Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  The archetypical luakini temple ritual occurred at the inauguration of a new paramount chief, when the temple was built, or more likely, rebuilt, but the ritual was repeated periodically to reaffirm the position of the ruler. The rite is too complex to be summarized Human sacrifice, forbidden during the Makahiki festival, occurs at every stage of the luakini ritual. Valeri’s central interpretation of this long and elaborate ritual is that it involves the “taming” of the war god Ku, even his transformation into something more like Lono. Human sacrifice is quite bloody in the early stages but is bloodless nearer to the end (death by strangulation rather than decapitation). The archetypical luakini ritual occurred after the new paramount chief had achieved victory over his opponents, often rival claimants to the throne, sometimes brothers or half-brothers, whose bodies became part of the sacrifice, so that it was not just Ku who was being tamed, but the new ruler (who was, after all, both Ku and Lono) as well. The ritual helped to transform him from a “wild” warrior into a “tame” leader of civil society. Because, however, the new paramount chief often sought to affirm his leadership with new wars of conquest, the oscillation between wild and tame, as well as the luakini temple rituals, were a continuous feature of chiefly rule.

  Although most serious students of ancient Hawaii affirm the traditional Hawaiian belief that the paramount chiefs (and to some extent all the higher ranks of ali’i) were considered gods, many observers, including some anthropologists, prefer to believe that the notion of a divine ruler was purely metaphorical, that no one really believed it literally, a sentiment shared by Christian Polynesians in Hawaii and elsewhere, ashamed of their pagan The problem arises, I believe, from a far too absolute meaning given to the word “god” in cultures deeply influenced by monotheism. In archaic socieies, complex chiefdoms, and the tribal societies described in Chapter 3, gods, powerful beings, ancestors, and humans exist on a continuum-there are no absolute breaks between these categories. As in Tikopia, gods and chiefs were thought of in terms of one another, so in Hawaii, as Valeri says, “Not only the ali’i are represented as gods, the gods are represented as ali’i.“79 Nonetheless, when the paramount chief was taken to be Ku in person, it was a matter of no small consequence.

  We must try to understand more clearly the role of the Hawaiian paramount chief. He was simultaneously divine and human and the mediator between the divine and human realms. As Valeri writes, “the [paramount chief] is the supreme mediator between men and gods. Direct contact with the most important gods of the society is possible only for the king and his chaplains.“80 This direct contact was manifested above all in sacrificial ritual, especially human sacrifice, which unites gods and humans like no other action. Only the paramount chief could authorize human sacrifice, and he was, in a sense, sacrifier (the one on whose behalf the sacrifice is performed), sacrificer (the priestly officiant at the sacrifice), and, symbolically, the sacrifice, for the victim, through his sacrificial death, “becomes” the chief, particularly in instances I will note below.

  That the paramount chief remained high priest is illustrated by a story that Valeri takes from a nineteenth century Hawaiian authority:

  At the time of a volcanic eruption, King Kamehameha sent for a priest of Pele to seek his advice on what he should do. “You must offer the proper sacrifices,” said the seer. “Take and offer them,” replied the chief “Not so! Troubles and afflictions which befall the nation require that the ruling chief himself offer the propitiatory sacrifice, not a seer or a kahuna [priest].” “But I am afraid lest Pele kill me.” “You will not be killed,” the seer promised.81

  As this instance indicates, the paramount chief as divine-human mediator acts for the common good at a time of affliction. In one aspect he was seen as “father” of his people,82 even implicitly as “mother,” insofar as he was seen as the source of fertility. Offerings to the chief as Lono, even when not physically redistributed, were seen as repaid by his mana of fertility.

