Lolóma, or two years in cannibal-land: A story of old Fiji

by Henry Britton

Within the last 45 years more than 100,000 persons, or two-thirds of the whole population of Fiji, have abandoned their old gods, in obedience to new influences to which their country has been subjected during that period. Some account of the now rapidly departing religious beliefs of this people, supplementary to the information conveyed in the story, will be interesting to those who are curious in such matters.

GODS AND THEIR SHRINES.

The history of the higher class gods of Cannibal-land is the history, painted by poets and exaggerated by garrulous retailers of old traditions, of kings and chieftains, heroes and heroines, who, no less human than their worshippers, once walked this earth, fretting and fuming away their lives in it, though not without leaving behind some claim to be remembered by the generations of men, women, and children who were to come after them.

The study of Fijian mythology suggests that in past ages one great master-mind threw its influence over the untamed elements of destruction then at work upon the human race in this country, and subjected them to its will. Such a hero as the possessor of this power must have been, would before his death glory in having reached a position which enabled him to send out his sons and minions to represent him in all the conquered districts and islands of his empire. These deputy governors or chiefs in the course of time would grow as ambitious and heroic as their great and now deified ancestor. What he had laboriously worked up into one great whole, would at this point turn again towards disunion. The breaking-up process would have to be perpetuated in order to satisfy and satiate the wild and savage ambition of an ever-multiplying host of ungovernable aspirants after dominion. The ever-remembered “Great Father” would from the moment of his apotheosis continue to rise in the minds of each succeeding generation from mere humanity to divinity, until at last he would be found, as he has been by us, in the throne of another but now unknown God, who preceded him. His sons and sons’ sons, who had divided and subdivided every divisible part of the original kingdom among them, would at death ascend to god-like ranks in the spirit-world, and be regarded thereafter by the people they had governed as among their chief deities. As this god-creating work proceeded through each succeeding generation, the world of gods ere long came to be an almost perfect copy of the world of men, and followed all the vicissitudes of its fortune. So long as the nation continued to recede from unity, so long did its gods continue to increase, until the tribes, burning with an enthusiastic desire for divinities of every class and name, at length started on a furious race to see which at last should be able to boast the greatest number. The breaking-up of the nation produced new gods for each province. The division of the provinces called into the divine circles hosts who but just before, being only human, were both little and unknown. New gods sprang up with every slight addition to a tribe; a god was called into being with each new-born child, and every death added a god to the long since countless number.

Such was the character of Fiji’s religion before the presence of the white man began to turn the current another way. While, politically, the nation was as a vessel shivered into a thousand pieces, religiously it was like one that had been dashed into a million atoms, which, though found without cohesion, were not without marks of having once cohered. Polytheism then was, and in many places still is, the religion of cannibal-land. But the term fails to express the thing to which by general consent it is applied, so infinitely numerous are the deities which have been crowded into the vast pantheon of the Fijian’s imagination. Every nation, tribe, clan, and individual in Fiji vied one with another in making the most of their gods, and in seeking to hold them up as mighty and terrible facts. From a study of the attributes assigned to them by priests and people, it soon became evident that great and almost numberless differences existed. These, however, were not of such a nature as to prevent a classification of the gods. As the work of investigation proceeded these divinities arranged themselves in three interminably long and deep columns. The first may be called aristocratic gods, the second middle-class gods, and the third democratic gods; not, however, meaning thereby that they are the gods of the several orders of people which these terms represent, but that among themselves they stand in these relative positions to each other.

Advancing to the phalanx of aristocratic gods, it is observable that it is composed of different ranks. Standing apart from it, yet looking towards it with dignified admiration, in serpent shrine, is the Great Father of the host, whose title to deity of the highest degree is universally acknowledged, and whose right to which no rival has ever risen throughout the heathen era powerful enough to wrest from him. So high above all others was this god, and so important were the many works he did for his cannibal children, that it will be necessary to devote some future space to him individually.

In the second but not much inferior rank of these nobles of the god-world, standing by themselves, are the sons of this Great Father. They are his own sons, who for unknown periods were his chief assistants and the generals of his armies; but in the onward flow of ages they climbed up, some by patient waiting and endurance, others by rebellious ambition, to thrones of power equal in their own eyes in everything but its extent to that of their grand-parent. Of this rank is the “Scrutinizer,” variously know as the “Shiner,” “Lord One-tooth,” the “Seer,” and the “Immovable.” Temples were reared to him in every tribe for he was greatly to be feared. He was believed to be the cleverest of his class in the manipulation of that metamorphosing power which more or less distinguished these high divinities. At one time and place he would be seen as an enormous giant, awing the people by the ponderousness of his limbs and his heaven-towering head The cloud-capped mountains were mole-hills to him, and the race of men who feared his nod, ants scrambling awkwardly up their sides. At another place and time he would be reported by his priests as an ugly dwarf, all head, aided in his miserable attempts to crawl about by thin long hands and arms and twisted trailing legs. To-day he would be met as a black man of the ordinary height, and to-morrow as a red one. The next day he might be seen with a head of hair black, crisp, and shiny, like that worn by a great chief in the heyday of youth, and the day following with one crowned with the snows of many years. Like the “enchanted horse,” he could travel with wondrous swiftness, often transporting himself from the Windward to the Leeward Islands and back again in a time and manner utterly incomprehensible by the human mind. Were he only half as popular now as he used to be, he would challenge for speed that modern and infinitely more useful god of the white man—electricity. Great, however, as was his power to assume any form he pleased, it was nothing to that with which, as his first name implies, he looked into the minds of men, and made himself acquainted with all their doings.

The third and last order of this divine aristocracy includes all gods descended from the sons of the “great source” down to the third, fourth, fifth, and last generation. As time swept by, these gods scattered themselves like locusts over all the islands, eating up everything where they or their priests, which is the same thing, alighted, leaving their worshippers poor indeed. They insinuated themselves into every place which had not yet named them with reverence.

In the first rank of “middle class” deities are gods of no parentage. They have neither come down from the class above nor ascended from the one below them, but are an entirely unique and original order sprung from trees and from what the wise men of the land call their “mother earth.” Numerically they are as formidable as any other army of gods whose history the poets and priests have handed down to us. To give an idea of the popular belief as to the origin of these powers, it will be enough to name a single example.

One day a man went off to his garden to dig some yams. Yams are grown in little cone-shaped hillocks from one to three feet high. On opening one of these mounds, expecting to find therein three or four fine yams, the man was struck dumb at seeing not yams, but a living being, who rose straight up out of the ground, and stood before him. What could the poor fellow do but at once adopt this genius as his God? and if he had an eye to business, as most Fijians have, when the business affects their own interests, what less would he be likely to do than to declare himself henceforth this earth-sprung God’s duly appointed priest? All of which, whether predetermined or not, was accordingly done. In this way thousands of new Gods have come to light, and as many cunning priests been self-ordained.