The People of Panggau Libau

I am sure, most of us ever heard of Keling, the hero of Panggau Libau, and Kumang, his wife from
Gellong. I am sure too, alot of us have this question popped off our head, who are these people of Panggau-Gellong? Gods huh?
No, they weren’t Gods, but people with special power, above ordinary human like you and me, or I can simply put them this way – Angels.

          Intermediate between humankind and the petara in the sky is a third major category of supernatural, the Orang Panggau. 

          These are the heroes and heroines of the mythic Panggau-Gellong world. Their domain is said to lie between the visible world and the sky. Thus in myth and ritual liturgy, those who journey to visit the gods and goddesses frequently pass through the Panggau-Gellong world to make their way to the homes of the petara. 

          Like the gods, these heroes and heroines possess supernatural powers and are believe to be capable of metamorphosis. Being great mythical heroes, they are credited with exemplary physical ability, beauty, creativity, skills in craftsmanship and other attributes of humankind. 

          They are, for example, the patrons of women weavers and male warriors. Their prowess is the subject of vast oral epic literature among the Iban society. Like the gods and goddesses, the Orang Panggau are beneficent and acts in ways that further human purposes and this makes them the invisible intermediaries. 

          During major Gawai festivals, they represent the gawai sponsor in inviting, welcoming and entertain the gods and goddesses whom the human bards have called down from the sky to bless and participate, unseen, in the ritual work of the Gawai.

 

Adat of Birth

For the Iban, a child’s introduction into ritual life is graduated. Thus ‘Ngetup Garam’ signals the first enlargement of its relational field beyond the bilik. – Anang ngelaban sida ke tuai, sida dulu Ngetup Garam.

          Through ‘Ngetup Garam’ the infant is removed for the first time from the confines of the bilik apartment and is introduced to the basic temporal dimensions of the Iban visible world, to daylight and the orbiting sun, and, at the same time, its presence is made known to the gods into whose care it is placed.

          The principal gods invoked are those responsible for the main constituents of its newly created person: namely, its visible body and its unseen soul. Finally, the journey from the bilik to the tanju’ and back to the bilik is seen by the Iban as a movement between areas of minimal and maximal spiritual danger, and back again, within the longhouse.

          The main rites of birth conclude with the infant’s ritual first bath (Meri Anak Mandi) at the longhouse bathing place. Ritual bathing gives recognition to the child’s social persona within the community, while similarly locating it ritually in a beneficent relation with the spiritual forces believed to be present beyond its threshold. The rite opens at dawn with the preparation of three sets of offerings on the family’s section of the longhouse gallery. When prepared, one set of offerings is carried into the bilik apartment. 

          There it is presented to the family’s guardian spirits (Tua). The other two are carried to the river side where, as part of the bathing ritual, one is presented to the spirits of the water (Antu Ai), the other to the spirits of the forest (Antu Babas).

          As soon as these preparations are completed, the bathing party assembles on the gallery and is formed into a procession. After making a complete circuit of the gallery, its pathway strewn with popped rice, the procession, bearing the child, descends the entry ladder and proceeds in file to the river bathing place accompanied by the music of drums and gongs. At the ‘Penai’ the offerings to the water spirits are cast into the river. The chief ritual officiant then wades into the water. Standing in the river, he pronounces a complex invocation (Sampi) in which he calls on the spirits of the water to form a parallel, unseen procession in the realms beyond the longhouse threshold.

          The spirits are described in his invocation as arriving at the penai’ from both upriver and downriver, from the river’s headwaters, its many branching streams, and from its mouth at the sea. Like human beings, the spirits, although unseen, inhabit ‘this world’ (Dunya tu). The invocation is characteristically structured as a dialogue in which the officiant becomes a number of different characters, both seen and unseen. 

          At first he self-reflexively describes the purpose of the rites and the intent of his own actions. Then, as they assemble, he assumes the identity of the spirits. These include the spirits of turtles, crocodiles and river fish. The spirits, through this dialogue, announce their arrival in processional order. Speaking through the officiant, they describe the magical blessings and charms they have brought to distribute among the bathing party and declare their intention to look after the infant, preserving it particularly from drowning. The guardianship of the river spirits, established at first bathing, is believed to continue throughout an individual’s lifetime. 

          In the poem of lamentation following death, the souls of the dead leave the familiar world of the longhouse by way of its bathing place, travel by river to the Otherworld (Sebayan) and pass the homes of their former spirit-guardians. As they come to each of these homes in turn, they release the spirits from guardianship and bid them farewell. Later, in rituals that involve the souls return from the Otherworld (Sebayan), the souls again pass these homes just before they reach the ‘Penai’ of the living. The spatial imagery thus locates the river spirits within the living world but beyond the boundaries of human society, its outer limits defined in this ritual construction by the ‘Penai’.

          As the infant is bathed, a chicken is sacrificed and its blood is allowed to flow into the river. The final set of offerings is then presented to the spirits of the forest. If the infant is male, these are hung from a spear (Sangkuh), if female, they are hung from a shed-stick (Leletan). Why spears and shed-stick? Spears (Sangkuh) and shed-sticks (Leletan) symbolizing the pre-eminent gender roles of men and women: warfare (Ngayau) for men and weaving (Nenun Pua Kumbu) for women.

