68 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Lumabat, and several important episodes turn upon the achieve- 

 ments of himself, and of his brothers and sisters. It was at this 

 time that several people, following the lead of a brother of Lnma- 

 bat's, turned into monkeys, m just as their mythical predecessors 

 had done. A quarrel between Lumabat and a famous sister of his 

 fixed the destiny of man, consigning him at death, not to heaven, 

 but to the country below the earth. It appears that Lumabat in- 

 sisted upon his sister's accompanying him in an attempt that he 

 was about to make to reach heaven; but the girl refused to go, 

 and, after a fight with Lumabat, she sat down on the rice mor- 

 tar ,32 and caused it to sink into the earth. As she disappeared. 

 while sitting on the mortar, she dropped handfuls of rice upon the 

 ground, for a sign that many should go down below the earth, 

 but that none should go up into heaven. This woman came to be 

 known as Mebuyan, a notable character in myth, for it is she who 

 guards the entrance to the One Country of the dead, and it is she 

 wIki determines the age at which each individual shall die. Down 

 there in Grimokudon, she shakes a lemon-tree, and the random fall 

 of green or ripe fruit, like the blind-snipping shears of the Greek 

 fate, Atropos, calls youth or age to the lower world. This element 

 seems very suggestive of Aryan influence, since the tendency of 

 pure Malay myth is to make demons and ghosts responsible for 

 all sickness and death. Shortly after the disappearance of Mebuyan, 

 Lumabat conducted an expedition m having for its object the 

 gaining of an entrance to the country above the sky. A great 

 number of his relatives went with him, but all save Lumabat himself 

 perished in one way or another on the road. He alone succeeded in 

 jumping between the sharp edges of the horizon, as they Hew apart 

 and Locked together in rapid succession, and he alone reached 

 heaven and became a great diwata. 



The exact arrangement of the mythical chronology is somewhat 

 hazy, and it is not clear whether it was before or after Lumabat's 

 apotheosis that the Bagobo began to become acquainted with the 

 cultural arts. The Tuglibung learned to weave hemp into textiles. 

 after she had laced the warp into patterns and colored it with 

 dyes obtained from the root of the sikarig tree, and from the leaves 



131 Cf. ibid., i>. 21. 

 l »* Cf. ibid., p. 20. 



1 " Cf. ibid., ]>i). 21—22. 



