The Era of Darkness

The organization of a theology did not stop at the creation of the Sky-father and the Earth-mother and the details connected with them. There was a vague period preceding them, which began with Chaos and Darkness. The literary tools used by the Polynesian mythologists were personification and genealogy. Chaos or Void was personified by Kore (Nothing) and the primeval darkness by Po (Night). In some versions, the prolonged period of darkness was num-page 43bered as the First Night, the Second Night, and so on in sequence to the Tenth Night. In other versions, the Po received qualifying terms, such as Po-tinitini (Myriad Nights), Po-tangotango (Impenetrable Night), and Po-kerekere (Abysmal Night). Darkness was succeeded by various degrees of light from the merest flicker to perceptible light. In the classical Kumu-lipo chant of Hawaii, there are eleven eras of darkness, and the recital of each era ends with the sentence, "It is night." The twelfth era ends the long period of night, and the canto ends with the significant sentence, "It is light." Thus natural phenomena in varying degrees of intensity were personified, placed in an ordered sequence of evolution, and recited as a genealogy. The content and the sequence may vary in different island groups but, in spite of local variations, emendations, and elaborations, we see through them all the groping of the human mind to understand an ordered sequence in nature from the darkness that is dead to the light that is living. We emerge from the bondage of darkness into the light that sets us free.

Besides the antithesis between darkness and light, the concepts of plant and animal growth were dealt with in this early period by the usual techniques of personification and genealogical sequence. Plant growth is set out in some such form as follows:

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The Rootlets.
The Tap Root.
The Trunk.
The Branches.
The Twigs.
The Leaves.

This is not only an enumeration of the parts of a tree, it also conveys the sequence in which these parts came into being.

With regard to human growth, the sequence deals with birth and adds a few personifications to indicate the development of mind wherein man differs from plants.

Impregnation.
Conception.
Labor Pains.
Bursting of [amniotic] fluid.
Desire.
Thought.
Reason.

It is interesting from an evolutionary point of view that plants, fish, birds, insects, and reptiles are given as originating before man. I am not foolish enough to attempt to link this up with the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is capable of a very simple explanation. The Polynesian mythologists and story-tellers used dramatic effect in their recitals, and it page 45was quite natural that they should enumerate plants and animals in a sequence that led up to the climax, man. But, in order to give man a divine origin, the major gods had to be created before him. Hence the periods of darkness and of light culminate in the Sky-father and the Earth-mother, who gave birth to the gods.