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Hierarchy and humanity in

Marshall Sahlins

The hero of the Maori undergoes a to remove the tapu of death, permitting him to pass out of the state of mourning. Playing the priestly part, his father’s brother stuffs cooked food into the mouths of the images, then recites an incantation that ends: Be thou [] undermost, While I am uppermost. Give me your mana to strike down. Close tight your spirit-devouring teeth Close tight your man-devouring teeth (Shortland 1882:62). The propitiation is the god’s defeat. But then, cooked food, because it has lost its reproductive cum divine nature, is notoriously polluting. In Polynesian , men approach the divine with a curious mixture of submission and hubris, as in the successive phases of a sacrificial procedure that will in the end put the god at a distance and allow men to appropriate nature to their own benefit. I should perhaps say “expropriate”. In the beginning, “everything is full of Jove.” The universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy. Natural means of human existence are forms or descendants of the god, and social production is a kind of cannibalism generalise. Therefore, the involves such deceptions as a pollution in the guise of a propitiation or the symbolic exchange of first-things in return for the whole land. The advantages won from the life-giving , however, can only be provisional and are eventually tragical. People die. Hawaiians and Maori are at the extremes, north and south, of the Central Polynesian languages and cultures. Yet their cosmic schemes resemble each other closely, to the extent that the divine dramatis personae have the same names as well as analogous functions. The principal difference between them is hierarchy: “The main acting units of Hawaiian mythology are chiefs (or chiefs as em­ bodiments of qualities belonging to particular genealogical lines),” as Schrempp (manuscript) writes, “while the main acting units of are corporate tribal groups.” I try to show this by compar­ ing certain relations of Maori agriculture with the Hawaiian

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(Makahiki) Festival, which I argue is the same thing transposed to the register of kingship. I begin by talking about what is common to both: the general cosmic system of production. My mentors for Maori are particularly Johansen (1954, 1958) and Jean Smith (1974); forHawai‘i, Valeri (in press). The great Hawaiian creation chant — “Beginning [-in-] deep-darkness” — marks the origin of the universe by the appearance of the Pleiades (Beckwith 1972). In the annual ceremonial cycle, the rising of the Pleiades at sunset in late autumn signifies the beginning of the Hawaiian year: the rebirth of nature presided over by the fertilising god , who returns at this from the spiritual domain or homeland of Kahiki. Yet in the Kumulipo chant, neither Lono nor any other determinate god had presided over the Creation. As in many Maori cosmogonies, the world begins in and as generative-spirit-in- itself. This self-reproductive power — or what is the same thing in a stative form, autonomous being — is perhaps the essence of atua ‘Polynesian ’. During the long ‘night’ of world-spirit, the epochs of ‘darkness’ or pō in Hawaiian and Maori alike, the work of the universe is a project of sexual reproduction, of which the main entities are themselves figurations. Maori generate the Sky-Father (Rangi) and Earth-Mother (Papa) out of Nothingness (Kore) through a genealogy of Beings whose succession seems to describe human procreation: that is, from Conception to Increase, Swelling, Thought, Memory, Con­ sciousness, Desire. Alternatively the earliest stages of creation are figured as forms of vegetal growth. Polynesian is perhaps the purest expression of an ancestral cult, not because one’s progenitors are gods but because procreation is divine. In the Hawaiian Kumulipo chant, only after the seven initial ages of natural generation are the gods as such born — as siblings to man­ kind. God and man appear together, locked in fraternal strife over the means of their reproduction — their older sister. Begun in the eighth epoch of creation, this struggle makes the transition from the pō ‘night’ of self-generation to the ao ‘day’ of humankind. Indeed, the struggle is presented as the condition of the possibility of human life in a world in which the lifegiving powers are divine. The end of the eighth chant thus celebrates a victory: Man spread about now, man was here now; It was day [ ao\ (Beckwith 1972:98). The older sister of god and man, La‘ila‘i, is the first-born to all the eras of previous creation. By Hawaiian theory, as first-born La‘ila‘i is the legitimate heir to creation, while as woman she is uniquely able to transform divine into human existence. The issue in her brothers’ struggle to possess her is accordingly cosmological in scope and political in form. The action engages the first two brothers. Described in certain genealogies as twins, they are identified directly in the