The New Zealanders, according to Rutherford, have neither priests, nor
places of worship, nor any religion except their superstitious dread of
the Atua.
To an uneducated man, coming from a Christian country, the entire
absence of all regular religious observances among these savages would
very naturally give such an impression. Cook ascertained that they had
no "morais"[BJ] or temples, like some of the other tribes of the South
Seas; but he met with persons who evidently bore what we should call the
priestly character.
The New Zealanders are certainly not without some notions of religion;
and, in many particulars, they are a remarkably superstitious people.
During the whole course of their lives, the imagined presence of the
unseen and supernatural crosses them at every step. What has been
already stated respecting the "taboo" may give some idea of how
submissive and habitual is their sense of the power of the Divinity, and
how entirely they conceive themselves to be in his hands; as well as
what a constant and prying superintendence they imagine him to exercise
over their conduct.
It would be easy to enumerate many minor superstitions, all indicative
of the extraordinary influence of the same belief. They think, for
instance, that if they were to allow a fire to be lighted under a shed
where there are provisions, their god would kill them.
They have many superstitions, also, with regard to cutting their hair.
Cook speaks, in the account of his third voyage, of a young man he had
taken on board the ship, who, having one day performed this ceremony,
could not be prevailed upon to eat a morsel till night, insisting that
the atua would most certainly kill him if he did.
Cruise tells us that Tetoro, on the voyage from Port Jackson, cut the
hair of one of his companions, and continued to repeat prayers over him
during the whole operation.
Nicholas, having one day found another chief busy in cutting his wife's
hair with a piece of sharp stone, was going to take up the implement
after it had been used, but was immediately charged by the chief not to
touch it, as the deity of New Zealand would wreak his vengeance on him
if he presumed to commit so daring a piece of impiety.
"Laughing at his superstition," continues Nicholas, "I began to exclaim
against its absurdity, but like Tooi, on a former occasion, he retorted
by ridiculing our preaching, yet at the same time asking me to
sermonize over his wife, as if his object was to have her exorcised; and
upon my refusing, he began himself, but could not proceed from
involuntary bursts of laughter."
On this occasion, the chief, when he had cut off the hair, collected it
all together, and, carrying it to the outskirts of the town, threw it
away. Cook remarks that he used to see quantities of hair tied to the
branches of the trees near the villages. It is stated, in a letter from
one of the missionaries, that the hair, when cut, is carefully
collected, and buried in a secret place.
Certain superstitions have been connected with the cutting of the hair,
from the most ancient times. Many allusions are found in the Greek and
Roman writers to the practice of cutting off the hair of the dead, and
presenting it as an offering to the infernal gods, in order to secure a
free passage to Elysium for the person to whom it belonged. The passage
in the fourth book of the "Æneid," where Iris appears by the command of
Juno to liberate the soul of the expiring Queen of Carthage, by thus
severing from her head the fatal lock, will occur to many of our
readers.
Whatever may have been the origin of this superstition, it is probable
that most of the other notions and customs which have prevailed in
regard to the cutting of the hair are connected with it. The act in this
way naturally became significant of the separation from the living
world of the person on whom it was performed. Of the antiquity of this
practice, we have a proof in a command given by Moses to the Jews:--"Ye
shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for
the dead." These were superstitious customs of the nations by whom they
were surrounded.
The Gentiles used excessive lamentations, amounting to frenzy, at their
funeral rites. According to Bruce, the Abyssinian woman, upon the death
of a near relation, cuts the skin of both her temples with the nail of
her little finger, which she leaves long on purpose; and thus every fair
face throughout the country is disfigured with scars. The same notion of
abstraction from the present life and its concerns is expressed by the
clerical tonsure, so long known in the Christian church, and still
retained among the Roman Catholics. It is still common, also, among
ourselves, for widows, in the earlier period of their mourning, to cut
off their hair, or to remove it back from the brow. Among all rude
nations, besides, the hair has been held in peculiar estimation from its
ornamental nature, and its capability of being formed into any shape,
according to the fancy of its possessor, or the fashion of the country.
Amongst nations, especially, where the ordinary clothing of the people,
from the materials of which it was formed, did not admit of being made
very decorative, this consideration would be much regarded, and still
more where no clothing was worn at all. In such cases, the hair, either
of the head or of the beard, has usually been cherished with very
affectionate care, and the mode of dressing it has been made matter of
anxious regulation. Many of the barbarous nations of antiquity had each
a method of cutting the hair peculiar to itself; and it was sometimes
accounted the deepest mark of servitude which a conqueror could impose
when he compelled the violation of this sacred rule of national manners.
We have a remnant of these old feelings in the reverence with which his
beard is regarded by a Turk of the present day. It is recorded, too,
that no reform which Peter the Great of Russia essayed to introduce
among his semi-barbaric subjects was so pertinaciously resisted as his
attempt to abbreviate their beards.
Marsden, on asking a New Zealander what he conceived the atua to be, was
answered--"An immortal shadow." Although possessed, however, of the
attributes of immortality, omni-presence, invisibility, and supreme
power, he is universally believed to be in disposition merely a
vindictive and malignant demon.
When one of the missionaries had one day been telling a number of them
of the infinite goodness of God, they asked him if he was not joking
with them. They believe that whenever any person is sick, his illness is
occasioned by the atua, in the shape of a lizard, preying upon his
entrails; and, accordingly, in such cases, they often address the most
horrid imprecations and curses to the invisible cannibal, in the hope of
thereby frightening him away. They imagine that at other times he amuses
himself in entangling their nets and oversetting their canoes. Of late
years they have suspected that he has been very angry with them for
having allowed the white men to obtain a footing in their country, a
proof of which they think they see in the greater mortality that has
recently prevailed among them. This, however, they at other times
attribute to the God of the Christians, whom they also denounce,
accordingly, as a cruel being, at least to the New Zealander. Sometimes
they more rationally assign as its cause the diseases that have been
introduced among them by the whites. Until the whites came to their
country, they say, young people did not die, but all lived to be so old
as to be obliged to creep on their hands and knees.
