POLYNESIAN ORAL TRADITIONS could be many things, from prayers and dedications to love songs and taunts. Tahitian traditions recorded in the early nineteenth century included enigmas, romances, political speeches, night invocations (to be taught in the dark), war songs, lullabies, directions for travel, instructions on how to reveal thieves and cast out disorders, disenchantments from witchcraft, and prayers for rain. But the starting point for most Europeans was the cosmogonies, or accounts of how the world first came into being, which were widely understood as clues in the quest to discover who Polynesians were.
Creation myths were recorded throughout Polynesia in the nineteenth century: there are cosmogonies from Tahiti and the Society Islands, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, Tonga, Samoa, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Easter Island, and Mangaia. The words written on a banana leaf and delivered to Moerenhout by an emissary of the old Tahitian priest were part of a Society Islands cosmogony, several versions of which were recorded. These myths are by no means identical: some tell of a creator god who sleeps in a shell at the beginning of time, others of a female primordial deity who plucks the first generation of gods from her body, still others of gods born from the union of rocks. But while there is no single, definitive version, it is possible to speak broadly of a Polynesian cosmogonic vision, which is characterized by two closely related themes.
The first is that the relationships among all forms of matter are ones of kinship; everything that exists is, in a fairly literal sense, related to everything else. The stone that is the ancestor Raukawa is also, in its own right, an ancestor, being part of the same continuum of creation as the man and the ancestral hero. The second is that the mechanism of creation for everything in the world—not just humans, animals, and gods but even things that we would describe as inorganic, like sand and stones—is a form of sexual reproduction. Creation in traditional Polynesian myths is, fundamentally, a matter of procreation.
According to many Polynesian creation stories, the origin of the universe begins in something known as Te Pō. Typically described as a period of chaos or darkness or a kind of night, Te Pō is what existed before any gods, sky, land, sea, plants, animals, or humans had come into being. It is associated not just with the dim beginnings of the world but with the time before birth, the time after death, and the mysteries of the spirit world. In the dualistic philosophy of the Polynesians, it is opposed to Te Ao, the world of light and ordinary human endeavor. We live in Te Ao, but it is from Te Pō that we come, and to it that we ultimately return. The New Zealand ethnologist Elsdon Best described Te Pō as a time or place of metaphorical darkness. He tells the story of a Māori acquaintance who, when asked about a particular series of events, replied, “I do not know any of those matters, for at that time I was still in the Po,” by which he meant that he had not yet been born.
References to Te Pō occur in myths and chants throughout Polynesia, including one of the most famous of all, a two-thousand-line Hawaiian creation chant known as the Kumulipo, meaning “Beginning in deep darkness.” Composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to mark the birth of the high chief Lonoikamakahiki, it begins, in Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation:
At the time that turned the heat of the earth
At the time when the heavens turned and changed
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth
At the time of the night of Makalii [winter]
Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness
Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,
It is night,
So night was born.
Similar chants collected in nineteenth-century New Zealand describe the many phases of Te Pō, iterating, in long incantatory sequences, a series of nights—or perhaps one long night—in terms that strongly suggest a period of gestation and labor:
Te Po-nui The great night
Te Po-roa The long night
Te Po-uriuri The deep night
Te Po-kerekere The intense night
Te Po-tiwhatiwha The dark night
Te Po-te-kitea The night in which nothing is seen
Te Po-tangotango The intensely dark night
Te Po-whawha The night of feeling
Te Po-namunamu-ki-taiao The night of seeking passage to the world
Te Po-tahuri-atu The night of restless turning
Te Po-tahuri-mai-ki-taiao The night of turning towards the revealed world
Thus, the world is born quite literally from darkness.
In some traditions, Te Pō is associated with Te Kore, a word that in common speech expresses simple negation but here is elevated to mean something like “Nothingness” or “the Void.” Like Te Pō, Te Kore can be qualified—Kore-nui (the Vast Void); Kore-roa (the Far-Extending Void); Kore-para (the Parched Void); Kore-rawea (the Void in Which Nothing Is Felt)—suggesting that it is less a matter of true absence or emptiness and more a kind of liminal space between being and nonbeing—a “realm of potential being,” as one early missionary put it. Both of these concepts—Te Kore and Te Pō—can seem highly abstract, and much of the language used to translate them reinforces this impression. But this is probably a misapprehension. As one modern scholar puts it, “Ideas of infinity and eternity denote limitlessness in space and time, which does not seem to me to be a category of ancient Māori thought; instead, the abundance of multitude is always stressed, and this is characteristic of the concreteness of Māori thinking.”
“Abundance of multitude” is a good way of describing what happens next, as the cosmogonic darkness gives way to creation, and through the union of opposing elements everything in the world is brought into being. In chants from Tahiti and Bora Bora, the “first generation of growth” arises from the conjunction of different types of rock:
Rock from the cliffs and ocean rock may meet and unite, there is affinity between them.
Slate rock and clay rock may meet and unite, there is affinity between them.
