The Sun and the Shakers, Again: Enga, Ipili, And Somaip Perspectives on the Cult of Ain: Part One (Report‪)‬

In the middle 1940s (1) a cult spread through what would become Enga Province, traveling even into what is now called the Southern Highlands Province just south of Enga Province. Mervyn J. Meggitt called the cult the Cult of Ain and Ain's Cult (Meggitt 1973, 1974a), ethnically neutral terms that l use in this article to refer to the cult in all its variety. Gibbs and Sharp referred to the cult after its place of origin: the Cult or the Movement from Lyeimi for Gibbs (1977) and the Lyeime Movement for Sharp (1990). Local populations had other names for it. Tayato (aka Taro (2)) Enga called it Mara (ibid.: 113) or Mata Katenge (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:383, 2001:301), the Huli called it mara gamu (3) (Frankel 1986:28-29), some Ipili speakers called it mata kamo (Biersack 1995a:25-28, 1996:98-101, 1998a:55-60, 2005:141-48), and the Karinj-speaking Somaip referred to it as Ip Tand (Reithofer 2006:189-214). The recurring vernacular term is mara or mata. (4) Jacka questions the common translation of mata or mara as 'shaking' (2002:212, n. 5). However, several other scholars have translated the word as 'shaking,' and so, it seems, have the cult participants themselves, putting the gloss of 'shaking' beyond reasonable doubt. (5) The most enthused participants shook, went into trance, and/or spoke in tongues, a state that was typically induced by staring at the sun along the shaft of spears. (6) The Cult of Ain was initiated among the Tayato Enga at Lyeimi (aka Lyeime, Lyemi, Ljaima, Lyalyame, Lyalyalaim, Yeimi, and Yeim) (see map). A deceased Tayato Enga man named Ain visited one or more of his four sons in a dream or dreams, urging the innovation of new rituals. The deceased father claimed to have learned these rituals from a tree-climbing kangaroo that had emerged from a pond in the mountainous forest (Meggitt 1974a:20-21). (7) In the 1940s, Engas endured a series of meteorological and epidemiological disasters: from frosts that destroyed sweet potato crops to an outbreak of influenza attributable to the influx of Europeans into the area to an epidemic of dysentery (ibid.: 18) to a disease that killed 'perhaps as many as 20-30% of Enga pigs' from 1943 to the late 1940s (ibid.: 19). There was also 'a marked increase' in anthrax-caused morbidity in the same population from 1943-1945 (ibid.). The new rituals would combat the cumulative effects of these disasters.