The white man's God they believe to be altogether a different being from
their own atua. Marsden, in one of his letters, relates a conversation
he had upon this subject with some of the chiefs' sons who resided with
him in New South Wales. When he told them that there was but one God,
and that our God was also theirs, they asked him if our God had given us
any sweet potatoes, and could with difficulty be made to see how one
God should give these to the New Zealander and not equally to the white
man; or, on the other hand, how he should have acted so partially as to
give to the white man only such possessions as cattle, sheep, and
horses, which the New Zealander as much required. The argument, however,
upon which they seem most to have rested, was:--"But we are of a
different colour from you; and if one God made us both, he would not
have committed such a mistake as to make us of different colours." Even
one of the chiefs, who had been a great deal with Marsden, and was
disposed to acknowledge the absurdity both of the "taboo" and of many of
his other native superstitions, could not be brought to admit that the
same God who made the white men had also made the New Zealanders.
Among themselves, the New Zealanders appear to have a great variety of
other gods, besides the one whom they call emphatically the atua. Crozet
speaks of some feeble ideas which they have of subordinate divinities,
to whom, he says, they are wont to pray for victory over their enemies.
But Savage gives us a most particular account of their daily adoration
of the sun, moon, and stars. Of the heavenly host, the moon, he says, is
their favourite; though why he should think so, it is not easy to
understand, seeing that, when addressing this luminary, they employ, he
tells us, a mournful song, and seem as full of apprehension as of
devotion; whereas "when paying their adoration to the rising sun, the
arms are spread and the head bowed, with the appearance of much joy in
their countenances, accompanied with a degree of elegant and reverential
solemnity, and the song used upon the occasion is cheerful." It is
strange that none of their other visitors have remarked the existence of
this species of idolatry among these savages.
Yet two New Zealanders, who are now in this country, were in the habit
of commencing the exhibition of their national customs with the
ceremonies practised in their morning devotion to the sun.
The vocal part of the rite, according to the account we have received,
consisted in a low monotonous chant; the manual, in keeping a ball about
the size of an orange constantly whirling in a vertical circle. The
whole was performed in a kneeling posture. Like most other rude nations,
the New Zealanders have certain fancies with regard to several of the
more remarkable constellations; and are not without some conception that
the issues of human affairs are occasionally influenced, or at least
indicated, by the movements of the stars. The Pleiades, for instance,
they believe to be seven of their departed countrymen, fixed in the
firmament; one eye of each of them appearing in the shape of a star,
being the only part that is visible. But it is a common superstition
among them, as we have already noticed, that the left eyes of their
chiefs, after death, become stars.
This notion is far from being destitute of poetical beauty; and perhaps,
indeed, exhibits the common mythological doctrine of the glittering host
of heaven being merely an assemblage of the departed heroes of earth, in
as ingenious a version as it ever has received. It would be easy to
collect many proofs of the extensive diffusion of this ancient faith,
traces of which are to be found in the primitive astronomy of every
people. The classical reader will at once recollect, among many others
of a similar kind, the stories of Castor and Pollux, and of Berenice's
tresses, the latter of which has been so elegantly imitated by Pope, in
telling us of the fate of the vanished lock of Belinda:--
"But trust the muse--she saw it upward rise,
Though marked by none but quick poetic eyes;
(So Home's great founder to the heavens withdrew,
To Proculus alone confessed to view);
A sudden star it shot through liquid air,
And drew behind a radiant trail of hair."
The New Zealanders conceive, also, that what we call a shooting star is
ominous of the approaching dissolution of any one of their great chiefs
who may be unwell when it is seen. Like the vulgar among ourselves, too,
they have their man in the moon; who, they say, is one of their
countrymen named Rona, who was taken up long ago, one night when he
went to the well to fetch water.
Nicholas has given us, on the authority of his friend Duaterra, the most
particular account that has appeared of the inferior deities of New
Zealand. Their number, according to him, is very great, and each of them
has his distinct powers and functions; one being placed over the
elements, another over the fowls and fishes, and so of the rest.
Deifications of the different passions and affections, also, it seems,
find a place in this extended mythology.
In another part of his work, Nicholas remarks, as corroborative of the
Malay descent of the New Zealanders, the singular coincidence, in some
respects, between their mythology and that of the ancient Malay tribe,
the Battas of Sumatra, whose extraordinary cannibal practices we have
already detailed; especially in the circumstance of the three principal
divinities of the Battas having precisely the same functions assigned to
them with the three that occupy the same rank in the system of the New
Zealanders.[BK]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote BJ: Marae. With Maoris and Samoans the word means an open
space in a village; in the Tahitian, Mangaian, and Paumotan languages it
means a temple, or a place where rites were performed.]
[Footnote BK: The religion, and superstitions and legends of the Maoris
are dealt with in Sir George Grey's "Polynesian Mythology," Mr. S. Percy
Smith's "Hawaiki," articles by Mr. Elsdon Best in the "Transactions of
the New Zealand Institute," articles by that author and by Mr. Percy
Smith in the "Journal of the Polynesian Society," Mr. E. Tregear's "The
Maori Race," and Mr. J.C. Andersen's "Maori Life in Ao-tea."]