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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Religion is the Greatest Conservator of the Past

Religion is the Greatest Conservator of the Past

(16) Even in religion this stratification is apparent, although the conservatism of this sphere renders the evidence of it more ambiguous. But as a rule it is only obscure traces or relics of cruder stages that are retained in the more advanced. And where there are broad tracts of several stages or phases manifest in a race or people, we may be sure that the civilisation is mixed as well as the race.

(17) Now, amongst primitive peoples, especially amongst most of those that spoke Aryan languages, the earliest sign of religious evolution was the development of a priesthood and priestly domination. The earliest prehistoric stage in which we find those peoples is the patriarchal, in which the father of the family performs all or most of the family rites, and the hearth is the altar; it is especially characteristic of nomadic shepherd races. When the Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans come on the historic scene, there is fast developing amongst them the dominance of a priesthood. For they have evolved the tribe, which throws household worship into the background, and the nation is tending to take its place. Amongst the Polynesians the two stages, the family and the tribal, are intermingled, in the tropical islands the family religion being the most prominent, in New Zealand the tribal. But even in the latter, though there is a great development page 77of the priesthood and its power, it has still a rival in the household; the separate family has many rites it can go through without the assistance of the priest. But the growing importance of the tribe through the almost permanent state of war tended to make the tribal rites and the priest supreme.

(18) But in another form the primitive or patriarchal stage persists more clearly. For the early household religion is based on the worship of ancestors. And in Polynesia, and especially in New Zealand, the preservation of the genealogy is one of the chief functions of the priesthood, and not only of the priesthood, but of all the elders and learned men of the community. They are all able to trace back their ancestry to the gods. Nay, the chiefs at least were able to boast that not only would they join the divine ranks at death, but they were divine already. And as a rule it is on the disappearance of ancestor worship that an elaborate priestly fabric is reared. Yet here we have the two intimately allied.

(19) Another mark of a highly primitive and especially Aryan religion is the absence of temples, or, rather, the performance of the rites in the open air. Though the Polynesian as an islander has no trace of the pastoral about him, and is a careful house-builder, he conducted his worship in the open. The innumerable rites and incantations necessary at every stage and movement in life were performed under the sky, often in the marae or public place; but an altar could be set up anywhere, on a journey or expedition, wherever there was a priest, a victim, and the materials for an oven. And yet in New Zealand at least there was generally in every village a building sacred to the teaching of the genealogies and cosmology, the wharekura; it was, in fact, a school of the priests. Here the youth of priestly or noble family assembled in the winter months, and under strict religious discipline learned the sacred traditions of the tribe and the race, the karakias or incantations, and the rites and ceremonies. It page 78was strictly tapu or forbidden to any but the sacred persons. Here we have the germ, at least, if not the full-grown institution, of a temple, or church, or synagogue, that essentially conflicts with the open-air character of most of the ceremonies. The wharekura belongs to a very advanced religion; the performance of all or most of the rites under the sky belongs to the most primitive stage of religion.

(20) The same contradiction appears in the Maori attitude to images. On one side of their religion the Polynesians seem to have none, and by many travellers and observers are reported to have none. They have no permanent human form in wood or stone that they worship; although the Maoris represent their deified ancestors in the monstrous carved figures on the doorways and walls of their public buildings, these are by no means objects of worship. And yet there is a feature of their religion that is distinctly fetichistic. The priest in his incantations and ceremonies sets up representatives of the gods in mounds of earth or pieces of toi-toi or stones, and to these presents special portions of the cooked food. And in the legends of the Maori immigration we hear of gods being carried in the canoes, some of which, as a lock of hair and the Mokoia stone-god, were preserved till the nineteenth century in their sacred places. And in the tropical islands the primitive totemistic system is manifest in the bird or beast or plant that a household or village adopts as its god and will not eat. Thus alongside an imageless system of worship, that usually belongs to an advanced stage of religion, there stand the evidences of two of the most primitive, if not savage, forms, the fetichistic and the totemistic.

(21) Nay, there was developed elaborately, especially in New Zealand, a religious feature that is essentially fetichistic. This was the famous tapu, that fettered life amongst the Maoris at almost every step in it. It was a plague of sacredness. Whoever was sacred infected everything he touched page 79with consecration to the gods. And whatever had thus the microbe of divinity communicated to it could communicate it to other things and persons, and render them incapable of common use or approach. Not till the priest had removed the divine element by ceremonies and incantations could the thing or person become common or fit for human use or approach again. The only thing that was always common and unclean, and therefore to be kept away from every person or thing that was sacred, was cooked food. The abhorrence of cooked food attributed to the Patupaiarehe or fairies, set beside this, seems to indicate an aboriginal source for the extraordinary strength of this feeling amongst the Polynesians.

(22) There is another curious trait of this legendary people that seems also to point to the primitive religion of aboriginals. It is that they had not the power of karakia or incantation. In other words, there was no priesthood amongst this indigenous population to deal with the tapu and other religious dilemmas of life; there were no sacred formulae or ceremonies, such as only a family or caste set apart for the purpose could remember accurately enough to make efficient, In short, the religion of the aboriginals was evidently in the primitive household or family stage, and had not developed into that use of magic and incantations which especially belongs to the priestly and monarchic concentration of a race or people, and which is especially characteristic of the older Babylonian religion. The life of the Polynesian was saturated with witchcraft and its attendant magic, which, according to their legends, went back right into the times of the gods. And in New Zealand makutu attained to such proportions as to sap and embitter the existence of the Maori. Everything seems to indicate that this dominance of witchcraft and magic came with the conquerors from South Asia, and did not originate with the people whom they subdued in the Pacific.

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(23) Thus in the most conservative of all phases of human culture, the religious, we find evidences of various contradictory stages in Polynesia, the primitive household-worship of the patriarchal stage, and the rise of a powerful priesthood that means advanced political organisation, the templeless worship of early nomads, and the beginnings of the sacred building that concentrates the art and the devotion of the community upon it, the imageless worship of an advanced people, and the totemistic, and even fetichistic methods of an uncultured race. The most striking contrast to this last is the splendid fragment of cosmology that Maori myth begins with, classing it as it does with the most imaginative and abstract mythology of the Aryan peoples. If these violent contradictions be taken along with those in the social customs and the social constitution, we can see that they are not due to development. Development obscures or obliterates most of the superseded stages, retaining only faint traces of them. Nothing but the intermixture of two or more races can explain them.