  But the chief also had a terrifying, destructive side, as indeed did the gods. A favorite image of the chief as devourer was the shark. According to Valeri, “a shark was sometimes called chief, and a chief called a shark.” He cites the following chant as a typical example of this usage:

  A term used traditionally to designate the paramount chief was ali’i ‘ai moku, “chief who eats the island.“84

  The “terrifying” side of Hawaiian chieftainship was in part a reflection of practical political reality. Succession to the paramountcy was never clear. Though seniority counted, in a polygamous family the son of a mother of higher rank than the mother of the oldest son might be considered to outrank his older half-brother. And with marriage to sisters or half-sisters favored by chiefs trying to maintain the highest possible rank of their offspring, the genealogical complications were considerable. In any case the death of a paramount often set off a civil war, and challenges from a pretender could come at any time. By killing and sacrificing his brothers and/or half-brothers, the paramount could absorb their mana, become them, so to speak, so as to concentrate the genealogical rank of his generation in himself. But more broadly, according to Valeri, the chief’s “human sacrifice is always a fratricide: either a literal one-because his most likely rivals are his brothers-or a metaphorical one-since every transgressor implicitly identifies with him and therefore becomes his ‘double.’” Through incestuous marriages to sisters or half-sisters, he could also absorb the mana of the women of equal rank. Thus the chief reproduces his legitimacy through fratricide and sororal incest.85

  By the same token, a defeated chief has obviously lost his mana, is no longer divine, is polluted. Rule depends on linage, but lineage, as we will see, can be fabricated. Rule must be proven, must be actively affirmed, which is why so few chiefs met a natural death. Even though claimants to the throne of a ruling paramount were his brothers, they could still be considered upstarts, for their legitimacy remained to be proved. And upstarts were not always relatives of the ruler, not even always ali’i. The legendary `Umi, archetypal usurper and conqueror, who, perhaps around 1500, conquered the whole island of Hawaii, was of commoner birth. He did not, however, attempt to reign as a “military dictator,” but claimed that an earlier paramount chief had secretly slept with his mother, so that he was truly an offspring of the chiefly line on his father’s side.86 Chiefs kept genealogical specialists who could confirm ali’i rank and status or on occasion fabricate a needed genealogy. So, though ideologically the genealogical principle remained dominant, according to Valeri, “actual relationships of subordination and political alliance tend to be more important, in the long run at least, than the genealogical relationships.“87 In other words, though upstarts who came to power through sheer military force abounded in Hawaiian history (though there were probably more unsuccessful upstarts who met an untimely end), they sought genealogical and ritual legitimacy once in office.88

  The critical reader might well ask how much of what I have written about Hawaiian rulers was ruling class ideology and how much was shared by commoners. Indeed, what did commoners think of all these goings-on? One of the advantages of Hawaii as a case is that we have some information about such things from those who lived under the old regime. Of great value in this regard is the book of David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, written in the 1830s in Hawaiian and translated into English in 1898. According to Valeri, “Malo’s work is the most important source on ancient Hawaiian culture.“89 Male, was of ali’i lineage, born probably in 1793, and in his young manhood was attached to the household to the high chief Kuakini, brother of the powerful Queen Ka’ahumanu. He had personal knowledge of what he spoke, and, though his possible bias as a Christian convert must be taken into account, he also had some critical distance from the society he described. So let us consider Malo’s testimony:

  The condition of the common people was that of subjection to the chiefs, compelled to do their heavy tasks, burdened and oppressed, some even to death. The life of the people was one of patient endurance, of
yielding to the chiefs to purchase their favor. The plain man (kanaka) must not complain.

  If the people were slack in doing the chief’s work they were expelled from their lands, or even put to death. For such reasons as this and because of their oppressive exactions made upon them, the people held the chiefs in great dread and looked upon them as gods.90

  Yet commoners not only judged between chiefs, they could on occasion rebel against them.

  There was a great difference between chiefs. Some were given to robbery, spoliation, murder, extortion, ravishing. There were a few kings91 who conducted themselves properly as Kamehameha I did. He looked well after the peace of the land.

