops that had never existed before. He took her arms to Mulua Satene, who built a spiral gate. Those who passed through it remained human but became mortal, and those who failed became animals and spirits.

Who recorded the Hainuwele myth?

The Hainuwele myth was recorded by the German ethnologist Adolf E. Jensen, who worked among the Wemale of western Seram in 1937 on a Frobenius Institute expedition. He published it in 1939 in Hainuwele, a collection of 433 myths from Seram, written with Hermann Niggemeyer. Joseph Campbell later made the story widely known in English.

What is a dema deity?

Dema deity is the name Adolf Jensen gave to beings like Hainuwele, whose killing in the primal age produces food plants and mortality. Jensen took the word from the Marind-anim of New Guinea. Later anthropologists criticized the concept, and Hainuwele’s gifts of imported Chinese porcelain and gongs show that the myth as recorded is not as ancient as Jensen claimed.