THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

The story of O'B'mi was told to us as follows:
Many years ago a man bui 1 t a house6 He cut a tree to make
a central pillar. But this toklag could not be lifted by 50
or 70 men, because of the power of the god (deut8) residing in
it. So men gave it millet beer (m) and it became light,
But before that , the woman of the house had a baby on her
back and she bent down to investigate the hole which had been
dug for the tokleg. But as she looked in her false hairpiece
l c h tagcukma) fell in. She reached in to get it out, but
the hole was deep and as she stretched her hand in the baby
also fell off her back into the hole. The men came back with
the toklag and, because it was heavy, dropped it straight into
the hole despite the cries of the woman. From that, the
spirit (cy8r.1) O'd'mi was formed. Everyone has to perform this
a because of the way the cy8g was formed. When building a
house drop a piece of dubho (Bermuda grass, Cynodon dactylon)
and money into the hole, Also tite~Siti (mugwort, Artemesia
vulgaris) and rice, On the day you put on the roof you should
also perform an O'd'ml puJEJ.';.
We were never invited to an O'B'ml although one could well have
taken place on October 18th of the first year of our stay in Tamaphok
when the f ounda t ions of a house the pradhiin p8-c was bu i 1 d ing near the
Tamaphok panc8vat office were nearing completion. Early that morning
one of the young men working on the house, a nephew of the pradh8n 08-c
had come to the pradhiin DB-c's house to collect a large pot of ctlha
which he took up the hill in a m. Later that day I went with the
pradhBn p8-c to the pancByat office. I was asked to wait here while the
pradh8n ~8-c disappeared for about twenty minutes, Later I was called
into a small shed next to the panc6vat office which the workers had been
using to keep their tools in. Here I was seated on a stool and given a
leaf plate of tite (fried chicken feathers mixed with rice) to eat with
a glass of cuha. Assuming this was the result of an olB'mi puJ6, the
blood sacrifice of a small chicken would also appear to have been
involved.