page 116

The Polynesian Religion mingles all Stages

(9) Wherever we find two or more of these stages intermingled, we may be sure that there has been a crossing of races or tribes with different culture-developments. It is perfectly true that at least two of them co-exist in most peoples that have got beyond the merely savage. But this only means that few or no peoples have ever risen to anything that can be called culture without cross-breeding. Genealogies and all the birth-paraphernalia that belong to an aristocracy encourage the fiction that the conquering or dominant race is pure. No fiction could stand less investigation than this. For the race that is pure never advances. Crossing produces the competitive types that mean progress and ultimate dominance in the struggle for life. We may therefore accept the co-existence of any two or more of these stages of religious thought and feeling as evidence of the intermixture of races or tribes.

(10) Now if there is one feature that distinguishes Polynesian religion more than another, it is its inconsistent, and often contradictory, phases. We have the purely fetichistic stage, not only in the system of tapu, but in the kura or sacred stones, which had the power of communicating divinity to new objects. They were generally only round stones from the beach or the brook. And all over the islands of Polynesia similar stones were worshipped or used as talismans or amulets. The artificial stones sculptured into the form of some living thing, generally the human form, like the kumara gods, belong to a much later stage of religious development. They imply the reactive power of advancing culture, the power to mould that which is worshipped, to represent in material form that which has appealed to the imagination. And it soon leads to a temple or pro-page 117tection for the divine images, an elaborate ceremonial and a priesthood.

(11) The Indo-European peoples who spoke the primitive Aryan tongues on the Euro-Asiatic steppes between the Baltic and the Black and Caspian Seas had not reached this stage of image-making and temple-building, before they scattered to the four quarters. And the Maoris have not only these images, as for example that of Kahukura the rainbow-god set up in the porch of the school of the priests, but they have the imageless, templeless worship of the Aryan nomads. The priests could set up an altar wherever they were, and they generally preferred the open air for their ceremonies and incantations, whilst there were certain gods that could be worshipped only in the open air; their names were not to be spoken, their rites were not to be mentioned except in the forest or in the solitudes of the mountains. This takes us back to the description of the Teutonic worship given by Tacitus in his "Germania": "They think it unfitting the might of celestials to pen the gods within walls or counterfeit them in human likeness. Groves and forests they consecrate." Temples they afterwards had, and images too. But the earlier Teutonic religion was that of the Aryan nomads, open-air and imageless. Even the Vedic religion, when we first meet it in the Punjaub, is more advanced than this; it has elaborate hymns composed by Rishis or seers; its ritual has got beyond the stage of spontaneous worship in the household or the forest. It is developing a priesthood that alone knows how to please the gods with sacrifices and conduct the rites.