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belonged to the Austronesian language group. Teljeur focused on mythology to show the
relation between South Halmahera and West Papua and he selected different mythological
narratives two variants from South Halmahera and two from Waropen.
In South Halmahera, an important mythological creature is the eel while in Waropen
it is the snake. Teljeur looked at these two mythological creatures. At noon in Foya, when
people were hungry, in between the rocks where people were busy working, an eel emerged
carrying a stick and wearing a headband like a sangaji. Some people wanted to catch it but
some others were shouting and forbade anyone to catch it. Finally they caught the eel and
boiled it. Everyone ate boiled eel but not long after, they all died except a woman who
was three months pregnant. This woman gave birth to a baby boy and brought him up but
when he was grown she was married to him because there was no one else living in that
area. This was incest, a violation of the rules of marriage which was called cuki yaya in the
Ternate language and up to now there has been a soa cuki yaya in Foya who is assumed
to b a descendant of the pregnant woman. Another version of this myth has it that the eel
was out of the river and boiled by the people. All the people who ate the eel died because
they killed each other. Both versions of the myth has it that people died after eating eels
boiled in a cauldron. The first version describes the eels’ emergence out of the rocks as
proper as a sangaji and other version has the eels coming out of the river.
In Waropen, there is a myth about a boiled snake. At one time there was a girl named
Nuawiroki who went with her mother. Because of hot weather, she felt thirsty. Therefore,
she went in search of water to satisfy her thirst. She got water from a container and it
turned out that she drank snake eggs. Nuawiroki became pregnant and gave birth to a
snake which was immediately attacked by her father but Nuawiroki’s mother prevented
him from killing the snake. The snake was placed on a dish and taken care of as it grew up.
Once grown, the snake named Siroei was sitting with its mother on the edge of the forest.
The villagers wanted to kill the snake, but the snake was able to escape. Finally the snake
was caught. The snake was cut into small pieces and then taken to the village. Miraculously
Siroei was alive and followed the group from behind. In one house, the snake was boiled in
the cauldron and then its head was out and singing that it was Siroei using clever rhymes.
By the time people came to look for the origin of the sound, the head of the snake was
back into the cauldron. So as no one was there, the snake’s head came out and sang loudly
again. Finally, Siroei’s meat was eaten by the villagers and after that all the villagers died.
Teljeur (1984: 240) said that the myths about the eel and the snake in the cauldron
appears among ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia. This myth was often

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