chant as “Ki‘i, a man” and “Kāne, a god”. But sincek ii means ‘image’ and kdne means ‘man’ (in the sense of male), everything has already been said: the first Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 197 god is ‘man’ and the first man is ‘god’. Accordingly, in the chant the ontological rank of god and man is reversed by La‘ila‘i’s actions. She “sits sidewise”, meaning she takes a second husband, Ki‘i. She descends from heaven and a union with the god, and her children by the man Ki‘i are born before her children by the god Kāne. Thus the descendants of the man are senior: There was whispering, lip-smacking and clucking, Smacking, tut-tutting, head-shaking, Sulking, sullenness, silence, Kane kept silence refused to speak, Sullen, angry, resentful With the woman for her progeny . . . She slept with Ki‘i, Kane suspected the first-born, became jealous . . . Kane was angry and jealous because he slept last with her, His descendants would henceforth belong to the younger line, The children of the elder would be lord: First through La‘ila‘i, first through Ki‘i, Child of the two bom in the heavens there Came forth (Beckwith 1972:106). In the succeeding generations, the victory of the human line is secured by the repeated marriages of the sons of men to the daughters of gods, to the extent that the divinity of Kāne is totally absorbed by the heirs of Ki‘i. It is the paradigmatic model of Hawaiian of usurpation. The same eternal and cosmic triad is at work in the of Hawaiian kingship: displacement of the senior and prince by an upstart younger brother, mediated by the capture of the royal wife (see Valeri and Kaeppler this volume). But this is a characteristically Hawaiian, thus hierarchical, version of a general Polynesian idea of the human condition: that men are compelled to secure their own existence by inflicting a defeat upon the god, appropriating thus the female power — the bearing earth. The Maori of the divine children of , Sky- Father and Earth-Mother, is the classical Polynesian statement of this promethean contest (Grey 1855; White 1855, 1897). Locked together in a primordial coupling that left no space or light for their progeny, Heaven and Earth were divided by Tāne, parent and body of trees, who in an act likened to an original parricide stood upon his head, pressed against the Earth-Mother and rent the Sky-Father from her embrace. Tāne is also parent of mankind, or more exactly of the first woman, and by pushing Rangi to a distance he made it possible for his human descendants to enter a world of light ( ao mdrama) and to inherit the Earth (Papa). However, it was man’s death or more pre­ cisely a human sacrifice that fixed the Heavens in place. The fierce brother of Tāne, and also ancestor of men, Tū-mata-uenga slays a minor Kaupeka (the name means ‘Offering’) and uses his body to make the adzes that cut the poles that propped the Heavens up. That was the world that Tū built, and the Polynesian paradigm of the 198 Marshall Sahlins

sacrifice. The attribution of a victim identified with the sacrifier distances the god from nature — or transposes divinity from the immanent to the invisible (Valeri in p ress) — so that mankind can safely consume the world. Such separation of Heaven and Earth or ao and p ō “is the proper substance of creation”, Johansen says, “what makes the world fit to live in for a Maori” (1954:85). If the price of this separation is reciprocally human life, we should not forget it was first achieved by means of a cosmic crime. Maori speak of Tāne’s exploit as “an act of rebellion on the part of the children toward their parents, as the first act of disobedience, the first wrong committed” (Best 1924, vol. 1:96). Tāne’s heroic crime brought death, too, in a generic way, as an attribute of human life. This world is te ao matemate ‘the day of death’. For events led to the creation of woman, who appears as the origin of misfortune as well as the means of life. Agent of the transfor­ mation between divine and human, ta p u and n o a ‘free’, woman is the mediator also of the relation between life and death. By such means Tāne had already lost his ta p u ,a ritual demise, since in the course of pushing away the Heavens he was forced to pollute himself by putting his head — which is sacred — in the Earth — which is female. In the sequel, Tāne as “Tāne the Fertiliser” develops an excessive sexual urge which sends him scurrying about the universe in search of the u h a ‘the female element’. He eventually succeeds in finding this notorious ‘house of misfortune’: Papa said to Rangi: ‘Let our offspring resemble us. Let us endow them with organs, even as we are endowed. We will give them eight such, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, one mouth and one other [i.e., anus].’ Of these, the two eyes were to see with, the two nostrils to carry off humours, the mouth to eat with, that man might be nourished. But Tāne would not agree to these words of Papa, he demanded nine organs. Papa, the wise mother, was right, and Tāne was wrong. It came about this way: Tāne demanded of Rangi — ‘Where is the uha [female element]?’ Rangi replied: ‘The abode of misfortune [the vagina] is below, the abode of life is above’. . . . The latter is the mouth. Man eats food and so preserves strength and life. But the whare o aitua [‘abode of misfortune’] is an organ that pertains only to the female element. It was the quest of Tāne that was the means of introducing death into the world. Men and birds, reptiles, fish and insects, likewise the offspring of Tāne, all alike know death. According to the knowledge of the Maori people, the whare o aitua is the cause of death (Best 1925a, vol. 1:757). As in another famous promethean tradition, woman is the “beautiful evil” bestowed by the gods in repayment for a criminal de­ fiance (Vernant 1979). In a series of exotic sexual experiments, the craven Tāne in search of the u h a first produced various trees, shrubs, birds and insects. Finally, he conceived the human ancestress Hine- titama by mating with a female form divinely fashioned from the m o n s V e n e ris of Earth (Papa). At the climax of this scene, “Tiki [the phallus] dies.” Maori think of sex as a battle that women win, turning the death (detumescence) of the man into the life of the people (child). Maori Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 199 say, “the genitals of women are killers of men.” Tāne’s story proceeds to make this point for the species as a whole. He mates with his own daughter who, upon discovering Tāne is her father, flees from their incestuous association to the Underworld, opening the path of death to her descendants. The Underworld is again the p ō or place of spirit, as for that matter is the womb, and the ancestress accordingly is known as ‘Great-woman-of-the-night’, Hine- nui-te-pō. Later, Maui — another famous deceiver of gods and benefactor of men — will be crushed to death in the vagina of this ancestress, in a vain attempt to win immortality for humanity. Analogously, Valeri (in p ress) tells of the mortality discovered by Hawaiian men upon leaving the temple, to mix again with women: “The appeal of women reveals the illusory character of the immortalite sacrificiel; it coincides, precisely, with death.” The sacrifice, remember, is what separated the Heavens. The Kumulipo chant had represented these elementary relation­ ships as siblingship. In the primordial cosmic triangle, one recognises the structure of the Central Polynesian sibling system, with its basic contrast of same-sex and opposite-sex categories. Older and younger brother are joined in a double and contradictory relation of identity (brotherhood) and differentiation (seniority). Between brother and sister, there is complementarity without (explicit) seniority, and more than the suggestion in terminology and conduct that they are gods to each other. The contrast between older and younger brother rehearses a well-known and productive Polynesian opposition — for which the best expression may be the Dumezilian gravitas and celeritas (see Sahlins 1981). In action, these are the two ritual moments of suppli­ cation and appropriation of the life-giving gods. The correlated dis­ tinctions of status, as between the chief of the blood ( ariki) and the warrior (toa) or the priest and the prophet, are likewise to be defined by the difference between participation in the godhead ( tapu) and a human counterposition (noa). So the senior brother is to the cadet as god is to man. Legend and sentiment, then, generally imitate the paradoxes of the Kumulipo by making the younger brother the pre­ ferred victor in all confrontations between them. Such is the common­ place outcome, the rights of seniority notwithstanding, in the epics «nd practices of dynastic succession. The brother-sister relation is the privileged access to divinity in so far as the work of woman is the transformation between spirit and man, ta p u and n o a .The same dynastic legends that tell of the triumph of the younger brother over the older will not omit the strategic marriage to a ranking woman that secured the usurper’s victory — and in Hawai‘i precisely gave access to a chiefly ta p u .But the female role is in this far more general, cosmological, and applies as well to the bear­ ing earth as to the woman proper. There is a celebrated Maori chant relating the contention between the brother gods, Tū and Bongo, over their garden, the name of which was Pohutukawa. Pohutukawa, the Maori elder told Elsdon Best, “stands for the world” (1902:11-2). It is 200 Marshall Sahlins

also the species of tree by which depart from this world to the spirit world (Reinga): just as woman, it is the connection between the two worlds. So to close the cycle, the Maori staple crop, , came into the human world as the offspring of the ancestress (Pani) — just as was born of woman (Ho‘ohokukalani) in Hawai‘i. The woman or the earth nourishes a life whose source is always divine but whose man struggles to make his own. Man turns out to be the avatar of Tū, who fought with his brother Rongo over the world.

