BOOKS.
MYTHS AND SONGS FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC.* Tins is an interesting book, and though unsatisfactory in some important respects, it may be regarded as a valuable addition to the literature which treats of the South Sea Islands. The "myths" are clearly and skilfully narrated. The translations are spirited, and look like faithful work. Those who read for amusement, or to know what the traditions and poetical fancies of the Polynesians are like, will find in both much curious matter, set forth in a form by no means repellent. Mr. Gill, however, came before the world heralded by Mr. Max Muller, and his book was offered as throw- ing some light on the growth of mythologies and of religions. For this purpose, it is much less valuable than it ought to have been— than it would have been, bad the author taken the trouble of explaining to us matters about which, as it would seem, he must have been informed. There is an indistinctness of statement, an insufficiency of statement, which at some points is very puzzling. There are surprising omissions. A list of those of the gods of Mangaia, which were included in the Island pantheon, with seine Myths and Song$ from the South l'acifle, fly the Me. W. W. C4111, B.A. With a Prorttoo by P. Max Milner, KA. London : limy S. Ring and Co. account of the forms under which they were worshipped, and mention of the tribes which specially worshipped each, might have been looked for in a work like Mr. Gill's ; but information of this kind is given only for a few cases, and then not quite distinctly. Of the gods not admitted to the pantheon we are told scarcely anything, and of the relations between their worship and that of the national gods we are told nothing at all. On many other matters we get only a hint, casually dropped, where fall infor- mation would have been most instructive. The result is that we receive but a vague impression of what was the religious condition of the Mangaians, and are not much helped towards judging of the steps by which it was arrived at. The "myths" which Mr. Gill has collected, some of which he describes as being esoteric teaching of the Mangaian priests, though they indicate a considerable activity of speculation, throw scarcely any light on the actual growth of Mangaian faiths, They are, for the most part, " origins," such as of late have been produced by the dozen by some enterprising philosophers among ourselves. The most interesting of them are local modifications of traditions, pre- viously recorded, which, in one shape or another, have been cur- rent throughout Polynesia and New Zealand. In Mangaia, society and religion were alike in a curious phase when European influences put a stop to their independent de- velopment. It is probable that the first colonists CM° (as Mr. Gill suggests) from Hawaii, five or six centuries ago. Their repre- sentatives in later times deduced their descent from the three sons of Tavaki, the daughter of their god, Rongo,—sons who, as one of the songs which Mr. Gill has translated says, had "710 father," —that is, whose fathers were unknown ; and who were on this account, as Mr. Gill seems to think, sometimes said to have been sons as well as grandsons of Rongo, illegitimate children being still commonly spoken of as children of the gods. There were a good many bodies of subsequent settlers, some of which came by choice, while others were driven by acci- dent ; a band of worshippers of the god Tane—probably from Rarotonga—and a band of Tongaus, worshippers of ' the lizard god, Tonga-iti, being among the earliest., The original colonists seem to have had to go to the Tune connection for their priests; and through the priestly influence they were led to conjoin with the worship of Rongo (a god who lived in the shades) the worship of Motoro—said to have been the son of a Rarotongan chief " who had grown up under the sacred shade of the Mumma leaves "—a god who lived in daylight, and entered into and inspired the priests who carried on his worship. The original colonists established their supremacy over all later comers ; and their priestly tribe, first as priests of Motoro, and afterwards by superior prowess, bad control over them, and were, in fact, the lords of the island. For long this tribe conjoined the worship of 'Pane with their functions as priests of Motoro, but a memorable incident, the slaughter of a famous chief named Tittle by one of their number—so the story runs—led to their substituting Tiaio for Tune, worshipping him under the forms of the shark and the eel.
