CHAPTER XXVI.
The mysterious “still small voice”—Samoan mythology—The man who pushed the Heavens up—The child of the Sun—A Figian version of the “Flood”—The Paradise of the Figian—Lying Ghosts—Singular case of abduction—The disobedient Naiogabui—All fair in love and war—The fate of poor Rokoua—The Samoan hades—Miscellaneous gods of the Samoans—A god for every village—The cup of truth—Mourning the destruction of a god’s image—The most fashionable god in Polynesia—Families marked for human sacrifice—“Tapu” or “tabu”—Its antiquity and wide-spread influence—Muzzled pigs and blindfolded chickens—Ceremony of releasing the porkers—Tremendous feast of baked pig—The tapu in New Zealand—A terrible tinder box—The sacred pole and the missionaries—The chief’s backbone—The Pakeka and the iron pot—One of the best uses of tapu—Its general advantages and disadvantages—Tapu among the Samoans—Witchcraft in New Zealand—Visit of a European to a “retired” witch—The religion of the Dayak—“Tapa,” “Tenahi,” “Iang,” and “Jirong”—Warriors’ ghosts—Religious rites and superstitions of the Sea Dayaks—The great god Singallong Burong—Belief in dreams among the Sea Dayaks—Story of the stone bull—Of the painted dog.
Religion, as signifying reverence of God and a belief in future rewards and punishments, may be said to have no existence among people who are absolutely savage. Belief in life hereafter is incompatible with non-belief in the existence of the soul, and difficult indeed would it be to show a thorough barbarian who did not repudiate that grand and awful trust. He is too much afraid of the mysterious thing to confess to being its custodian. Undoubtedly he is quite conscious of a power within him immensely superior to that which gives motion to his arms and legs, and invites him to eat when he is hungry. He “has ears and hears,” and “the still small voice” that speaks all languages and fits its admonitions to the meanest understanding bears the savage no less than the citizen company all the day long, noting all his acts and whispering its approvals and its censures of them; and when the savage reclines at night on his mat of rushes, the still small voice is still vigilant, and reveals for his secret contemplation such vivid pictures of the day’s misdoing, that his hands ache with so fervently clasping his wooden greegree, and he is rocked to sleep and horrid dreams with trembling and quaking fear.
But the savage, while he acknowledges the mysterious influence, has not the least notion as to its origin. To his hazy mind the word “incomprehensible” is synonymous with “evil,” and the most incomprehensible thing to him, and consequently the most evil, is death. With us it is anxiety as to hereafter that makes death terrible; with the savage death is detestable only as a gravedigger, a malicious spirit who snatches him away from the world—where his children and his wives are, and where tobacco grows, and palm-trees yield good wine,—who snatches him away from all these good things and every other, and shuts him in the dark damp earth to decay like a rotten branch.
Death therefore is, in his eyes, the king of evil, and all minor evils agents of the king, and working with but one aim though with seeming indirectness. This it is that makes the savage a miserable wretch—despite nature’s great bounty in supplying him with food without reaping or sowing, and so “tempering the wind” that the shelter of the boughs makes him a house that is warm enough, and the leaves of the trees such raiment as he requires. Through his constant suspicion he is like a man with a hundred jars of honey, of the same pattern and filled the same, but one—he knows not which—is poisoned. Taste he must or perish of hunger, but taste he may and perish of poison; and so, quaking all the time, he picks a little and a little, suspecting this jar because it is so very sweet, and that because it has a twang of acid, and so goes on diminishing his ninety-nine chances of appeasing his hunger and living, to level odds, that he will escape both hunger and poison and die of fright. Death is the savage’s poisoned honey-pot. He may meet it in the wind, in the rain; it may even (why not? he has known such cases) come to him in a sunray. It may meet him in the forest where he hunts for his daily bread! That bird that just now flitted by so suddenly and with such a curious cry may be an emissary of the king of evil, and now hastening to tell the king that there is he—the victim—all alone and unprotected in the forest, easy prey for the king if he comes at once! No more hunting for that day though half-a-dozen empty bellies be the consequence; away with spear and blow-gun, and welcome charms and fetiches to be counted and kissed and caressed all the way home—aye, and for a long time afterwards, for that very bird may still be perched a-top of the hut, peeping in at a chink, and only waiting for the victim to close his eyes to summon the grim king once more. In his tribulation he confides the secret of his uneasiness to his wife, who with affectionate zeal runs for the gree-gree-man, who, on hearing the case, shakes his head so ominously, that though even the very leopard-skin that hangs before the doorway be the price demanded for it, the most powerful charm the gree-gree-man has to dispose of must be obtained.