MAORI

All of the major gods (ancestors), such as Tāne, Rongo, , have forms of themselves in nature. Trees and birds are descendants of Tāne; the sweet potato is Rongo; fish, Tangaroa; fernroot, Haumia. Only the fiercest, the warrior Tū — Tū-mata-uenga ‘Tū of-dreadful countenance’ — has no such “natural” form. Tū is man. The one who lives on all the others. At birth the male child is separated from the night-world of spirit (po) and brought into his human world ( ao) by priestly rites which en­ dow him with the martial attributes of Tū. The incantations bestow ferocity, strength, bravery, skill in wielding weapons and in seizing men: And acquire the power of Tu, Possess itl Hold!. Come forth to the world of being To the world of light (Best 1902:21). The are the same as warriors undergo before battle to enter into the tapu of Tū, and again after battle to fix their courage as they re­ enter normal life. Birth is likewise a kind of human triumph, an appropriation of divine life by mankind. The birtii therefore opposes Tū to other spirits, and sees their supersession by him. Tāne is transcended and defeated. The child’s separation from the pō consists in severing the umbilical cord, the term for which, iho, is synonymous with the pith or strength of a tree, hence a form of Tāne. Indeed, as the placenta is also known as the whenua ‘earth’, the physiology of birth recapitulates the primordial separation of Heaven and Earth by Tāne, or else the god’s original fructification of the Earth. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony. So the father chants over his new-born son. It was he [i.e., Tāne] who put the poles of heaven above us, Then you were born to the world of light. But Percy Smith tells of the severing (crushing?) of the umbilical cord (Tāne) by means of a war club (Tū) (Smith 1897:82). Or the warrior-child is opposed to Rongo, parent of sweet potato and source of fertility. The incantations of birth bestow strength also in tilling food. For Maori, planting and war are alternate fields of con­ flict: war is the continuation of agriculture by other means. “He who is brave in cultivating,” says the proverb, “will not fail in battle”. Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 201

Likewise at the season of collecting birds’ eggs, when the ta p u of T āne the parent of birds is removed from the forest, the incantation con­ cludes: Now Tū is great. Now Tu can eat (Grey 1857; Smith 1974:45). All this is to say that in his essential relations to the universe, notably including the relations of production, man is a warrior. Human biography thus recapitulates cosmogony in another way. For in the sequel to Tāne’s separation of the primordial parents Heaven and Earth, their divine offspring engage in a series of fratricidal conflicts, with the final result the triumph of the warrior Tu — or the conquest by man of the natural sources of human existence. Beside Tāne, he of trees and birds, the vanquished were Tangaroa or the fishes, Haumia the fernroot, and Rongo-maraeroa the k ū m a ra ‘sweet potato’. At first Tāne, who had reversed and thus polluted himself when he pushed away Heaven (Rangi), together with these other brothers, bent before Tāwhiri, the Winds, who was leagued with Heaven in quest of vengeance. But Tū (meaning Who was ‘Erect’) was able to stand erect to the Winds, and then to make the others his food. Tū thus destroys their ta p u , renders them ‘common’ or n o a , another meaning of which is ‘within one’s power’ (Williams 1975:222). Or, in other words, the ta p u passes to man: Tapu above all belongs to Tu for his younger brothers were conquered by him: his younger brothers, the fish, birds, fernroot, kumara and all things of the land were eaten by him. So there it is, the tapu of Tu-mata-uenga, that is, of man (South Island text collected by John White). This means that man controls the gods or nature ritually: From his brothers having been made common, or articles of food, by Tu- mata-uenga, he assigned for each of them fitting incantations, that they might be abundant, and he might easily obtain them (Grey 1854:13). And this means that man outranks the gods socially. In the text collected by Sir George Grey, the relation between Tū and his divine brothers is reversed in seniority, analogous to the reversal be­ tween man and god in the Hawaiian Kumulipo chant. Before he ate the others, Tū was their tēin a ‘younger brother’; but after he had thus made them common, Tū is referred to as the tū ak an a‘older brother’. Maori speak of the “self-extolling” or the “degeneration-causing” younger brother. Still the myth is careful to confirm that the symbolic deceptions of sacrificial rituals are no proof against the gods deceived. The Arawa text ends with comment on the irony of Tu s success: that his progeny were able to multiply on this Earth, u n til the generation of the brothers Maui, the youngest of whom Maui-tikitiki discovered death for man­ kind in the vagina of Great-woman-of-the-night (Hine-nui-te-pō) — i .e ., precisely the daughter and wife of the defeated brother Tāne. I say the myth is careful on this