Die heilige Sage der Polynesier — Kosmogonie und Theogonie

Abstract

PROF. BASTIAN, on a late journey made to enrich the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, stayed a short time in New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands, and there gathered some interesting information as to native traditions, some not yet published, and some which have been neglected (if ever met with) by European students. The documents now printed in a small volume all strengthen the opinion which has for years been gaining ground among anthropologists as to the civilisation of the Polynesians. It is true that they were found in Capt. Cook's time living in a barbaric state, and their scanty clothing and want of metals led superficial observers erea to class them as savages. But their beliefs and customs show plain traces of descent from ancestors who in some way shared the higher culture of Asiatic nations. At Wellington Prof. Bastian found Mr. John White, who, as a skilled translator of Maori, worked for Sir George Grey in bringing out the “Polynesian Mythology,” and has been engaged in the study of native lore ever since. He is about to publish the results of his long study with the aid of the Colonial Government, and we have here as a specimen one of those mystic Maori cosmogonies which make us fancy we are hearing some Buddhist or Gnostic philosopher pour out his dreamy metaphysics about the, origin of things. Out of the Primal Night, says the Maori poet, there divided itself Nothing, then came Darkness, then Seeking, and Following, and then such stages as Conception of Thought, Spirit Life, Desire, Coming into Form, Breath of Life, Space. All this is of a piece with the native Polynesian poetry in Taylor's “New Zealand,” and that lately published by Judge Fornander in Hawaii. The poem that begins with the time when there was no voice nor sound, no day nor night, may remind us of the famous hymn of the Rig Veda that begins “Nor aught nor naught existed.” We find here the well-known chant of Taaroa, how in the emptiness of space, when there was no earth nor sky nor sea, Taaroa passing into new forms became the foundation of the rocks and the sand of the sea, and the land of Hawaii was born as his shell. Prof. Bastian well compares this with the Scandinavian poem in the Edda, how there was no sand nor sea nor salt waves, no earth nor sky above, till Bor's sons made the mighty Midgard-earth. He points out, as he has already done, the curious likeness between the Scandinavian story of the fishing up of the monstrous Midgard—snake; and the South Sea Island tale of Maui fishing up the island of New Zealand. Not less striking is such an analogy as the Polynesian Taaroa mating with his own energy in female form, like a Hindu god with his Sakti. The author may well ask, are these people, with such far echoes of Crphic, Chaldean, Buddhist philosophy, the simple playful children of nature on whom we look down as representing the lowest rungs in the ladder of development? In Hawaii the German anthropologist learnt much from King Kalakaua, who is thoroughly initiated in the religious ideas of his royal predecessors, who used to have the eyes of their enemies offered them by the high priest in the stone bowl which his majesty still keeps as a curiosity. Out of the royal library he produced a MS. temple-chant, written about the beginning of this century, containing a cosmogony, of which Prof. Bastian reproduces as much as he had time to have translated. It has real poetry in it, and as a piece of child-like philosophy it is not without interest in its enumeration of the orders of beings, the grubs and worms, the sea-eggs and mussels, the seaweed in the ocean watched by the grass on land, the cranes and the gulls at sea watched by the hawks on land, and so on with trees and other creatures, till at last the gods come into being, and man rises out of the night. For a specimen of barbaric science may be mentioned the Maori myth, told to the author by Mr. Davis, how the Moon arose out of the ocean, and still keeps the traces of this marine origin in its phases, which follow the ebb and flow of the tide.

Die heilige Sage der Polynesier — Kosmogonie und Theogonie.

Von Adolf Bastian. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1881.)