Ratovantany

Also Known As: also Ratovoantany, Andriantompo; often glossed “the self-created one,” from Malagasy tany, “earth, land”
Region/Culture: Southern Africa (Madagascar)
Mythos: Malagasy Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A self-made earth deity who shaped the bodies of the first humans and animals out of clay and reclaims every body back into the soil at death.
Role in Mythos: He is the earthly partner of the sky god Zanahary, and the bargain between them divides each person into a soul owed to the sky and a body owed to the ground.
Relation to Humans: Every human body is his handiwork and his eventual property, returned to him through burial. Yet he receives almost no worship, and the living acknowledge him mainly by giving their dead to the earth.

On the bare ground of a world that held nothing yet, rows of small clay figures sat drying in the sun. Men and women, cattle, birds, each one shaped by hand and set out to harden in the heat, and not one of them moved. The maker crouched among them with the particular despair of a craftsman whose work will not come alive. He had pulled himself up out of the soil the way a shoot pushes through a field after rain, self-made, answerable to no one, and he had built this silent crowd out of loneliness. This is Ratovantany, lord of the Malagasy earth, and the oldest stories of Madagascar begin with him and his statues.

High above the island was Zanahary, the sky, who had made the earth in the first place and then left it empty and gone home. When the sky god came down to see what had become of his barren country, he found it no longer barren. Ratovantany’s figures covered the ground, patient and lifeless, waiting for the one thing their maker could not give. Zanahary could give it. He carried breath, the small warm spark the Malagasy call aina, and the deeper thing called fanahy, the soul. He leaned over the clay, and the clay began to breathe.

Then the two of them fell to arguing, the way makers do. Zanahary had given the figures life and meant to carry them up into the sky where he lived. Ratovantany had made them with his own hands from his own ground and would not let them go. Neither would give way. So they struck the bargain that every person in Madagascar has been living and dying inside ever since. The creatures would walk the earth for a while, and when they died, each god would take back only what he had put in. Zanahary would draw the soul upward, to the sky and the sun and the country of the creator. Ratovantany would take the body down into the soil it came from and let it soften back into clay.

That is why the dead of Madagascar are laid in stone tombs rather than given to the sky, and why the body is owed to the ground as a debt instead of merely disposed of. The soul rises to join the razana, the ancestors, who stand nearer to Zanahary and keep watch over the living. The body stays with Ratovantany, and it is his to hold. In the highlands a family will open the tomb again years after a death, lift the dry wrapped remains into the light, wind them in fresh silk and carry them shoulder-high through music and dust in the ceremony of turning the bones, a few last hours of sun before the ancestor goes back down to the earth god who holds the lease on all flesh.

For a god who owns every grave on the island, Ratovantany is oddly hard to picture. The stories that hand him half of creation give him almost no face. They show him rising from the ground like a plant and stooped over his drying figures, and after that they lose interest in his body entirely. Where Zanahary is the sky itself, and in some regions the sun, Ratovantany is only ever the ground beneath a person’s feet, and no teller seems to have felt the need to describe the ground. He is a shape read backward from the work of his hands rather than one anyone drew.

His names carry the old argument in miniature. He is Andriantompo, the lord who is master, and he belongs to a wider Malagasy notion of the tompon-tany, the owner of the land, the first occupant whose prior claim the newcomer must always honour. The tellings do not fully agree on him. Some split the single sky god into a heavenly Zanahary and an earthly one, and let the pair quarrel under one name, so that Ratovantany becomes the earth’s own copy of the creator. Among the Bara and the Betsimisaraka the sky’s part falls to the sun, which gathers the souls of the dead into its fire. What holds steady under all the variation is the shape of the deal, the splitting of a person into a piece that goes up and a piece that stays down.

His power is the plainest kind there is. He made the physical stuff of every living body out of clay, and he takes it back without fail, which puts him among the rare gods whose authority nobody has to enforce because it simply happens. Everything that lives is walking around on loan from him. He shaped the first animals and the first people, and in the broadest tellings he is the fertility of the soil as well, the reason seed becomes plant and plant becomes food, the same generative earth that produced him when he sprouted from it untended.

His limits are written into the same bargain. He can shape a body down to the eyelashes and it will lie there like the statue it is, because the one thing he cannot do is make it breathe. That belongs to the sky. So the earth god is forever the junior partner in his own creation, able to build the vessel and never to fill it. He gets no worship for the trouble. The Malagasy turn toward Zanahary and honour the razana, while Ratovantany, who keeps the other half of every human being, has almost no cult of his own, no temple, no festival, no offerings set out for the lord of the clay. He is thanked, when he is thanked at all, only by the act of burial. A god everyone relies on, and no one addresses.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ratovantany?

Ratovantany is the self-created earth god of Malagasy mythology, also called Andriantompo. He shaped the bodies of the first humans and animals from clay, and in the great creation bargain he reclaims the body after death while the sky god Zanahary takes the soul.

What is the myth of Ratovantany and Zanahary?

After Zanahary made the earth and left it empty, Ratovantany rose from the ground and molded clay figures he could not bring to life. Zanahary breathed life into them, and the two gods agreed that living things would walk the earth for a time, then each god would take back his share at death, the soul to the sky and the body to the earth.

What happens to the body and soul after death in Malagasy belief?

In Malagasy tradition the soul rises to Zanahary and the sky to join the ancestors, while the body returns to Ratovantany and the earth. This is why the dead are buried in stone tombs, and why highland families later exhume and rewrap their ancestors in the ceremony of turning the bones before returning them to the ground.

Is Ratovantany worshipped in Madagascar?

Ratovantany has almost no cult of his own, with no temple, festival, or regular offerings, even though he holds half of every human being. Malagasy religious devotion is directed toward the sky god Zanahary and toward the ancestors, and Ratovantany is acknowledged mainly through the act of burial itself.

What does the name Ratovantany mean?

Ratovantany is tied to the Malagasy word for earth or land and is often glossed as the self-created one. His other name, Andriantompo, means the lord who is master, linking him to the idea of the tompon-tany, the owner of the land whose prior claim must be respected.