point, since earlier on Tu s success was explained by the fact that Maui had not yet been born, so that death as 202 Marshall Sahlins yet had no hold over man. Nor would it ever have gained the hold if Maui had not tried to deceive “that ”. Another “degeneration- causing” younger brother. At the same time, the myth of Tu and the brothers explains the inevitability of cannibalism — indeed of endo-cannibalism. In John White’s novel of Maori daily life (1874), the hero at one point is made to argue: “If then the gods eat each other, and they were brothers, why was I not allowed to eat those who killed my child?” The of migration from Hawaiki and legends of tribal dispersion in New Zealand make up so many humanised versions of the fratricidal cannibalism of the gods. Best recounts the discord among immigrants of the Mātātua canoe, characteristically begun as a quarrel over garden land. The younger brothers were jealous of the older Ueimua ‘Ue-the- first’, because he had formed a connection with an indigenous woman of the tāngata whenua ‘land people’. The youngest brother Tūhoe eats the heart of Ueimua, transforming him into Ueimuri ‘Ue-the-last’, and causing his descendants to go elsewhere. In such tales and practices, the legacy of Tū remains general: distributed in every tribe, every h a p ū ‘clan’ and every man, so long as all are poised in internecine strife, or even just tending their own gardens. For the conflict between Tū and Rongo, the ancestor of sweet potato or cultivated crops, is memorialised by certain tribes as the origin of war itself. On the warpath, the sweet potato (= Rongo) is prohibited food; the warriors subsist on the natural fernroot. Or the categorial opposition may be projected as the course of history, making Rongo the god of the original ‘people of the land’, to be superseded by immigrant warriors from Hawaiki across the waters — just as at birth the immigrant warrior ‘descends’ ( h e k e =migrates) across the waters of the womb (= p ō or Hawaiki). An elder of the indigenous peoples argues that Rongo . . . was the origin of peace-making. . . . The original people of this land of Aotea-roa (New Zealand) were followers of Rongo-ma-Tane. They were a very peaceable folk and lived quietly. The later comers from Hawaiki were the people who introduced strife and other evils into this land. Rongo was the peace-maker (Best 1925a, vol. 1:771). Accordingly, the war that brought the ancestors from Hawaiki can be described in the metaphor of the sweet potato harvest — where, we shall see, Tū as man triumphs over Rongo. In the myth, the song is sung by Uenuku (Rainbow-war god), descendant and form of Tū: Go forth and fetch The many of Ngati-Rongotea [i.e., the Clan of Rongo-the-pale (= immature?)] Drag them hither, lead them here, That they may be destroyed, extinguished, The first-food will be sweet, Bind firmly Rongo, Bind them (Tautahi and Taipuki 1900:216). Each year, in the cycle of k ū m a racultivation, . the h a p ū re-enacts a Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 203

cosmic drama of fertility and death, bringing the god Rongo upon the scene to inseminate the earth, only to make him at the harvest the victim of Tū, allowing men to seize the crop for themselves. Describing these successive moments of Rongo and Tu, the planting which is a kind of copulation and lifting in a kind of raid, I shall follow the brilliant analysis of Johansen on a text by Kapiti of the Ngāti Porou tribe (Johansen 1913:36-41). Again, argument will be that this agricultural cycle of the Maori is a generalised version of the royal rites of the Hawaiian Makahiki or New Year Festival. The Maori cere­ monies are also reminiscent of some famous happenings at the sacred grove of Nemi, even to the slaying of the god by a rude bough broken from a certain tree. The scene is a small garden “set apart for the god” where the first sweet potato mounds are planted on behalf of the h a p ū settlement. I stress the collective character of the proceedings. Each person of the community contributes two seed k ū m a ra to the special basket used by the priest in planting. Moreover, the assistants are dressed in specially beautiful costume, a sign of their participation in the sexual congress, the sacred marriage that now transpires. To the accompaniment of a chant that begins “Be pregnant, be pregnant”, a priest impersonating Rongo places seed tubers from the basket in the several p u k e‘hillocks’ (also meaning ‘m o n s V e n e r is ’)of the garden. The ritual makes allusion to the mythical acquisition of the k ū m a ra by the god Rongo. In this myth, Rongo takes the part of mankind in the typical cosmological triad. He steals the tubers from his older brother Whānui (i.e., the star Vega, whose heliacal rising coincides with the k ū m a ra harvest). Rongo conceals the tubers in his penis, descends to earth and inseminates his wife Pani, who will then give birth to the k ū m a ra .In the text, Rongo goes by the binomial Rongo-Maui, signi­ fying that he plays the human part, since Maui is the archetypal trickster-ancestor of man and frequently counted as