Kehi and Palmer - City of Port Phillip

Hamatak halirin 461
covered with a special hand woven textile (tais). 16
We take as an example, the offering and celebration at Lookeu’s sacred
spring in 1992, one week prior to the sacred house celebration and two weeks
prior to the community blessing with holy water to mark the end of the sacred
house celebration or feast. One week before the opening of the sacred house
celebration in Lookeu, West Timor, at least two hundred people, men and
women, young and old, of the Lookeu kingdom in East Timor and West Timor,
gathered together at Lookeu’s most sacred spring called We Uas in Foho Lor
Lookeu, East Timor, for a sacred water ritual and offerings. They were there
for two nights and two days. Thirty pigs and more than one hundred chickens
were killed for the offering and celebrations around the spring, the site of the
first sacred house of Lookeu, and site of the first ancestral graves. The activities
prior to and after the offerings were made included cleaning up the areas
around the sacred spring, storytelling, prayers, singing and dancing, preparation
of meat and other foods for the offerings. After midnight around 3am
when the ‘queen of the stars’ (fitun nain) appeared, the cooked food along with
betel-nut offerings were placed on baskets called hane matan and were offered
to the invisible owners of the sacred spring, the invisible owners of the sacred
land and the ancestors by the lia nain (‘custodian of the words’) coupled with
prayers. Following this the food and meat as well as the people were sprinkled
with holy water (we lulik). Water was taken by the lia nain from the surface of
the sacred spring and put into two bamboo cylinders (au bonun) and covered
with woven cloth (tais), and placed on the altar made from stone at the head
of the spring. This rite is called ‘taking the top of sacred water’ (kuru we fohon).
Before the water was taken from the spring a poetic prayer was chanted by
the lia nain in which matak malirin is repeatedly asked for. 17 The following day
the sacred water in the two bamboo cylinders were carried by two young and
strong men dressed in sacred heirloom ornaments to the spring called We
Onu (we = water, onu = plants that look like small bamboo which grow only in
swamps) near the site of the current sacred house of Lookeu in West Timor. The
bamboo cylinders filled with sacred water were then placed at the small altar
made of rocks at the head of the spring next to two wooden statues of male and
female deities (ai tos). Several people stayed there to guard the water until the
last night of the sacred house celebration. A week later the celebration at the
sacred house of Lookeu started. All people from the kingdom of Lookeu who
live anywhere within or outside the territory of the kingdom came to the sacred
house bringing with them pigs, buffalos, cattle, rice, betel nuts, cloth, drums,
16 Likewise the Balinese Agama Tirtha or ‘Religion of Water’ centres on the acquisition and dispersal
of sacred water carried in sacred bamboo cylinders (known as sujung).
17 Vroklage 1953a:521-5. Vroklage recorded a rite ‘hamulak ba oras kuru we fohon’ from Lassiolat
which is very similar to that of Lookeu and other Koba Lima kingdoms.