          As these offerings are being set out the procession reassembles and, bearing the infant, returns to the longhouse gallery. Here the mother and infant undergo a secondary bathing rite called ‘Betata’, literally ‘to drench’ or ‘sprinkle with water’. The mother and child are seated together on a gong (Tawak), covered by a ritual ‘Pua Kumbu’ cloth, at their family’s section of the upper gallery (ruai atas). Here they are individually touched with water by other longhouse members and the family’s guests from neighbouring communities. ‘Betata’ thus dramatizes the end of the mother’s and child’s confinement and their ritual reintegration into the community.

          In the series of rites that follows birth, beginning with ‘Bekindu’ and ending with ‘Betata’ each rite makes use of a different socially demarcated area of the longhouse and its surroundings. As a result, the series as a whole is constituted as an ordered movement through the longhouse community at large. 

          This movement ritually effects the progressive engagement of the newborn infant in an expanding series of social and ritual relationships — moving outward from the bilik to the longhouse and beyond to the larger river system that encompasses them both — and from confinement within the spiritually secure bilik apartment to location within an all-embracing, but increasingly dangerous cosmological order. 

          Spiritual danger is spatialized and through the ritual organization of the longhouse, this danger is progressively confronted as the infant journeys through the community, becoming in the end a source of efficacy and spiritual protection. Finally, these journeys are always, like the internal ordering of the longhouse itself, bidirectional, returning to the source from which they began. Thus they move from inside to outside the longhouse, to its veranda and river bathing place, then back inside again, first to the bilik, then to the communal gallery; hence, not upriver and downriver but along its opposite, life-symbolizing east–west coordinates.

Iban’s Tradition For New Born Baby – Ngetup Garam Nengkadah Hari

Shortly after birth, as soon as the severed umbilical cord has dropped off, the infant’s confinement is temporarily interrupted and it undergoes a secondary birth, this done outside the bilik, in a brief rite called ‘Ngetup Garam’ literally ‘to taste salt’. – Awaka Masin Baka Garam, Rajin Gawa Enda Kelalah.

During this rite, the infant is carried from the bilik to the open-air veranda. Here it is presented to the sky (Langit) and to the daylight (Hari), the latter epitomizing the visible, ‘seen’ dimensions of bodily reality. It is made to look up into the sky and so ‘take cognizance of the day’ (Nengkadah hari).

At the same time, a small bit of salt is placed in the infant’s mouth to give its body ‘taste’ (Tabar). The elder holding the child then pronounces an invocation presenting the infant to the Gods (Petara) and asking them to take the child into their care.

Reflecting Iban notions of the dichotomous nature of experience — the contrast between waking reality and the dream world of the soul — the principal Gods invoked are:

1. ‘Selampandai’ (Creator God) who, as a blacksmith, forges and shapes the child’s visible body (tuboh) (and later repairs it should it receive physical injury).

2. ‘Ini Inda’ who, as the shaman goddess, is the principal protective deity associated with the soul (Semengat) and with the invisible plant counterpart (Ayu) that represents human life in its mortal aspect.

The Rites of Iban’s Birth

I’ve asked my wife (Dr. Majorie) about the significant of the Iban-after-delivery tradition called ‘Bekindu’ and the part of ‘Penti’ have to do with the medical science. She explained that ‘Bekindu’ meant for warming the mother’s body – which is explainable. But, the part of ‘Penti’ however remain mystic – Unexplainable, through a scope of health sciences.

          According to Iban’s tradition – Following delivery, the mother is subject to a period of heating called ‘bekindu’ (literally ‘to heat’ or ‘warm by a fire’) which traditionally lasted from a month to forty-one days, its duration formerly reckoned by the use of a string tally. During this time the mother heats herself by an open fire kept continuously burning inside the bilik and is treated with ginger (Lia) and other heating agents so that her ‘body is made warm’ (ngangat ka tuboh). 

          At the same time, members of the bilik-family observe a series of ritual restrictions (penti). These have a disjunctive effect, temporarily setting the family apart from the rest of the community whose members are not subject to the same restrictions. Similarly, heating itself places the mother and infant in a ritual status antithetical to other longhouse members.

          For the mother, this status ends when she resumes river bathing at the ‘penai’, a ‘cooling’ act that marks her resumption of normal longhouse life. ‘Heating’ and ‘bathing’ are ritually antithetical categories, and before the mother resumes ordinary river bathing, she is first given a steambath (Betangas) inside a mat enclosure at the tempuan bilik in which she is steamed with an infusion of medicinal leaves meant to induce heavy sweating. ‘Steaming’ in this context can be interpreted as a mediating act between ‘heating’ and ‘bathing’. 

          For the infant, on the other hand, its first bath at the penai’ is made the focus of a longhouse ‘Gawa’ rite. This rite, the most elaborate of the series surrounding birth, gives social and ritual recognition to the infant’s entry into the longhouse community. 

          Following its first bathing, mother and child undergo a secondary bathing rite on the longhouse gallery marking their ritual incorporation. The movement represented is thus from seclusion to incorporation, from heating to cooling.

          What is significant here is that this series of rites is enacted as an ordered movement through the longhouse itself: 

1. beginning in the relative security of the bilik apartment; 
2. moving outward to the open-air veranda, 
3. the zone of the house most removed from the bilik; 
4. then journeying in ritual procession from the gallery to the river bathing-place, at the outer threshold of the longhouse, and back again; 
5. and ending in a rite of incorporation on the communal gallery. 

This movement gives cultural construction to the infant’s entry into the social and cosmological world — an entry signalled, at its beginning and end, by a fundamental ritual polarity: heating and bathing (or cooling). 

          This polarity recurs at other life transitions as well, including death, and is an integral part of the rites that preserve the longhouse as a ritual entity, symbolized especially by its hearths and posts — the one a source of heat, the other of cooling.