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Originally Posted by Spunjer
interesting topic, lorenz! if you don't mind, here's a little (if not, neat) theory: let's look at a typical Moro Kris. i rhink my diagram can explain it better:
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ron, your laser-guided munition surely hit the target right on the money! thanks for that excellent example.
and i do hope that our malaysian and indonesian brethren in this forum will also comment and contribute any info they may want to share. well, anybody and everybody are most welcome to contribute or comment or question anything in this thread for sure!
ok, in the austronesian cosmos, the underworld is also equated with the waters (rivers, lakes, & seas). that's why aside from land snakes -- crocs, fishes, turtles, crabs, & other sea creatures are also regarded as reps of the underworld.
and closer to home, the mythical visayan sea-serpent, the
bakunawa was surely an underworld deity as far as our forefathers are concerned.
to recap, it should come as no surprise then that austronesian boats would often have serpents or dragons or reptiles in their design motif:
- for the
korakora/karakoa for instance, the carving of a serpent's head would usually be on the boat's prow
- a similar philippine fighting ship of old, the
joangan [pronounced who-WAH-ngan], would also use the serpent for bow design, as can be seen in the illustration below from alcina's monumental 1668 treatise on the visayans
- as can be expected, the tagalogs of luzon in northern philippines did the same thing: in the excerpt below from san buenaventura's excellent 1613 spanish-tagalog dictionary, we can see that the typical
balangai (a big boat of old used throughout the philippines) also used the
naga for the prow's design --
cabeza [spanish for head] is
naga in tagalog, and was defined as the serpent in the bow of a ship (spanish:
'de sierpe en la proa del navio'); and the example of usage,
'nagaan mo ang balangay' [tagalog] also below means, 'put the naga [in the bow or prow] of the balangay [boat]'.
long story short: underworld = serpent = naga => boat motif -- perhaps given the belief that the naga would make the perfect patron saint of sorts for seagoing vessels.
finally going back to ron's example above, in a kris (or keris), the thing in the scabbard where the blade (i.e., the naga) enters is sometimes shaped like a boat ... a mere coincidence? i don't think so!
p.s. - here's where linguistics can come to the rescue. i think in indonesian that part of the scabbard i referred to above is called
warangka. now in the austronesian world, the other local terms for boat are
wangka/ bangka/ wa'a/ va'a. thus perhaps warangka is a cognate of wangka/bangka after all ... hope somebody can check this out.