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Anthropology and Religion

Origin of Island Groups

Origin of Island Groups

Before we go further, we must deal with the origin of the island groups that were to form the habitation of man. Land, as personified by the Earth-mother, was a symbol of land in general. The island groups that were subsequently discovered had their own individual origin.

With the concept of an Earth-mother, it would have been easy for the priests to have said that the Earth-mother gave birth to children of her own kind. But the Earth-mother had already been selected as the mother of the gods, and evidently the mythologists at Opoa were averse to mixing the nature of her progeny. In only one island group, Hawaii, did the Earth-mother give birth to islands, and in this group her motherhood of the gods has been somewhat obscured. However, it is one of three versions concerning the origin of the islands. In the west, Samoa and Tonga, the god Tangaroa threw down page 46rocks into the sea and they became islands. These concepts are sporadic and not worthy of deep-sea explorers and discoverers.

The more widely spread theories of the origin of islands are that they simply emerged from the depths of the ocean or were fished up, not by the gods but by the culture hero Maui. These theories are a metaphorical way of stressing the fact that the islands were discovered by man. In the Tahitian song concerning an ancestor named Ru, each of the islands of the leeward group of the Society Islands emerges from the sea to the drumming of the surf as Ru journeys among them. Then the drumming of the surf recedes to other neighboring groups, which emerge in the sequence given by the song. The island of Tahiti was peopled from Ra'iatea, and hence a mythical story was composed to relate that, owing to the breaking of a severe taboo in Ra'iatea, a portion of the island broke off and floated down to its present position as Tahiti. When the Polynesian navigators discovered new islands, they had to work along the surf-beaten outer reef to find some channel through which they could pass to make a landing. The song of Ru thus expresses in poetic language the discovery of islands. Similarly, the fishing up of islands is another literary expression, because the discoverer fished them up out of the unknown where page 47he found them. It is quite in keeping with the Polynesian trend to elaborate stories that details of bait, hook, and line should be added to create a literary composition. The culture hero Maui may have discovered one or more groups originally, but the story became so popular that it was applied to islands that Maui never saw. In the course of centuries, the metaphorical language of ancient legends has come to be accepted literally by later generations of Polynesians.

Another myth applied to some islands is that they were floating about and their position was afterwards fixed by the gods, who attached them to the bottom of the sea. This story was applied to the islands of Aitutaki and Rarotonga in the Cook group. Tahiti was regarded as a fish that swam to its present position from Ra'iatea; its sinews had to be cut to prevent it from moving. Here again we find a literary expression to denote the uncertain location of islands until their locality was fixed by their human discoverers. The calling in of the gods to fix the position was for the purpose of adding further interest by invoking the supernatural.