The Western Polynesian Paradise differs from the
Eastern

(27) But the predominant idea as to warriors is that they become gods in heaven, still following warlike pursuits. According to Letourneau's Sociology, "Paradise was specially page 144reserved for the great warriors or the conquerors. Men spent their days in perpetual warfare, interrupted only by great banquets, at which they over-gorged themselves with fish and sweet potato." Yet immediately after he tells of an old warrior chief who, when he heard a Wesleyan missionary describe the future life of the Christians, refused to go to such a heaven, and declared he would rather go into the Maori Po or hell, "to enjoy himself there with his old friends upon sweet potatoes." Tawhaki, the New Zealand Baldur, though he goes to the land of the dead, like his Norse kin, ascends at last to Heaven and rules three circles there. So it may be that the Maori warrior, after dying and descending to Po, rises to the delights of perpetual war and cannibalism amongst the deities; for, as the Norse Valhalla is in Asgard, or the abode of the gods, so the Polynesian paradise of warriors is in heaven.

(28) The Tahitian paradise and that of most of the tropical Polynesians differed to some extent from this. It had none of the strenuous, warlike joys of the spirits of Maori chiefs; it was the sensuous paradise of the South Asiatics, song, dance, feasting, unlimited kava, and never-ending amorous pleasures; it was a sublimated version of the life of that notorious society of aristocratic debauchees, the Areois. Priests and the Areois got there without trouble; chiefs and their friends by help of the priests; and a few common souls might, by bribing the priests handsomely, get out of Po into this Oriental heaven.

(29) And, like the Vedic paradise, the Tahitian and the Nukuhivan paradise was away above the earth; in Tahiti up in the air above the high mountains of Raiatea, amongst the Nukuhivans in an island in the clouds; in the Rigvedas it was above the clouds, but it was, like that of the tropical Polynesians, a land of Cockayne, where man was supremely happy, and had every wish, even the most mundane, gratified page 145at once; just as the geese flew ready cooked in the land of Cockayne, the pork ran ready roasted in Rohutu, the Tahitian paradise.