The Natural Affinity of the Polynesian Mind for a
Vague Philosophy points to Early Aryan India

(11) There is something of the same ambiguity and doubt about the unstoried genealogy of creation, which holds such a large space in the first volume of White's "Ancient History of the Maori." It may have been suggested by page 134the first chapter of Genesis, and may be saturated with the primitive philosophy of that book; for the Maoris had long been Christianised when it was communicated by the various priests, and these priests had doubtless studied the Bible with some care. But, on the other hand, it is to be said that, though the different reciters varied in their versions, the core of them was the same; and again, the deeper Maori mind, as represented in its high priests, had a natural affinity for the metaphysics and cosmogony of the Old Testament, and thus reveals a native vein that would spontaneously produce such crude efforts at the philosophy of existence, and the reappearance of these more esoteric, if not mystical, religious ideas might be due to the abandonment of the later and ranker growth of gods and religious customs before the power of the higher conceptions and teachings of Christianity. The forest of the personal gods, like Tu and Rongo, and countless more, had obscured the older, more philosophical, and less personified ideas of Deity that had tended in the finer minds towards monotheism; but they had not destroyed the seed of the old religious world, and when the conflagration of a new faith swept through the tangled growth, the elder growth sprang up anew, where it seemed to have for ever disappeared.

(12) In the cosmological tablet given at the close of White's first volume, Te Kore, or Nothingness, comes first, followed by Te Po, or Darkness; and sixteen abstractions descend from Po in series, among them Thought, Breath of Life, Space, each a pre-cosmic period stretching from a thousand to unlimited years. Then seems to come the World floating in Space, an idea somewhat advanced for primitive cosmology. Coeval with this there seem to exist the ten heavens, called Rangi, and the ten under-worlds, called Papa, and Rangi and Papa; each seems to marry various mates. Between them come the six great gods of page 135the later Maori worship: Tu, Rongo, Haumia, Tawhiri, Tane and Tangaroa.

(13) This takes the mind back to to the Theogony of Hesiod, many centuries before the Greece of Pericles. We have the same effort at tracing back the genealogy of the later gods to Chaos, or the Void; "from Chaos were born Erebus and black Night; and from Night again sprang forth ther and Day." But the Maori mind was far more mystically imaginative than the early Greek; it indulged in a metaphysics of creation, beside which both the Greek mind and the Hebrew seem practical and prosaic. Take this, from an ancient lament of Turoa:

From germ of light sprang thought, and God's own medium came;
Then bud and bloom; and life in space produced the worlds of night.
'Twas Nothing that begat the Nothing unpossessed,
And Nothing without charm.

Or again, take the mythological chant of Tane's discovery of man:

Night had conceived the seed of night; the heart, the foundation of night,
Had stood forth self-existing even in the gloom.
The shadows screen the faintest gleam of light.
The procreating power, the ecstasy of life first known,
And joy of issuing forth from silence into sound.
Thus the progeny of the Great-extending filled the heavens' expanse.

If these represent the original in any degree, we must acknowledge in the Maori mind a poetical mysticism, a formlessness of real poetic thought that approaches some of our modern poets, and chaos itself. We have to resort to the early Hindoo books to find anything like it in the primitive world. For the Orphic hymns and myths are not early Greek; they are saturated with the mystic philosophy that arose after the first spread of Christianity. In the Vedic hymns, page 136and in the later and more philosophic and mystical Upanishads, there is much of this vague yearning after what evades all early thought. One quotation will be enough, a passage from Muir's prose translation of a Vedic hymn of creation: "There was then neither entity nor nonentity; there was no atmosphere nor sky above." "Death was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or night. That One breathed calmly, self-supported; there was nothing different from or above it. In the beginning darkness existed enveloped in Darkness." "That One which lay void and wrapped in nothingness, was developed by the power of fervour." Or take one from Bhler's translation of the "Laws of Manu": "This universe existed in the shape of Darkness, unperceived, destitute of distinctive marks, unattainable by reasoning, unknowable, wholly immersed, as it were, in deep sleep. Then the divine Self-existent, indiscernible, but making all this, the great elements and the rest, discernible, appeared with irresistible creative power, dispelling the darkness."

(14) But even this is more definite and less mystically imaginative than the products of Maori thought, which seem to revel in the formless. But the chants and hymns are not always on this level any more than the Rig-veda. They are more often dreary columns of the genealogy of the gods, like Hesiod's, only here and there relieved by a gleam of incident or detail of poetry. A fine beginning such as that of the South Island karakia, "The Atua (god) began his chant of creation at Te Po, and sang; Po begat Te Ao (light), who begat Ao-marama (daylight)" degenerates at once into a monotonous record of the wiving and begetting of the gods.

(15) Fragments of a similar abstract cosmology have been reported from the Hervey group, and appear in the Hawaiian and Marquesan hymns. This abstraction is most page 137characteristic of the higher Polynesian mind, and it seems to be agreed on all hands that it is not an evolution from the lower elements of Polynesian religion, as the later Hindoo philosophic religions are to some extent an evolution from the early Aryan worship. It has rather been thrust into the background and obscured by later accretions, the personified phenomena of Nature and the deified ancestors or heroes. That it belonged to the last migration, the migration from South Asia, is manifest; for it is only the priests of the old aristocracy that know it. It is not for the common herd. It is held sacred above the sacred, an inner mystery not to be profaned by communication, or by common rites and common gods.

(16) And there is never any degeneration in this spiritual sphere unless by contact with a lower world. Wherever "gods many" have crept into a faith that had reached the idealising and mystical stage, they come from the presence of a lower race; it needs conversion, and that implies an adaptation of the higher attitude to the lower, and generally an absorption of many of the deities and rites of those that have to be converted. This occurred with the conquering Sanskritic Aryans, that entered the Panjaub with a very elevated primitive creed, and soon developed a still more philosophical version of it. As soon as they began to spread their empire over the valley of the Ganges, they had to take in the local gods of the aborigines, and evolved a hard-and-fast ritual and a rigid priesthood. And the more it spread through India, the more it expanded its pantheon and lowered its creed. This was evidently what occurred in Polynesia. The road to monotheism or pantheism, on which they had entered before the last immigrants left India, had to be abandoned when they took the women of the conquered aboriginals into their households in the islands.