  On account of the rascality (kolohe) of some of the chiefs to the common people, warlike contests frequently broke out between certain chiefs and the people, and the commoners killed many of the former in

  It was the king’s duty to seek the welfare of the common people, because they constituted the body politic. Many kings have been put to death by the people because of their oppression of the makaainana [people of the land].93

  From other information and from the examples that Male, himself gives, ali’i claimants, who undoubtedly used popular dissatisfaction with the reigning chief to gather an opposition force, led such popular rebellions. In any case, as in all such situations in traditional societies, such a revolt was not a revolution, not an effort to change the nature of the regime, but an effort to replace a bad ruler with a good one. As Male, writes: “If the people saw that a king was religiously inclined (haipule), strict in his religious duties, that king attained great popularity. From the most ancient times, religious kings have always been greatly esteemed.“94

  Malo’s testimony is invaluable. It is apparent from what he wrote that commoners had their own ideas about the high and mighty, and were prepared to act on them. Yet the most they could hope for was a good, “religious” ruler. Whether through fear or admiration, the ali’i were godlike to them. In nonliterate societies known only archaeologically or even in literate societies where the surviving documents derive solely from the ruling class, we would have almost no idea what the common people thought.

  Another indication of the importance of the paramount chief to the entire population was the breakdown of social order following the ruler’s death. Valeri speaks of such a death as involving “radical subversion and violent anarchy” that “removes the foundation of the system of social rules.” In short, the system of kapu that ordered sexuality and respect for person and property collapsed. Nothing and no one were safe. Nor was this the benign Carnival-like status leveling of the Makahiki festival, but rather a period of extreme fear for life and limb.9s Is it not possible that many, even commoners, identified with the apparent omnipotence of the paramount chief, who combined the divine and the human in his own person, but who was also the enforcer of the system of kapu? If so, it is not surprising that the chief’s death brought on the collapse of the normative order, both internal and external. One can imagine that even the most skeptical commoner would wish for the rapid installation of a new paramount chief to bring the disorder to an end.96

  Another extraordinarily valuable testimony of something we could have no knowledge about where we are entirely dependent on archaeology is Malo’s description of “prophets,” kaula. This is the Hawaiian cognate of the Proto Polynesian taaula, whose various meanings include “priest, spirit medium, shaman, sorcerer, or prophet.“97 Firth translates the cognate Tikopia term, taura, as spirit medium, which seems to be the most general term for a phenomenon that takes different, though related, forms in various Polynesian societies. Unlike tahunga (Hawaiian kahuna), priests of the official cult, spirit mediums can be of any status and either gender. This is a “democratic” role, as the spirit may choose whomever he or she wishes (male spirits usually choose male mediums and female spirits female mediums). Firth devotes a chapter to spirit mediums in Rank and Religion in Tikopia, but, as the almost sole function of such mediums had to do with healing within the lineage of the medium, they were rather peripheral. The Hawaiian kaula is another matter altogether. Let us hear Malo: “The kaula were a very eccentric class of people. They lived apart in desert places, and did not associate with people or fraternize with any one. Their thoughts were much taken up with deity.” Kaula, prophets or foretellers as Male, calls them, forewarned of such events as “the death of a king, or of the overthrow of a government.“98 One noted kaula of the eighteenth century is reported to have prophesied:

  Valeri quotes another early authority, S. M. Kamakau, as saying “The prophets were independent people, and were inspired by the spirit of a god. They spoke the words of the god without fear before chiefs and men. Even though they might die, they spoke out fearlessly.” 100

  The potential opposition between chief and prophet arises from their fundamentally different relation to deity. As Valeri puts it, “the kaula represents a totality directly accessible to the individual and thus in opposition to the social hierarchy; the king represents a totality consubstantial with the social hierarchy.“101 Both chief and prophet are in a sense upstarts: the chief because he came to power by force; the prophet because he affirms his message in the face of king and people. But the chief does not rule by force alone and the prophet’s weapon is not force but speech. The figure of the prophet, who claims a direct relation to a god in a society like Hawaii where social hierarchy overwhelmingly mediates the relation between the divine and the human, is shadowy indeed. He will return.