When the island became known to Europeans, and probably long before, its tribes, in time of peace, formed a rude kind of commonwealth. There was a chief whose superiority all other chiefs acknowledged, who was the lord or temporal ruler of the island. At the close of a period of war he was appointed by the tribes who had been victorious in the war, and he held office till war broke out again. At each proclamation of peace there was a resettlement of the land of the island, made by agreement between the victors. A human sacrifice, offered to Rouge, was needed for the inauguration of peace, and portions of the victim's body were the title-deeds by which the chiefs or clans held their lands till war again threw everything into con- fusion. The lot of the vanquished was hard, for they became the serfs of the victors, but in many cases the servile condition was ameliorated through the influence of relationships subsisting between the serf and persons belonging to the victorious tribes, Such re- lationships seem to have been common. There was no bar to marriage between persons of the stronger clans and persons of the weaker, and husband and wife were frequently--and we are dis- posed to think habitually—of different tribes and worshippers of different gods. Then children of the same parents might be of different tribes, for it was matter of arrangement between the parents whether a child should be of the father's tribe and worship or of the mother's. The father's tribe and worship, however, were preferred. A child was, immediately after birth, dedicated to the god of the tribe to which be was to belong, and a momentous consequence often depended upon whether he was affiliated to the father's tribe or to the mother's. One or other of the two might be among the weaker tribes, whose deities, called in consequence
" dead gods," could not protect their votaries from being sacrificed to Rongo or Motoro. Mr. Gill says that this consideration was not allowed much weight. It raised something like a point of honour, and possibly Mangaian parents cared more for their gods than for their children. Ile tells us of a friend of his who had a narrow escape from growing up devoted to the altar, his mother having importuned from his father a promise that lie should be dedicated to her family god, the lizard-god, Teipe—a promiao which the father at the last moment broke ; and he says that a father would stoically pronounce the name of his own god over his son, though by doing so he might be ensuring Lim a bloody death, and possibly the lot of being out up into title-deeds. The system of dedicating children shows not merely that worship and tribal connection went together, but that worship rather than blood had become the tribal bond ; and it also exhibits a very curious phase of the transition from kinship through females to kinship through males. The approximation to the latter was closer than it is in those African cases in which (the fact suggesting what used to happen in marriages between Protestants and Roman Catholics) sons belong to the tribe and worship of the father, and daughters to the tribe and worship of the mother, It resulted from the latitude of dedication and the practice of intermarriage between the tribes that persons of different kinships or tribal connections were much mixed together in the Mangaian population ; and this led to a remarkable arrangement, which had for its object to verify and proclaim the tribal connections of young people,—to show who were liable to be sacrificed, and who owed duties to each other as being worshippers of the same god. This was a process gone through at convenient times, at the marae, or place of worship of each tribal god. The proper children or young people were there solemnly named by the Ring of Mangaia, as being worshippers of the god. The King, was a spiritual potentate. He could take no part in war. his person was sacred. His office was hereditary. It was that of priest of Rongo, and it made him literally all-powerful, because it made him the mouth-piece of the greatest of Mangaian gods. He was also a sort of high-priest of all the gods, and the rude pantheon which contained the images of the national deities was in his keeping.
It was of the greater gods only that images were made, and thirteen—all, it may safely be assumed, tribal gods—were repre- sented in the national temple. We are told that some of the idols were in the human form, but the great Mangaian god of war, the dread Itongo, " the Resounder," was represented in the pantheon by a trumpet-shell. The minor deities, according to Mr. Gill, were countless, " each individual possessing several ;" but, as has already been said, we are not informed how the wor- ship of the secondary divinities was related to that of the tribal god. Mr. Gill mentions, however, that " birds, fish, reptiles, and insects ; inanimate objects, such as the triton-shell, particular trees, civet, sand-stone, bits of basalt," were objects of worship ; and that the " to anua tuaranga," or " heavenly family "—a descrip- tion comprehending all divinities—included "rats, lizards, beetles, eels, and sharks, and several kinds of birds." Birds, he says, were ever regarded as the special messengers of the gods, "each tribe having its own feathered guardians." Whether the animals regarded as sacred were eaten by their votaries, or those over whom they watched, does not appear ; but of the capture of an enormous eel Mr. Gill tells us that it would have been in heathen times regarded as a visit of Tiaio, and that the fish would have been allowed to return to the rocks. Tiaioshark and eel— and Tongaiti, the lizard, were among the national gods ; and it may be inferred that a worship of animals, of plants, of natural objects, preceded the later religion, which speculation and inter- tribal connection between them originated. Speculation super- imposed anthropomorphic conceptions upon the earlier worship, so that where it was not made absolutely subordinate to the worship of men-gods, its character was radically changed, the animal, plant, or natural object worshipped coming to be re- garded as the shrine or incarnation of the real deity. It worked out, too, a cosmogony which, while accounting for man and animals and the appearances of nature, accounted also for the gods of actual worship, uniting the older of them—though known to be the gods of distinct tribes, long at war with each other— in the bond of a common brotherhood.
