RELIGION IN OLD MYTHS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22444, 13 June 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

RELIGION IN OLD MYTHS

Diffusion, of Culture

By KOTARE

WBEN it is discovered that among widely separated peoples there is a similarity of custom and belief, two possible explanations at once present themselves. There is the view associated with the name of Tylor and later with Freud, that similar needs and urges produced similar results in very different environments. These customs and beliefs developed independency as the expression of a fundamental unity that linked up all humanity on its deepest levels. Tha human mind, because it was human, facing the same problems, arrived at practically the same explanations and solutions. The second view,; associated with Rivers and Elliott Smith, and adopted increasingly by modern ethnologists, postulates diffusion from an original centre.) Certain ideas and customs arose in' the morning of human development in some definite area, and were spread throughout the world by migration and contact. They would modify, gather accretions, change emphasis, under local conditions.But in some form they would persist, a kind of social heritage bridging the millenniums of time and earth's widest spaces. The Polynesian migrations that peopled New Zealand and produced the Maori race obviously brought their culture with them and established it here. What elements were added under the new conditions, the change from a tropical to a temperate environment, the dependence on new sources of food supply, and the other factors modifying the Maori way of life, we know in part. Yet the original element of custom and belief was always there as a basis. Correspondences We should expect to find, then, definite correspondences between the religious ideas of the Maori and those of the peoples that travelled west from the original home of the Indo-European race. Elsdon Best, who has for all time the secret religion of the ancient Maori as far as it can be ascertained to-day, says that the Maori story of the long contest between Tane and Whiro is but a repetition of the old Persian concept of the struggle between Lieht and Darkness. " In the Persian version the two contending powers possess a double character: one represents light and goodness, the other darkness and evil. The Maori myth "makes Whiro represent darkness and evil, while Tane personifies light, but can hardly be said to stand for goodness or virtue." The unceasing conflict between darkness and light would, of course, be one of the first facts of nature to impress itself on the primit tive mind.

The Maori, naturally poetic and imaginative, embellished the original idea, personifying the competing forces ill his own wAy. " The world was, in the beginning, but it lay in darkness."as John White records the tradition* This world was in the form ot a globe,an idea probably suggested by the arch of the heavens. But it had two parts,; an upper and a lower, Kangi and Papa. : Between them lay in darkness the gods, their children. Tanemahuta suggested that the two parts should be separated by hoisting Rangi upwards. The other gods tried to raise Rangi but he waa too much for them. Then Tane lay down, thrust upwards with his feet, stood on his head, and at last the heaven was separated from the earth. Another god with his clouds propped Rangi in position. Tane, Light-B ringer

But Tawliirimatea, the god of the winds, or Whiro, according to Best's version, objected strongly to the separation. He was a true conservative and hated new. ways. He decided to punish his presumptuous brethren and despatched the rain and hail and sleet to swamp the newlv-delivered earth. One spot alone, like Ararat, remained above the waters; this was occupied by Tumatauenga, the god of war. Wohlers, who collected the tradition® in the southern part of New Zealand, notes that Tane after the liberation ot Papa looked up to Rangi, his father, and was distressed to see him looking sad and sorrowful. He decided he would brighten up the dejected old man and made many ornaments for bis decoration. He climbed to heaven and fixed his ornaments as stars. When he returned to the earth-mother he decided the effect was too uniform; so ha climbed again with fish which he established as* the milky way, and he also rearranged the stars into mom attractive patterns.

When Tane saw how beautiful thai heaven now appeared he was not satisfied with the dull sameness of his mother. He took Earth's crippled children which lay formless on her surface, and planted them as trees. Ati first he put them in head up, but the effect did not please him. So he turned them upside down and their hair be« came roots and their legs branches. All this well-meant decoration by Tane did not satisfy the separated parents. Rangi" mourned for Papa and his tears fell in the rain and dewdrops. Papa's sighs took the form of the morning mists drifting down the valleys and along the shore.

A Supreme Being The faith behind the Maori mythology, however, was not revealed to Wohlers, if indeed there were any initiates in the south who could have told him. It was the property of the very few, and these the highest in. priestly dignity. The sacred traditions communicated to Best show that the Maoris had at the core of their religion a faith in one Syipreme Being. He was " lo the Parent, lo the Parentless. lo the Great, To of the Hidden Face." No image of him might be made. _So sacred was be that no one knew just what he was like. So holy was his name that it might not be uttered. Best notes that the Maoris were horrified at the glib references of the white man to his deity. Only a very few of the highest rank of priests wore initiated into his ritual, and probably they alone knew his name. He remained always infinitely remote, without incarnation. His name lo suggests many possibilities. Some of the deities in Western Asia and Southern Europe have as essential parts of their names the same letters: the Hebrew Jahweh, or, in the form for public use, Jehovah, the Jove; and there is record 01 the exact,'*' form, 10. We cannot build with certainty on a similarity of letters, but the name of a god would.be likely to preserve its shape through its very sacredness Whatever the truth of the matter, it tits into what we know of the diffusion of culture. The roots of Maoridoni run deep.