Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

All of them are Unmoral, with a Seed of the — Moral in them to be Developed

All of them are Unmoral, with a Seed of the
Moral in them to be Developed

(24) There is in most of them, too, the evidence of a conquest of aboriginals; wherever there is a precipitation of the rebels against heaven into the lower darkness, it is the gods of the conquered that are dethroned, and have to "reign in hell." Not merely do the Hades-queens, Hinenuitepo, Rohe (the wife of Maui, the culture-leader from the north), and Miru rule in Po, but these masculine rebels against Heaven, Tu and Rongo, dwell there too. There is an elaboration of grades of darkness and abhorrence in the ten zones of hell, as there is of divinity and light in the ten belts of heaven, and this takes the mind back to the nine worlds of the Norse mythology, and the circles of Dante's Inferno and Paradiso. They all doubtless come from some primitive Aryan source, and reveal the efforts of the primitive Aryan mind after a gradation of happiness and misery beyond death, that ultimately leads to the elevation of both hell and heaven into the sphere of morality.

(25) There are a few dim foreshadowings of this final coalescence of ethics and the future life, that is the mark of a high civilisation, even in the Polynesian pantheon. Rehua, who rules the four highest heavens, is the god of love and benevolence. Rangi, in spite of his patronage of war, has benignance in his nature, and is the giver of life and health. Kahuhura, the rainbow-god, watches our voyages, and also confers life and health. Rongomai, Ruatapu and Uenuku were full of goodness to those who were good. On the other hand, Tu and Rongo were evil deities that worked mischief amongst men. Whiro, the god of thieves in Eastern Polynesia, is also responsible for much of the evil in the world. And around Miru, the queen of the lower zones of Po (or Darkness), are gathered many evil gods, some of them ngarara, or reptile or snake, gods, and others makutu or deities of sorcery; it was to her that Rongomai resorted in order to learn the spells of witchcraft. There are the same beginnings in all the Aryan myths of a classification of gods and spirits and worlds beyond death into evil and good.

(26) But in the Polynesian, as in most primitive hells and heavens, the only distinction is between spirits aristocratic and common, warlike and cringing. The lowest circle of Po was Ameto (or Extinction), where all common souls finally vanished out of existence. In fact, there seems to be here the germ of that which, in the Vedic religion, ultimately produced the Buddhist Nirvana, the annihilation to be desired, as the return of the Maori spirit in the form of a moth seems to be a relic of the earlier doctrine of transmigration. But there is much ambiguity as to what becomes of spirits after death; now it seems as if there were never any soul in common men and women, or slaves, at all, and that death meant complete annihilation for them; and yet every animal and every implement and weapon has a soul, and, if the dog is killed or the gourd broken, the soul of it goes with the dead chief. Again, the souls of the common seem to enter Po, and wander on towards extinction; now the souls of chiefs seem to linger about the body, and even long after about the dwellings of their relatives; again, they seem to get into the upper circles of Darkness, and again some of them seem to go into the upper zones of heaven; sometimes the continuance of even the war-like spirit seems to depend on the funeral rites.