Pebbles and crumbling rock may meet and unite, there is affinity between them.
Black rock and white rock may meet and unite, there is affinity between them.
In Hawai‘i, night gives birth to the coral polyp, which is followed, in turn, by the birth of the grub, the earthworm, the starfish, the sea cucumber, the sea urchin, the barnacle, the mother-of-pearl, the mussel, the limpet, the cowrie, the conch. In a chant from Easter Island,
Grove by copulating with Trunk produced the ashwood tree.
Dragon fly by copulating with Bug-that-flies-on-fresh-water produced the dragonfly.
Stinging-fly by copulating with Swam-of-flies produced the fly. . . .
The central principle here is of generation through the pairing of male and female elements: gods, concepts, personifications of nature, even curious abstractions like “Growth-of-comeliness” and “All-rushing-land.” Each pair gives rise to new elements, which in turn unite and produce still more, so that through a series of “begats” the entire universe is created: rock and sand, salt water and fresh water, rivers and mountains, forests and reefs, moss and trees, swimming things and crawling things, gods and men. The result is a kind of cosmic genealogy, or family tree, in which any given individual can trace his or her descent not just back to a pair of founding ancestors but to the rocks and trees and corals and fish, all the way back through the physical matter of the world to the very fiber of the universe itself.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEANS were fascinated by this mythology, which they viewed as a kind of direct testimony, the simplest, truest, most authentic source of information about Polynesian history: what Polynesians themselves had to say about their own past. They envisioned scenarios like Moerenhout’s encounter with the old Tahitian priest, in which learned members of these societies would divulge what they knew and the shrouds obscuring the islanders’ origins would fall
away. In practice, however, it was all a lot more complicated than that. Collecting, transcribing, and translating were time-consuming and difficult; Polynesians were often reluctant to share what they knew. There were mixed motives on the part of both collectors and informants: Europeans often suppressed bits that confused or offended them; Polynesians sometimes altered information with which, for tribal or other reasons, they disagreed. In some cases informants were paid for their knowledge—a standard ethnographic practice, but one with obvious potential for warping the results. For Europeans, the primary problem was interpretation: how to extract from these fragments a map and a history; how to make Polynesian mythology tell them what they wanted to know. For help with this, they turned to the nascent fields of comparative linguistics and mythology, disciplines that in the nineteenth century seemed to be opening up the history of the world. When it came to the history of Polynesia, however, this foray into folklore and philology proved not quite so illuminating. In fact, for the next several decades, it led everyone astray.
The Aryan Māori
An Unlikely Idea
Cover of The Aryan Maori by Edward Tregear (Wellington, 1885).
REED GALLERY, DUNEDIN PUBLIC LIBRARY, NEW ZEALAND.
IF WE WERE to look at Polynesian mythology today, we would probably be struck by what is unusual or distinctive about it. We would likely be most curious about those aspects of the traditions that appear to reflect something unique about the Polynesian world. But nineteenth-century Europeans took a very different approach to this material. They did not see a collection of strange and esoteric narratives about dragonflies and earthworms and copulating stones, but rather a series of familiar motifs. They noted, for instance, the elemental pairing of earth and sky that occurs in many Polynesian mythologies, a good example of which can be found in the New Zealand story of Rangi (Sky) and Papa (Earth). According to this popular Māori myth, at the dawn of time Rangi and Papa are clasped together in a tight embrace with their children, the gods of wind, war, sea, and so on, trapped in the darkness between them. After a time, the children grow weary of their close confinement and plot to push their parents apart. Each one tries and fails until, finally, Tane, god of forests and trees, rests his back on Papa, his mother, and, using his feet, thrusts his father, Rangi, up into the sky. In a related myth from the Society Islands, the god Tane uses great logs as pillars to separate the earth from the sky, while in a chant from the Tuamotus it is the first generations of men who raise “the layer above them with their arms, mounting upon each other’s shoulders . . . until the highest trees could stand upright.”
To Europeans, this idea of a tree, prop, pillar, or man holding up the sky was perfectly recognizable, instantly conjuring the Greek Titan Atlas, whose shoulders (in Homer’s telling) “lift on high / the colossal pillars thrusting earth and sky apart.” They were also entirely familiar with the idea of a Sky Father and an Earth Mother, versions of which appear in many European traditions, including the ancient Greek myth of Zeus and Demeter. In fact, the expressions “Father Heaven” (Dyaus Pitā in Sanskrit, Zeus Pater in Greek, Jupiter in Latin) and “Earth Mother” are so common in Indo-European languages that terms for them can be reconstructed going back more than five thousand years.
Another concept that rang a bell for nineteenth-century scholars was Te Pō, that deep Polynesian darkness at the beginning of time. This notion of something emerging from nothing—of presence from absence, order from chaos—was instantly legible to Europeans as an echo of the book of Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” For those with a classical education, it further called to mind Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Before the ocean and the earth appeared—
Before the skies had overspread them all—
The face of Nature in a vast expanse
Was naught but Chaos uniformly waste.