descendant of Tū. And Rongo’s seizure of the food from his older brother Whānui is sometimes counted as the original theft, albeit justified by Whānui’s refusal to give the k ū m a ra when first asked. Johansen comments that it is “extremely characteristic of [the Maori’s] whole attitude towards existence that he does not . . . conceive the kumara as a gift from "the gods, but something he gets hold of either by stratagem or by force”.1 More generally, the assumption by priest and people of Rongo’s person at this stage helps to explain why Rongo, as also Tāne or Tangaroa, is considered a tu p u n a‘ancestor’ by Maori, albeit that Tāne engendered the first human being and Tū is the specific form of man (or vice versa). The assumption by men of Tāne, Tangaroa or Rongo, who respectively cover the domains of forest, sea and cultivation, corresponds to the initial ritual moment of human submission, which is also participation in the gods by ta p u , the moment thus of natural reproduction. Whereas, the subsequent putting-on of the warrior Tū is the adversarial moment, when men seize the god’s product for their own use. Thus Tāne, Tangaroa, Rongo and Tū, the famous “Big-Four” 204 Marshall Sahlins of Central Polynesian theology, make up a fairly complete cosmological mode of production. In the k ū m a ra ritual, then, the seed basket is Rongo’s penis, the field is his wife Pani, and the planting by the priest c u m Rongo is a sacred marriage. The accompanying chant, as Johansen (1958:151) says, . . . shows that a ‘sacred wedding’ was celebrated between the priest and the sacred plot, between Rongo and Pani, so that the field, Pani, is fecun­ dated with the kumura as it is distributed on the hillocks by the priest. Near the first mound thus planted — also apparently near the first hillocks of fields later planted by individual members of the clan — a certain sacred pole of m ā p o u wood is erected. (A figurehead of m ā p o u [Myrsine australis], according to the legend, adorned the canoe that first brought the k ū m a ra to New Zealand.) With the erection of the pole, the garden is put under a ta p u of Rongo that lasts through the growing season. The garden now passes into Rongo’s possession; the m a n a is given him. Note that the Polynesian theory of conception requires repeated intercourse in order for the father to grow or shape the foetus. We should also remember that humanity began in a scene similar to that now presented by the k ū m a ra garden, with a tree (Tāne) inserted in a mound (of Papa). Everything conspires to suggest that the pole is the phallus of Rongo, left thus to do its work. And the ta p u is an inter­ diction on Tū, or men. The ta p u is ostensibly directed against strangers and travellers, which in Maori ritual is also to say those who come by canoe, the home people being in such contexts tāngata whenua ‘people of the land’. A passage from John White’s notes, referring to the prohibition on canoes passing on streams near growing k ū m a ra gardens, discloses the identity of the feared stranger: Should a canoe attempt so to pass, then a poor crop would result, or the seed tubers would decay in the ground instead of germinating on account of the atua Rongo having been belittled by men. Rongo is the younger brother of Tu; from the former came the kumara, from the latter sprang men: The descendants of Tu, by disregarding the tapu of the field, cause affront to Rongo, hence the destruction of the crop (cited in Best 1925:101). We shall encounter this scene again, when the King of Hawai‘i, representing Kū (= Tū), comes ashore by canoe to fight the partisans of the god Lono (= Rongo) at the climax of the Makahiki Festival. In the gardens of New Zealand, the analogous showdown comes at the harvest, when Tū contests the ground with Rongo. Using an unshaped branch broken from the k ō k ō m u k ashrub (H ebe salicifolia), a priest representing Tū, different from the Rongo-priest who presided over the initial copulation, unearths a sweet potato from the first mound, firmly binds it with a cord, then reburies it in the mound together with his crude digging implement. He thus kills Rongo, or puts him to sleep, that the field may be harvested. Afterwards the bound tuber will be retrieved and taken to the tū ā h u ‘sacred precinct’, Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 205 apparently as an offering to Rongo. But the garden is seized by Tū. Indeed, according to Maning’s description, the harvest takes the form of a raid: the k ū m a ra hurriedly dug by the whole strength of the working hands, thrown in scattered heaps, concealed by leaves from the observation of strangers, then carried to the storehouse by night making every effort to complete the task before daylight (Maning 1863:157). A text collected by Colenso from Ngāti-Porou source gives the explicit sense of these bellicose rites: Their angry contention arose about their kumara plantation; the name of that plantation was Pohutukawa. . . . Then their fighting began in earnest, and [sweet potato form of Rongo] with his people were killed, all slain by Tumatauenga. The name given