It is only, however, to the perfect savage—the Fan and Ougbi of Central Africa, the Andamaner of Polynesia, and some others—that the above remarks apply. If we take belief in the soul and its immortality as the test, we shall find the number of absolute barbarians somewhat less than at first sight appears; indeed, the mythological traditions of many savage people, wrapped as they invariably are in absurdity, will frequently exhibit in the main such close resemblance to certain portions of our Scripture history as to fill us with surprise and wonder. Take, for instance, the following examples occurring in Samoa, furnished by the Rev. George Turner:
“The earliest traditions of the Samoans describe a time when the heavens alone were inhabited and the earth covered over with water. Tangaloa, the great Polynesian Jupiter, then sent down his daughter in the form of a bird called the Turi (a snipe), to search for a resting-place. After flying about for a long time she found a rock partially above the surface of the water. (This looks like the Mosaic account of the deluge; but the story goes on the origin of the human race.) Turi went up and told her father that she had found but one spot on which she could rest. Tangaloa sent her down again to visit the place. She went to and fro repeatedly, and, every time she went up, reported that the dry surface was extending on all sides. He then sent her down with some earth, and a creeping plant, as all was barren rock. She continued to visit the earth and return to the skies. Next visit, the plant was spreading. Next time it was withered and decomposing. Next visit it swarmed with worms. And the next time had become men and women! A strange account of man’s origin. But how affectingly it reminds one of his end: ‘They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.’
“They have no consecutive tales of these early times; but we give the disjointed fragments as we find them. They say that of old the heavens fell down, and that people had to crawl about like the lower animals. After a time, the arrow-root and another similar plant pushed up the heavens. The place where these plants grew is still pointed out, and called the Te’engga-langi, or heaven-pushing place. But the heads of the people continued to knock on the skies. One day, a woman was passing along who had been drawing water. A man came up to her and said that he would push up the heavens, if she would give him some water to drink. ‘Push them up first,’ she replied. He pushed them up. ‘Will that do?’ said he. ‘No, a little further.’ He sent them up higher still, and then she handed him her cocoa-nut-shell water bottle. Another account says, that a person named Tütü pushed up the heavens; and the hollow places in a rock, nearly six feet long, are pointed out as his footprints. They tell about a man called Losi, who went up on a visit to the heavens. He found land and sea there, people, houses, and plantations. The people were kind to him and supplied him with plenty of food. This was the first time he had seen or tasted taro. He sought for some in the plantations and brought it down to the earth; and hence they say the origin of taro. They do not say how he got up and down. When the taro tree fell, they say its trunk and branches extended a distance of nearly sixty miles. In this and the following tale we are reminded of Jacob’s ladder.
“Two young men, named Punifanga and Tafalin, determined one afternoon to pay a visit to the moon. Punifanga said he knew a tree by which they could go up. Tafalin was afraid it might not reach high enough, and said he would try another plan. Punifanga went to his tree, but Tafalin kindled a fire, and heaped on cocoa-nut shells and other fuel so as to raise a great smoke. The smoke rose in a dense straight column, like a cocoa-nut tree towering away into the heavens. Tafalin then jumped on to the column of smoke, and went up and reached the moon long before Punifanga. One wishes to know what they did next, but here the tale abruptly ends, with the chagrin of Punifanga when he got up and saw Tafalin there before him, sitting laughing at him for having been so long on the way.