Other scholars would see links with Hesiod’s Theogony, the Sanskrit Rigveda, and even the Norse sagas, where the world is said to have sprung from the great abyss Ginungagap, which, like Te Pō, is without form and void.
Even now, it is not easy to know what to make of such resemblances. Modern suggestions include the idea that themes of this kind are archetypal, a reflection of some psychological condition that all human beings share. Another intriguing proposition is that such similarities are evidence of a truly ancient mythological substrate, a “Laurasian” mythology, spanning the cultures of Eurasia, North Africa, Oceania, and the Americas and going back far beyond the traceable beginnings of either Polynesian or Indo-European culture, as far back perhaps as twenty thousand years. Alternatively, one might argue that there is, in fact, no connection, that such apparent resemblances are simply the artifact of a process that selects for similarity: Europeans find dragon and flood myths in Polynesia because they are interested in dragons and floods. Nineteenth-century folklorists, however, concluded none of these things. What they thought they were looking at was evidence of a genealogical connection.
Faced with what looked to them like traces of their own most ancient traditions, nineteenth-century Europeans concluded that Polynesian and European mythologies had sprung from the same roots and that the ancestors of the Polynesians and their own forebears must therefore be related. It was not immediately obvious just where in history—or geography—this connection was to be found. Some argued that Polynesian origins could be traced to the ancient Greeks, others that they were to be found somewhere in Egypt, among the pharaohs and their tombs. An idea popular among the early missionaries was that the inhabitants of Polynesia were descended from a lost tribe of Jews. The Reverend Samuel Marsden, founder of the first Christian mission in New Zealand and an early proponent of this idea, found evidence for the Māori’s Semitic origin in what he described as their “great natural turn for traffic,” for, as he put it, “they will buy and sell anything they have got.” Rather more romantically, the Reverend Richard Taylor envisioned Polynesians as a tribe of wandering nomads who had made their way from the eastern Mediterranean, across what is today Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Malaysia, “until in the lapse of ages they reached the sea, and thence, still preserving their wandering character, from island to island driven by winds and currents, and various causes, they finally reached New Zealand.” But the idea that ultimately gained traction among nineteenth-century Europeans was that Polynesians were neither Semites, Egyptians, nor ancient Greeks, but that they were Aryans.
IT IS IMPORTANT to recognize that the term “Aryan” did not mean in the mid-nineteenth century what it means to us today. It had nothing to do with Teutons or fair-haired Nordic types but referred first and foremost to a group of Sanskrit-speaking herders and horsemen who are thought to have migrated from the Iranian Plateau into what is now northern India in the second millennium B.C. These people, who referred to themselves using the Sanskrit word ārya (meaning “noble”) were known to nineteenth-century Europeans as “Indo-Aryans,” or just plain “Aryans.” At the time, Sanskrit was the oldest known language in the Indo-European family (older languages have since been discovered), and the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were presumed to be the people from whom all the other Indo-Europeans—Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and so on—had sprung. Thus, “Aryan,” originally a fairly narrow designation of a particular Indic tribe, became synonymous in the nineteenth century with “the mother of modern civilization.”
The later appropriation of this term by the Nazis—which arose from the mistaken claim that the homeland of these early Indo-Europeans was located somewhere in Northern Europe—has distorted its meaning so severely that it is difficult to re-create its nineteenth-century sense. But at the time, it was linked with a feeling of excitement about discoveries in the field of comparative linguistics and the implications these had for the study of human history as a whole. To nineteenth-century scholars, the idea of a chain of related languages reaching back thousands of years, well beyond the bounds of recorded
history, beyond Homer and the Bible, was nothing short of revelatory. It offered a glimpse of their most ancient forebears, people who had lived centuries before Greece and Rome and who, up until that point, had been essentially unimaginable. As philologists began to piece together this story, working out the relationships among more and more languages (and thus more and more peoples), it gradually became possible to envision a hypothetical mother tongue, an even more ancient language, perhaps five or six thousand years old, of which not only Greek and Latin but Sanskrit itself was merely an offshoot, and from this reconstruction to deduce something about the common ancestor of the vastly disparate peoples who had spread across the world from Iran to Iceland.
It could be inferred from this protolanguage, for instance, that the technology of these people included the wheel. They had words for axles, yokes, and some kind of cart or wheeled conveyance, as well as a verb that meant “to plow.” They had a word for field and another that meant “to lead away cattle,” which did double duty as a word for marriage, as in “leading away” the bride. They had words not only for cows, oxen, bulls, and steers but for sheep, goats, dogs, pigs, and, especially, horses. They distinguished between movable and immovable wealth and, in the former category, between four-footed chattels (livestock) and two-footed chattels (slaves). They were polytheistic, and the name for their most securely reconstructible deity relates to the word for “sky.” Their word for human, on the other hand, was derived from their word for “earth” or “land.” Their poetry revolved around themes of fertility, reciprocity, immortality, and heroic deeds; a single famous phrase, best known to us from the Homeric epics, is glossed as “imperishable fame.”
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