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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

There are Strata on Strata of Culture

page 264

There are Strata on Strata of Culture

(18) It is not merely the combination of cannibalism with chivalrous generosity to an enemy, of coarse licence and polygamy with the romance of love and devotion to woman and strict chastity in married life, of human sacrifice with gentleness to slaves in the same tribe and individual. The burial customs are many and contradictory. In the constitution of society, the patriarchal system and the village communal, the socialistic and the feudal, the oligarchic and the monarchic, stand side by side. Whilst in religion there are combined in the same tribe and locality household worship and a powerful priesthood, open-air rites and a sacred building, imagelessness and fetichism, sorcery and a highly developed philosophic attitude to the gods and the powers of Nature.

(19) It would not be impossible to assign many of these inconsistent customs to the migrations from the north and others to those from the south of Asia; but, as some of them might well belong to both, it would be a task of some difficulty to analyse and classify them. For, as the language seems to indicate even before it left Indonesia, two inflective or Aryan languages have gone to the making of it, and after it reached the islands it encountered a language of most primitive phonology that had Aryan words or elements. Even in the mythology, it would be difficult to apportion its various elements to the northern and the southern routes; though the sun-myths and sun-worship point to the cold north, this tendency belongs to all Aryan mythologies of the temperate and subtropical zones. It is the legends of the spirit world that most definitely point to the northern route; some of their heroes and aristocratic spirits ascend into the circles of heaven, as amongst Aryan peoples of the south, but most go to the under-world, Po, or twilight and darkness. And there are some portions of the mythology page 265that are classifiable: the culture heroes have more affinity to the Northern Aryans; the cosmogony clearly comes from the region of the Vedic religion.