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;