For the Mangaians there was, to start from, a large basis of cosmic speculation common to all the peoples of their race, and this they modified, adapted, and in. their own way developed. An immense hollow cocoa-nut, with a thick stem tapering to a point, was their conception of the universe. The point of the tapering stem was
a, spirit, the Root (!f. all Existence ; above that was another spirit, Breathing, or Lift ; higher still was a third spirit, the Long-lived;
and upon those formless beings the permanence and welfare of the universe were believed to be dependent. Within the cocoa-nut, and at the lowest part, resided an old woman, Vari-me-takere, or The very Beginning, from whom all gods and men were said to derive their being. A piece which she plucked out of her right side became Vatea, a being, half-man, half-porpoise, from whom gods and men descended. Successive pieces torn from her left side became Tinirau, half-man, half-sprat, the lord of fishes ; Tango, or support, the lord of the land of red-parrot feathers ; Echo, whose home was in the hollow of the grey rocks ; and Ra,ka, who presided over the winds ; while a second piece taken from her right' side became a daughter, who was called Tu-metua, or Stick by the parent, because she never quitted her mother. Vatea managed to find a wife in Papa, or Foundation—daughter of Nothing-more and his wife Soft-bodied—and his children were the twins Tangaroa and Rongo, both having human forms (but Rongo was also the trumpet-shell) ; Tonga-iti, "whose visible form were the white and black-spotted lizards ;" (about whom nothing is told us) ; and Tane, commonly called Tame, piler-up of food. All these were gods of Mangaia, but the worship of Tangaroa has been practically extinct for ages, if it ever was thoroughly established in the island. The others were among the national gods, and three of them—Rongo, Tonga-iti, and Tane —were the tribal gods of the most powerful bands which early settled in Mangaia. The first settlers, as has been said, de- duced their origin from Tevaki, the daughter of their god Rongo, who became the mother of three sons, who had " no father."
Three minor Tames came to be, as tribal gods, admissible into the national temple. The legend of Motoro has already been noticed. His brothers, Ruanuku and Tereketi, were also among the national gods. Of the worship of these three all that can be confidently said is that it came from Rarotonga, which sup- plied to Mangaia yet another deity in Tekuraki,—a god who was popular so long as the " red-marked tribe," his worshippers, were powerful, but who latterly was little regarded. That Tiaio should rank among the national gods followed from his having been adopted into the worship of the powerful priestly tribe. All the national gods received from all a certain amount of acknowledge- ment, the amount depending upon the potency attributed to each, and that, no doubt, depending upon the fighting-power of the worshippers of each. The three oldest tribes and the king always worshipped both Rongo and Motoro.
A legend current among the worshippers of Tonga-iti, meant to explain the existence of the Sun and Moon, represented that god as not the son, but the contemporary of Vatea, and as dis- puting with him which of the two was the father of Papa's first child ; and from this, we think, may be understood the position of Yates in the Mangaian theogony. He and his brother Tinirau —the porpoise and the sprat—may have been among the old gods of Polynesian worship ; but as regards the Mangaians, he seems to have been, like his mother, VaH, and his wife, Papa, an hypo- thesis to account for the existence of gods and men. Neither Vatea nor Vari received any separate worship in the island, nor does either appear at any time to have received it. The name of Vatea's wife was Foundation, and that of her father, Nothing- more, and these names and the fact that Papa had a father seem to show that the legend in which those two occur must belong to a later and more metaphysical period than the legend of Tevaki, Rongo's daughter. The fact that Papa bad a father, while the sons of Tevaki had none, is noticed with some appearance of astonish- ment in one of the native songs.