to that battle was Moenga-toto (sleeping-in-blood, or bloody sleep). Tumatauenga also baked in an oven and ate his elder brother Rongomaraeroa, so that he was wholly devoured as food. Now the plain interpretation, or meaning, of these names in common words, is, that Rongomaraeroa is the kumara, and Tumatauenga is man (Colenso 1881:36). Just so, at the season of the maturing k ū m a ra ,Maori traditionally made war. It was the season of Tu. The improvised weapon/implement of the harvest-priest is thus met again in martial contexts, e.g., as a war god of the Tūhoe tribe: Te Wheawheau is a most useful atua in war time — in order to weaken the enemy, as will be seen when we take the trail of Tu in earnest. In regard to Te Wheawheau, an authority says, “An atua, a tree branchlet. It is carried by the priest and waved to and fro before (in front of) the enemy. It is used as a rotu, to weaken and unnerve the enemy. [Williams’ dictionary has rotu as ‘v.t. Put to sleep by means of a spell’] (Best 1902:66; Williams 1975:348). Tūhoe myth also tells of the human sacrifice originally made at this time of year, in autumn when the storehouse for k ū m a ra was finished. Sacrificed was the younger brother of the two men who first brought k ū m a ra from Hawaiki to New Zealand. His blood was smeared on the threshold of the storehouse to fix the k ū m a ra ,preventing it from returning to Hawaiki. Probably, then, Valeri (in p ress) is correct: the sacrifice negates u tu ‘reciprocity’ (here ‘revenge’); it distances the god and gives man the victory. Except that this is m y th ica l human sacrifice, a difference that will bear comparison to Hawai‘i. The cycle of cultivation and deification is co-ordinated also with the Pleiades, another connection to the Hawaiian Makahiki — indeed, to the rest of Polynesia (not to mention the rest of the world). Maori say, “The foods of (Pleiades) by him brought forth”. The Pleiades would rise at sunset in late November or in rough correlation with k ū m a ra planting to set in the west at sunset in late April or about harvest time. We have few details of the associated rites. One of the Maori rituals, “Feeding the stars”, is virtually identical with the Hawaiian ceremony of the same name twice performed during the Makahiki, the second time in connection with the autumnal rising of the Pleiades. Taking place at about the same (calendrical) date, the New Zealand ceremony thus becomes a vernal event, but evidently of 206 Marshall Sahlins the same intent as the Hawaiian autumnal rites, namely, controlling the fertility of the coming year. Offerings are presented to the stars (ancestors/gods) whose mark the months of the year; note that the Hawaiian ceremony is also called “feeding the moon”. The most striking correspondence, however, concerns the New Year ritual itself: for Maori heralded by the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in mid- June, in Hawai‘i by crepuscular rising at the same contellation in late November — hence in both places, in association with the winter solstice. The New Zealand ceremonial information again is not de­ tailed. The women greet the reappearance of the Pleiades with “posture dancing” and chanting, as the analogous time in Hawai'i was the privileged period of , and in both places the people gave themselves to feasting, amusements, and pleasure. Evidently also to peace. In Maori chant, it is the famous “peace made by the women”, probably referring to the rites of tapu removal presided over by the ruahine ‘chiefly woman’. Tū and Rongo are reconciled. In Hawai‘i the same effect is achieved rather by the victory of the king. Perhaps that is why the general Orpheus myth describing these relationships has a happier (and apparently noncyclical) ending in Maori (Best 1924, vol. 1:16). The hero is Mataora, another Rongo figure, since the land of Mataora (‘Life-Source’) is the home of the Rongo-maui, the one who first seized the kūmara. This hero Mataora becomes the husband of the beautiful goddess Niwareka. But overcome by some mad jealousy — thus, he has a rival — Mataora angrily strikes the goddess, causing her to flee to the spiritual Underworld, here described as a place of fertility, light and pleasure. Mataora follows Niwareka and manages to bring her back to the upper world, if at the price of certain sufferings. They carry with them a splendid cloak, the art of tattooing, and a special mode of dancing learned from the spirits. The guardian of the Underworld delays their escape until the lunar month (roughly) corresponding to November, i.e., the time of kūmara planting. On leaving, they had attempted to conceal the beautiful cloak; for this crime they are forever banished to the human world. And this is a ao matemate ‘world of death’; a point underscored in the myth by the fact that the pair are escorted above by the same species of birds whose laughter caused the trickster Maui to find death in the vagina of “that goddess”. Hence, the absence of a cycle of fertility or mortality is only apparent: another kind of Underworld awaits the kūmara — and in a certain famous long run, all of us.

