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The Maori Race
Offerings
Offerings.
Mention has been made of offerings presented to deities or during ceremonial rites of different kinds. It may be remarked, generally, that the character of the offerings differed according to the nature of the person to be propitiated or the character of the occasion. Sometimes it appeared as if in offerings to unseen beings, such as deities, only the spiritual part of the sacrifice was accepted, while in offerings to human creatures (themselves representatives of the gods) the actual substance of the sacrifice itself became the property of the person addressed.
In an offering of first fruits to a chief, kumara, birds, fish, taro, etc., were presented, while hymns (waiata whangai ariki) were chanted; these offerings were accepted wholly and in full. Again, food set apart for the gods, “food of propitiation” (kai popoa), was offered to and received by a chief as a sign of his supremacy and because he represented deity. page 219 Even to the gods themselves the most simple of sacrifices was at times presented, such as fern-root, seaweed, grass, etc. One ceremony consisted in making a canoe of bulrushes (typha) and putting stones therein to represent men; also food cooked and uncooked. Then the canoe was set adrift as an offering to the gods of Hawaiki. A calabash of potted birds was the thank-offering for the recovery of a sick person. To the spirit of a deceased chief a dog was sacrificed, and birds before setting out on a war party.
More terrible were some of the sacrifices offered to the gods of a battle-loving race. Libations of blood before a war began and presentation of the scalps, hair, and hearts of enemies in the Whangai-hau ceremony at the return from the fight were usual and common. A war-chief would cut out the heart of his own son, and offer it to the gods as a bribe for victory. To Whiro the head, heart, and liver of a victim would be sacrificed, and a human head was offered to Maru in the Whangai-hau. The fatal sacrifice was not confined to war alone; the opening of a new house, the tattooing of a chief's daughter, solatium to mourners in the House of Mourning, erection of the palisading of a fort, all these and other occasions (alluded to elsewhere) called for offerings of human beings to appease the bloodthirsty ghosts of religion and custom. It seems almost impossible to reconcile the ideas we entertain of the ordinary life of a race like the Maori—simple, cheerful, industrious, affectionate—with such barbarous practices, but the page 220 nature of man is full of anomalies. Human life is freely sacrificed every day in the crowded industrial centres of population for the production of wealth, and the recipients of that wealth are accustomed to spend the proceeds of sacrifice very cheerfully. It may be said to the credit of the Maori that little children were never among the victims offered to their gods—as they are to ours.