Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

3. The Egi, or nobles; all persons in any way related to the two former classes.

4. The priests.

5. The Matabooles, attendants on chiefs, managers of ceremonies, preservers of records, &c.

6. The Mooas, or younger sons or brothers of the Matabooles.

7. The Tooas, or common people, who practise such arts as are not dignified enough to pass from father to son, as cookery, club carving, shaving, or tattooing.

These ranks are so fixed and unalterable that they form a prominent feature in the Tongan conception of a future world. Rank, not merit, constitutes the title of admission to Bolotu. All noble souls arrive there and enjoy a power similar but inferior to that of the original deities, being capable, like the latter, of inspiring priests living on earth. The Matabooles also gain admittance to Bolotu, but are unable to cause priestly inspirations. The souls of the Tooas dissolve with the body, as too plebeian to find a place in Paradise.

In the Sandwich Islands, there were formerly three aristocratic orders—the first consisting of the king and queen, their relations, and the chief councillors; the second of the chiefs of dependent districts; the third of the chiefs of villages and of priests. Servile homage from all the inferior classes was paid to these three orders, but particularly to the priests and higher chiefs, their very persons and houses being accounted sacred, and the sight of them a peremptory signal for prostration. The people, as in mediæval Europe, were attached to the soil and transferred with it: but a strong customary law is said nevertheless to have regulated both the tenure of land and personal security.[210] If they had no voice in the government, they sometimes took part in public meetings, nor did the king ever resolve on matters of weight without the counsel of his principal chiefs. Yet government was more despotic in the Sandwich than in either the Society or the Fiji Islands. In Tahiti, public assemblies were held, in which the speakers did not hesitate to compare the state to a ship, of which the king was only the mast, but the landed nobility the ropes that kept it upright.[211]

Many savage tribes have succeeded, by speciously devised forms and ceremonies, in clothing arbitrary power with a cloak of legality, inviolably divine. The most remarkable of these devices is the famous institution of tabu, which, by transferring the divinity inherent in a king or chief to everything that comes in contact with him, early invested sovereign power with a most facile and elastic weapon of government. For the principle, that whatever a king touched became sacred to his use, supplied regal power with a most convenient immunity from the shackles of ordinary morality. A Fijian king, by giving his dress to an English sailor, enabled the latter to appropriate whatever food he chose to envelope with the train of his dress. Whatever house a Tahitian king or queen enters is vacated by its owners; the field they tread on becomes theirs; their clothes, their canoes, the very men who carry them, are invested with a sanctity the violation of which is death, and are regarded as precisely as holy as objects less, ostensibly associated with earthly necessities.

But whether or not the institution of tabu was a clever invention of kings for increasing their power, its inevitable extension reacted in time as a limitation to it. This may be illustrated from the Tongan Islands, where the regal power, owing probably to a long constitutional struggle between the rival claims to sovereignty of birth and merit, stood in a most anomalous position. For the king did not belong to the highest rank of the people, his title depending in part on birth, but principally on his reputation for personal strength and military capacity. Tooitonga and Veachi, the direct descendants of the gods who first visited the island, or (as we may perhaps rationalistically translate it) the direct descendants of the earliest kings, occupied a higher status than the actual king, and were honoured with acknowledgments of their divinity which even the king himself had to pay. To the posterity of bygone monarchs the actual king stood in the relation of a peasant to a prince, being expected, like anyone else, to sit down on the ground when they passed, though they might be his inferiors in wealth nor possessed of any direct power save over their own families and attendants. The dignity of the Tooitonga survived not only in his not being circumcised nor tattooed as other men, and in peculiar ceremonies attending his marriage or his burial, but in the more substantial offerings of the firstfruits of the year at stated periodical festivals. The king used to consult him before undertaking a war or expedition, though often regardless of the counsel offered; and in reference to the person of either descendant of the gods the king was subject to tabu, or even in reference to ordinary chiefs in any way related to them. If he but touched the body, the dress, or the sleeping mat of a chief nearer related to Tooitonga and Veachi than himself, he could only exempt himself from the inconveniences incurred by the violation of tabu by the dispensation attached to the ceremony of touching, with both his hands, the feet of such supernatural chief, or of some one his equal in rank.