Hainuwele, 'The Coconut Girl', is a figure from the folklore of the island of Seram in the Maluku Islands. While hunting one day on Seram, a man named Ameta found a coconut, something never before seen on Seram. Ameta took it home. That night, a figure appeared in a dream and instructed him to plant the coconut. Ameta did so, and in just a few days the coconut grew into a tall tree and bloomed. Ameta climbed the tree to cut down the coconuts but in the process slashed his finger and the blood dropped onto a blossom. Several days later, Ameta found in the place of this blossom a girl whom he named Hainuwele, meaning Coconut Girl. She grew to maturity with astonishing rapidity. Hainuwele had a remarkable, though rather unpleasant talent: when she "answered the call of nature", she excreted valuable items. Thanks to these, Ameta became very rich.
Hainuwele attended a dance in the village, at which it was traditional for girls to distribute nuts to the men. Hainuwele did so, but when the men asked her, she gave them the valuable things which she could excrete. Each day she gave them something bigger and more valuable: golden earrings, coral, porcelain dishes, knives, copper boxes, and glorious gongs. The people gradually decided that what Hainuwele was doing was sinister, for all distinctions were being eradicated, and they decided to kill her. They declared a dance festival of celebration that was to last for nine nights; in the interminable dances the men circled around the women at the center of the dance ground, Hainuwele amongst them, who handed out gifts. Before the ninth night, the men dug a pit in the center of the dance ground and, singling out Hainuwele, in the course of the dance pushed her further and further inward until with a shout she was pushed right into the pit. The men quickly heaped earth over her, covering her cries with their songs of jubilation, and danced the dirt firmly down.
Ameta, missing Hainuwele, went in search for her. When he found out what had happened, he exhumed her corpse and cut it into pieces which he then re-buried around the village. These pieces grew into the various tuberous plants, giving origin to the principal foods the people of Indonesia have enjoyed ever since. In their harvest festival, the Seram dance nine nights, the men circling around the women, all as described in the myth.
The myth of Hainuwele was introduced to a reading audience by A.E. Jensen, after the Frobenius Institute's 1937–8 expedition to the Maluku Islands. Joseph Campbell first narrated it to an English-speaking audience in The Masks of God : Primitive Mythology. Jensen found versions of the basic pattern of this "Hainuwele Complex," in which a ritual murder and burial originates the tuberous crops on which people lived, spread throughout southeast Asia and elsewhere. He contrasted these myths of the first era of agriculture, using root crops, with those in Asia and beyond that explained the origin of rice as coming from a theft from heaven, a pattern of myth found amongst grain-crop agriculturalists. These delineate two different eras and cultures in the history of agriculture itself. The earliest one transformed hunting-and-gathering societies' totemistic myths such as we find in Australian Aboriginal cultures, in response to the discovery of food cultivation, and centered on "dema" deities (the Seramese termed their deities "dema" beings) arising from the earth, and the later-developing grain-crop cultures centered on a sky-god.[1] He explores the far-reaching culture-historical implications of these and other insights in his Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963).