Once in every year, Tane had a new dress, and was invested with great solemnity. He was brought out of his house by his priest and laid on his bed, having four lesser gods on either side of him. The chiefs of the district stood each in front of his own god, and the priests stood round Tane as being the great god of them all. The old garments were then removed, and examination made into the interior of the idol, which was hollow, and contained various objects, such as scarlet feathers, beads, bracelets, and other valuables. Those that began to look shabby were removed, and others inserted to take their place, and the idols were then invested in their new robes.
Meanwhile, a vast amount of kava was prepared—the natives saying that it was equal in cubic measure to the marae—and a scene of drunken debauch took place, lasting for several days, even the priests being so intoxicated that they were unable to stand while performing their duties, but had to chant their incantations while lying on the ground. This stage of the idol-dressing is represented in the fine [engraving] on the opposite page. At the expiration of the three days a special god called Moorai was produced and stripped, and, as soon as his garments were removed, violent rain showers fell, as a signal for all the idols to be removed to their respective houses. The greatest care was taken that no woman should witness this ceremony, and if a female of any age had been detected coming within a certain distance of the marae, she would be at once killed, and even her father, husband, or brother, would have been among the first to strike her down.
The trees which decorated this marae are the banyans (Ficus Indica), one of which is described by Mr. Bennett as being seventy feet in girth at the principal stem, and throwing out vast horizontal branches, each of which is supported by a root which looks more like the trunk than the root of a tree. “More than forty of these we counted, standing like a family of earth-born giants about their enormous parent. A circle drawn round all these auxiliary stems measured a hundred and thirty-two feet in circumference, while a circle embracing the utmost verge of their lateral ramification was not less than four hundred and twenty feet.
“The upper stories (if such we may call them) of this multiform tree presented yet more singular combination of interesting and intertwisting boughs, like Gothic arches, circles, and colonnades, propped as by magic in mid-air. These were occasionally massy or light, and everywhere richly embellished with foliage, through which the flickering sunshine gleamed in long rays that lost themselves in the immensity of the interior labyrinth, or danced in bright spots upon the ground black with the shadows of hundreds of branches, rising tier above tier, and spreading range above range, aloft and around.”
This tree was one of the places in which the bodies of human beings were offered, being packed in leaf baskets and hung to the branches. One branch, which was hugely thick and strong, and ran horizontally at a small height from the ground, was pointed out as the principal gibbet, on which human sacrifices, thousands in number, have been offered century after century.
Tane, all powerful though he was, labored under one disadvantage. He had a very long tail, and whenever he wished to leave his house, rise into the air, and dart through the sky on some errand of mischief, he was restrained by his long tail, which was sure to become entangled in some object, which from that time became sacred to the god. For example, the magnificent tree which has just been described was several times the means of detaining Tane on earth, and the several branches round which his tail was twisted became tapu at once. On one side of his house there was a large stone, which had become sacred in consequence of having arrested the flight of the god.
SOCIETY ISLANDERS DRESSING THE IDOLS.
(See [page 1066].)
This idea of the long and streaming tail has evidently been derived from meteors and comets, which are supposed to be the gods passing through the air, and whenever a native saw one of them, he always threw off his upper garments, and raised a shout in honor of the passing god. Mr. Bennett suggests that the permanent tail attached to Tane is in all probability a commemoration of some very magnificent comet with a tail measuring eighty or ninety degrees in length.