Polynesian Religion

Two related concepts run across Polynesia, and both have been badly served by their English borrowings.

Mana is efficacy: power that shows itself in results. It is held by gods, by ancestors, by chiefs, by objects, and by people who are good at things, and it is demonstrated rather than asserted, a successful voyage, a productive garden, a won battle, a fishhook that catches. Because it is inherited through senior descent lines and also earned, it explains both why chiefly rank matters and why rank can be lost. The New Age use of the word to mean a generic energy has little to do with this.

Tapu is the restriction that protects and results from mana. A person, place, object or activity that is tapu is set apart and may not be approached or handled without the right standing or the right rite; its opposite, noa, is the ordinary or freed state, and rituals exist to move things between them. The English word taboo derives from tapu, encountered by Cook's expedition in Tonga in 1777, and it has since drifted a long way toward simply meaning forbidden, which loses the sacredness that is half the meaning.

The two concepts did practical work. Tapu on a fishing ground or a stand of trees closed it for a season and functioned as conservation, whatever else it was. Tapu regulated contact between ranks, between men and women, and around birth, death, warfare and food. Breaking it was expected to produce harm without anyone needing to enforce it, though enforcement also existed.

Both survive in current use. Mana appears in ordinary New Zealand English and in political speech about standing and authority; tapu still governs conduct around death, burial grounds and food in many communities, including Christian ones, and is written into some public protocol.

Related names for the same gods appear across islands separated by enormous distances, which is one of the clearest signs of common origin. Tangaroa (Kanaloa in Hawaii, Ta'aroa in Tahiti) is associated with the sea, Tane (Kane) with forests and often with the making of the first human, Tu (Ku) with war, and Rongo (Lono) with cultivated food and peace. Rank varies by island group: Tangaroa is the creator in Tahitian accounts, while in Maori tradition the primary act is the separation of Rangi the sky and Papa the earth by their children. The trickster demigod Maui, who fishes up islands and slows the sun, is known from Hawaii to Aotearoa.

Below the great gods, and in daily life often above them in importance, are ancestors. Genealogy, whakapapa in Maori, is itself a religious matter: it establishes descent from gods and ancestral beings, and with it rights to land, titles and knowledge. Recited genealogies were memorised to great depth and are still central in formal speech.

Ritual centred on precincts rather than roofed buildings. The marae of central and eastern Polynesia, and the heiau of Hawaii, were walled or paved open enclosures with uprights and platforms, where priests presented offerings and conducted rites of war, harvest, and the installation of chiefs. The largest were state institutions; smaller ones served families. In parts of Polynesia, including Tahiti and Hawaii, the most important rites at the highest-ranking sites included human sacrifice, generally of war captives or offenders.

Priests were trained specialists, in some islands taught in formal houses of learning, and their knowledge covered navigation, genealogy, chant, carving and healing as well as ritual. In New Zealand the word marae shifted meaning and now denotes the community meeting ground and its buildings, which remains the central institution of Maori life.

The older religion gave way across Polynesia within a few generations of sustained European contact, and the process is often told too simply.

In Hawaii the kapu system was overthrown from inside. In November 1819, months before the first American missionaries arrived in April 1820, Kamehameha II ate publicly with his mother Keopuolani and with Kaahumanu in deliberate breach of the eating kapu, and ordered the heiau dismantled and images burned. Resistance was defeated in battle at Kuamoo. The reasons argued by historians include the erosion of the system by years of contact with foreigners who broke it without visible consequence, the political interest of chiefly women excluded by it, and disruption from disease and trade.

In Tahiti the London Missionary Society landed in 1797 and made almost no progress for fifteen years. The turn came through Pomare II, who allied with the missionaries for political and material reasons, won a decisive battle in 1815, and was baptised in 1819; conversion of the population followed his. Elsewhere (Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Aotearoa, and later), Christianity spread through similar chiefly conversions and, very substantially, through Polynesian missionaries sent from island to island.

Introduced disease shaped all of this. Populations fell catastrophically in many islands, and priesthoods whose authority rested on securing wellbeing were discredited by their inability to stop it.

Polynesia is now heavily Christian, with high church attendance and churches central to community and diaspora life. But the older material was not erased. Genealogies, chants, place names, carving and protocol persisted, sometimes inside the churches. From the 1970s the Hawaiian cultural renaissance and parallel movements elsewhere revived language, hula in its ritual forms, and long-distance navigation, marked by the voyage of the Hokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 without instruments. Some heiau and marae have been restored and rededicated, and traditional protocol is used at public occasions. Practitioners today range from Christians who regard mana and tapu as cultural inheritance to a smaller number reviving the older worship directly.