Coconuts

While for Americans, the coconut is an exotic treat, it figures heavily in the folklore of many peoples in the Pacific and elsewhere. The Melanesians believed that a breaker of taboos would be driven to madness and would kill himself either by starvation or by flinging himself from a coconut palm. The Maori believed that the coconut sprung from the head of the eel-god Tuna. Tuna was a christ-like figure who had been sacrificed to redeem mankind, and to eat coconut was to partake of divine flesh. Unripe nuts were thought to represent heaven and the underworld. In the New Hebrides, the Malekula funeral rites include eating coconut so that the mourners may communicate with the dead. Hindus sometimes include coconuts as offerings on the anniversary of a death, as a symbol of rebirth.

Coconut palms were also thought shelter souls; the Dyaks of Borneo specifically transferred the souls of their newborns to coconut shells to protect them for the first year of life, and on Fiji a coconut palm is planted at a baby’s birth in the belief that the fate of the child is tied to the tree. The Baujaus of the Philippines use coconut shells to bury the afterbirth. The eastern African tribe Wanika thought that cutting down a coconut palm to be equivalent to murdering a parent.

Samoans believed that a coconut palm grew at the entrance to Pulotu, the World of Spirits. This tree was called the Tree of Leosia of the Watcher. If a spirit struck against it, he had to return to his body. Relatives would rejoice at this return from death, saying, ‘He has come back from the Tree of the Watcher.’

Sri Lankans have two different myths regarding the origin of the coconut. The first says that it sprung from the head of where a court astrologer was buried. The other claims that the coconut originated from where the head of a horrible monster had been buried. The Chinese called the coconut Ye-tsu or Yüe-wang-t’ou, meaning the head of the Prince of Yüe. Legend has it that Prince Lin-yi was fighting with the Prince of Yue, so he sent an assassin. The Prince of Yüe was killed while he was intoxicated by having his head cut off. The head was hung on a tree, and was changed into a coconut with two eyes in its shell. The resemblance of a coconut to a human head meant it was often a sacrificial substitute in the magical rites of many Pacific peoples.