As has already been said, the traditions which Mr. Gill has arranged as myths in various classes seem, with a few exceptions, to be what are called myths of creation—that is, they are in- tended to account for the appearances of nature ; the exceptions being either mere poetical inventions, or legends designed for the glorification of certain of the gods,—e.g., the shark, the eel, the lizard. Regarded as parts of a cosmogony, they appear absurd enough, but perhaps they are not more absurd really than such comparatively modern conceptions as that nature abhors a vacuum, or that a heavenly body owes it to itself to move in a perfect orbit. Mr. Gill has made at least one attempt to get a nature-myth out of a Mangaian legend. The end of the dispute (already referred to) between Yates and Tonga-iti as to the paternity of Papa's first child was that the child was cut in two. The legend states that Vatea, rolling his half of the child into a ball, tossed it into the heavens, and that there it still shines as the sun ; and that Tonga-iti, a day or two after, following his example, while the sun was absent, his half of the child became the moon, the paleness of the moon being attributed to the draining-out of the blood and the setting-in of decomposition. "The origin of this myth," says Mr. Gill, "seems to be this :— Day (Vatea) and night alternately embrace fair earth (Papa). Their joint offspring are the sun and moon. The cutting of the babe in two was invented in order to account for the paleness of the moon." To us, the Tongan account of the origin of the sun and moon does not seem much more absurd than the modern commentator's interpretation of it.
To analyse the legends in order to make out our view of them would take more space than wo can afford, and indeed, we can make room only for a few words about the most remarkable of them all, the famous Maui myth, of which two accounts are given in this volume. Hero are the principal exploits of Maui. Descending to the shades, he wrung from the Fire-god the secret of fire, return- ing with the knowledge that it can be got out of certain trees, and a knowledge of the process of getting it. To punish the Fire-god, who had given him some trouble, he had set his abode on fire, and the conflagration which had followed, and had nearly destroyed the universe, had made men acquainted with fire, and even withthe uses of it. By-and-by, Maui showed them how to get it at will. Next he raised the sky, which before his time had almost touched the earth, to its present height, an exploit disastrous for his father, Eu, the " supporter of the heavens," for he died of it, his bones afterwards falling in certain parts of Mangaia, in the shape of pumice-stone. After that, he resolved to tame the Sun, who had been accustomed to make an over-rapid and fitful course through the heavens, and to make him proceed in a course beneficial to mortals. Ile caught him in ropes and nearly strangled him, and did not let him go till he promised regular behaviour. Ulti- mately, according to the Mangaian account, lie was driven from Mangaia by Itangi, the grandson of 'tong°, for setting the rocks on fire. According to the other form of the legend, which Mr. Gill has given us, his next exploit was fishing up dry land—there having previously been none—which done, he mounted to the heavens, and fixed in the sky the fish-hook with which he had pulled up the earth, which is now the tail of the constellation Scorpio, but is still spoken of as the fish-hook of Maui. Here we seem to have legends—the work, no doubt, of a considerable poet—accounting for the separation of land and sea, and of the heavens and the earth, for the daily course of the sun and the regular process of the seasons, for the possibility of getting fire from certain trees. The tamer of the sun is nevertheless asserted to have been himself the sun, but that is chiefly on account of another adventure of Maui, supplied by the traditions of New Zealand. Of this we can only say that the story of Maui's en- counter with the Goddess of Death, the issue whether men should die or live for ever being expressly said to depend upon the result of the encounter, plainly purports to give, and was among the Maoris understood to give, the explanation of the introduction of death into the world ; and that the boasting of his victory over the sun, in which Maui indulges before entering upon the adven- ture, seems very strongly against the view that the legend is a myth of the sun 'setting. "The Wisdom of Manihiki" is the traditional name for one of the accounts of Maui's exploits, which Mr. Gill has given us, and this seems to indicate the feeling with which in Manihiki his legend was regarded. It was the genesis of Manihiki.
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