Animation of animals, and stones

Among animals, the pig is the most distinguished in fable. Giants from Tahiti embarked in rafts to fight the man-eating pig in Eiva; or Hiro, born of the sun, slew it. Pigs were the most costly victims for sacrifice, and only the priests might enter their styes. In Nukahiva a stone image of a pig's head was found in company with human bones. Besides these, we find fabulous animals. The subject, at once oceanic and amphibious, of an animal living on the land and with a serpent or eel-shaped extremity reaching to the sea, occurs in Fiji and elsewhere in Melanesia, in the form of tailed gods, as in the souls of the chiefs lying in prayer before Siuleo.

Here, as in Australia, lizards are involved in a special cycle of legends, bringing them into close connection with the divine figure which strikes its roots deeply, the god of earthquake. In Fiji he lived in a cave, and when he was driven thence by incantations the giant lizard which he kept in a cage as a plaything remained behind till it was killed by the chief Tara. With it the legend connected an earthwork built in the form of a great lizard, on the river Waitio. On a campaign a green lizard is counted a bad omen. The Atuas like to appear in the form of lizards. Lizards creep through the openings of the body and bring illness; and so among the Maoris the lizard god Mokotiti causes headache. Tare was also spoken of as dwelling in a lizard. Among the Melanesians, snakes were, of all animals, the most revered, and some places in Fiji were actually famous for snake worship. On the other hand, the Hattams of New Guinea preferred the snake to all other animals for food. Among the temple idols of the Papuas in Waigu, the crocodile also is found. Idols, shark below and man above, were set up on houses in the Solomon Islands, to avert evil influences. Skulls of those valuable food animals, the turtles, were kept in the temples. From Easter Island we have fish-headed idols, and in Florida large eels are favourite places of residence for the souls of the dead.

Stick calendar of the
Ngati Ranki tribe
in New Zealand
(British Museum)

Lastly, we must refer to the widely-spread cult of stones. In Melanesia, hardly any sacred place is without its holy stone. The splintered and cloven rocks of the coast gave rise to legends of all sorts, which in many cases sound like an echo of those which we know in the west. Rocky wastes are shown as the battlefields of contending gods, or the places where, overtaken by daylight in the task of creating islands, they were obliged to leave the materials lying about. Gods were made the constructors of the great stone figures on Easter Island. Herewith, in islands where stone idols abound, legends were connected; as in Tokelau, where the first man sprang from stone, and manufactured a woman out of sand, inserting a rib; or as in Tonga Levu, where a "dolmen" built by Tangaroa indicates the direction in which the gods travelled to Vavau and Hapai. In the Gilberts, sacrifices are offered on one stone in a stone circle, this being wreathed with the innermost leaf of a palm. Fishermen worship upright stones, and idols may be made only of a particular sort of rock. "Rain-stones" are put in the fire when it rains too much, but wetted in time of drought. Some saw in stones the petrified remains of fish left behind by the great flood. Stone idols, wrapped with cloth, are venerated in Micronesia, many of them being brought from a distance. In a stone of this kind dwells Tuitokelau, who is revered as a god. In Mota, little stones are a remedy for evil of every kind. Circumcision may, in New Guinea, be performed only with freshly-manufactured stone knives; though a bamboo splinter is allowed in cases of necessity. In the Pelews, Kubary found an idol of black volcanic rock. Small ancestor-images of stone were placed by the fishermen on their nets for luck. In Fiji, cliffs are the birthplace of the good Ndengeh; in Pelew, the last remains of submerged spirit-islands, whence the giant forefathers of the present population, the Kalits, came into the land. Magic treasures often lie under them; or, as below a reef in Korror, the kossol-root, which, laid on the prow of a canoe, of itself guides the voyage to its end.

Reverence is also paid to the sea; everything connected with it - as navigation or shipbuilding - is highly esteemed. In Nukuor the priest strikes eight blows with a consecrated axe on the tree from which a canoe is to be built, and it may not be felled or worked except in the three months elapsing after the death of the spiritual chief of the tribe. The people of Ponape hold a peculiar feast at which all boats built in the previous year are dedicated to the gods. The paddle that marks a grave represents the noblest activity of the man, as the spindle that of the woman; and not corpses only, but persons dangerously ill or decrepit from age, are exposed in boats. In Mortlock the highest honour is paid to the god of the sea, by the conveyance to him of those who have fallen in battle, while those who have died naturally are buried in the ground.

Under the breath of the universal tendency to animism which penetrated through mankind and Nature, gods and idols sprang up in crowds, and bore the Oceanian mind into a labyrinth of supra-terrestrial and sub-terrestrial conceptions. A racial feature appears in this luxuriant formative impulse. It is not by chance that Polynesia and Madagascar have a great extent of theogony in common, in the form of an extremely polytheistic mythology in one region, of exuberant fetishism in the other. And even if but a small fraction of these spirits soared to the heights of divine honours, while the great mass remained attached to the soil, yet the total was large. The list made by the missionaries in Raiatea contains nearly a hundred names of gods. Whether certain ones rose out of the mass depended on how the tribe lived. In a more distinct order, among the world of gods, we see a reflection of the stability of tradition. Thus in general more gods are found in the east among the Polynesians, more spirits and ghosts among the Melanesians and Micronesians to the west. Just when Christianity reached Polynesia, they were in the thick of a brisk process of god-manufacture; new shoots, new blooms, sent forth by their excited fancy, found a more secure footing, partly in the more firmly crystallised cosmogonic legends, partly in a system of hierarchies and relationships, which naively spiritualised conditions prevailing on earth. Where the tendency to discuss genealogical traditions on fine evenings in places of public resort prevailed, as in New Zealand, time brought about organised methods of recording (see woodcut of stick calendar above). In such cases theology gains a firmer consistency than in districts where life is lax, and traditions and the priesthood have no organs.