  What links Hawaii to comparable cases of early states or early civilizations is the absolutely central role of the priest-king. The fusion of powerful beings, nature, and the society as a whole, characteristic of ritual in what I have called tribal religion, though it reappears at moments in a society like Hawaii, for instance in the Makahiki festival, has become to a remarkable degree concentrated in one person in early civilizations.102 Human sacrifice, which turns out to be the sole prerogative of the priest-king in such societies, and which is almost absent from societies at any other stage of development, epitomizes the enormous fusion of power in one person. As David Malo put it:

  The edicts of the king had power over life and death. If the king had a mind to put someone to death, it might be a chief or a commoner, he uttered the word and death it was.

  But if the king chose to utter the word of life, the man’s life was spared.103

  The word of life and death is a divine word, and it is not surprising that the one who exercised it was considered a god.104 He was a god who was also a man, for he represented humans to the gods as well as the gods to humans. His arbitrary power and the oppression of the common people over whom he ruled represent a remarkable breakdown of tribal egalitarianism and a return of a particularly harsh form of despotism, made possible by the increasing size of the social unit with its attendant loss of face-to-face community, by the increased surplus due to agricultural intensification, and by the rise of militarism now that there was so much to fight over. The disposition to dominate was triumphant in the king as Ku in his wild state.

  But Hawaii was not Mangaia or Rapa Nui, where terror reigned almost without restraint. Terror existed, but it was ritualized, institutionalized, limited. The king as Ku was tamed and became, at least part of the time, the king as Lono, who, as Valeri said, “is the nourishing god.” So in Hawaii, the ali’i nui, the high chief, combined the disposition to dominate with the disposition to nurture, domination with hierarchy, as has every government since. Yet when despotism first reappears, the representation of cosmos, society, and self in one person, a person who combines both terror and benevolence, places that one person under almost unbearable tension. All archaic societies are monarchical, center around one person, but later archaic societies find ways to diffuse the intensity, to give it broader sociocultural institutionalization, so that the focus becomes more on rule than on ruler. We will consider such changes below.

  But was the Hawaiian high chief an archaic king? Was Hawaii before
Kamehameha I a state (or rather four states, as high chiefs reigned on each of the four major islands)? These are obviously matters of definition. One critical element in deciding whether a paramount chiefdom has made the transition to statehood is whether or not it has broken decisively with the kinship system. In 1972, Marshall Sahlins argued that Hawaii had not made such a break: “They had not broken decisively with the people at large, so that they might dishonor the kinship morality only on pain of a mass defection.“105 And in 1984 Patrick Kirch agreed with him: “the ruling elite … never managed to sever completely the kinship bond between chiefs and people that Hawaii inherited from Ancestral Polynesian Society.“106 By 2000, Kirch acknowledged that his opinion on this issue had “subtly changed over the years,” and that he had come to think that “even prior to Captain Cook, Hawaiian society constituted an `archaic state.’ The development of class stratification as well as the alienation of land rights from producers, not to mention the forms of absolutizing religious ideology (including the war cult of human sacrifice) and the regular exercise of military force are all typical of state-level social formations.“107

  Lawrence Krader’s definition of the state as a “secondary formation” is helpful in solving this definitional problem. He holds that “social integration, internal regulation, and external defense” are functions of all societies, but that “the state combines these functions with the promotion and preservation of its own existence as an end in itself. Thus the state is to be viewed as a secondary formation for the achievement of the aforementioned social ends.“108 I think that it can be argued that by late precontact times the court around what we can now call the Hawaiian king was such a secondary formation: it had the power to administer, tax, levy corvee, and conscript for military service, for its own ends, not necessarily the ends of the people. If we use functional analysis, as in sociology we always must, we must be careful to ask, functional for whom? What was functional for the state was not necessarily functional for the people, or indeed for society as a whole. There are all too many such examples in human history, so we must leave the degree to which the state is functional for society as an empirical question that will vary from case to case.