HAWAII

Hawaiians tell a similar story, concerned with equally abstract personages (Hiku and Kawelu) who figure neither in chiefly genealogies nor in ritual cults. But Polynesians will immediately recognise in this scheme of the goddess lost the Hawaiian epic of the divine Lono, as repeated also in the legends of certain royal avatars, Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 207 the latest of whom at least can be historically attested, being Captain James Cook (R.N.). The Dumezilian shift from cosmic myth to dynastic legend makes the comparative point I am trying to establish: that what is generally true of “man” for Maori is differentially and individually embodied by the Hawaiian king. The king assumes, and in his own person lives, the life of the collectivity. This is also, I believe, the logical principle of m a n a . M a n awould be the objectification or expression as ontology of a principle of extension, such as makes the people particular instances of the chiefs ( c u m ancestor’s) existence. Reproductive powers, or what is the same, a surfeit of being, are clearly (intensional) formulations in the terms of human attributes of the same logical principle. Thus, what we are dealing with in Hawai‘i is hierarchy rather in Dumont’s sense, or politics as the formal logic of class inclusion. At least two predecessors of Captain Cook in the capacity of the god Lono figure in the king lists of Hawai'i Island. The earlier, of several generations back, is Lono-i-ka-makahiki (Lono-at-the- Makahiki); the other, Ka-T-‘i-mamao, was the father of the King at Cook’s time. The great creation chant Kumulipo, with its struggle of the brothers ‘Man’ and ‘God’ over their older sister, was composed as a birth chant for the later ruler, Ka-T-‘i-mamao. Hawaiians thus read the chant alternately as the development of the world or the biography of the king: the royal child is, as Luomala says, “the cosmos described” (Luomala 1972:xiii) — a classic expression of hierarchy. Likewise classic is the change in character of the Lono , from cosmology to polity, when they are arranged in sequence from Lono the god to the most recent Lono-king. The same cosmic triangle is reproduced in all versions, but in a mode of discourse that passes from the mythical to the political as the era of the hero approaches the historical, to appear in the end as cruel tales of dynastic intrigue. Again, the kingship is the history of the universe. The several Lono stories are not only structurally analogous, they are composed of interchangeable parts. Names, characters, and episodes are transposed in different versions between the god, the Lono kings, and Captain Cook. Hence, I follow Hawaiian concepts here, while bowing to the limitations of space, by organising the discussion in terms of a few recurrent motifs of the Lono corpus.

1. Lono is the victim of political usurpation and marital infidelity. Lono plays the role of the deposed god in the cosmogonic triad. The Lono figure of dynastic traditions loses his wife’s affection to a social inferior; in the event, he likewise loses his kingdom, or his own children are excluded from the succession. The royal instantiations of Lono are themselves descended maternally from ancient, sometimes priestly, stocks; the dynastic struggle thus repeats the cosmic usurpation of the deity in the register of genealogical lines or categories. The proto- historical Lono (Ka-‘I-‘i-mamao) also sees his chiefly wife abducted by his father’s sister’s son. In the ensuing battle this King is banished, killed, or commits suicide, according to the version, and the rule passes 208 Marshall Sahlins

to one or another rival kinsman. The wife of the earlier Lono-king (Lono-i-ka-makahiki) had been the first woman to rule Hawai‘i Island. But her children by Lono’s half-brother, rather than by him, succeeded to the royal dignity. In a striking version of the myth of Lono-the-god, collected by the Russian explorer Kotzebue from the high chief Kalaimoku, Lono and his wife, the original occupants of Hawai‘i, were childless. When men drifted in, Lono adopted them, but later he left because of his wife’s liaison with one of the human immigrants, and the governance passed to gods of another, more ferocious kind. In certain versions, Lono-the-god descends from the skies to mate with a beautiful woman of Hawai‘i, thus initiating the myth in the same way as Maori initiate the human world by the union of Heaven (Rangi) and Earth (Papa). 2. Lono and his rivals respectively represent peace and war, human fertility as opposed to human sacrifice. Lono-the-god is the patron of prosperity and the peaceful arts, sometimes the origin of food crops. Hawaiian temples of Lono are specifically for food-cultivation, and preclude the human of the royal temples dominated by Kū (= Maori Tū). The legend of the earlier Lono-king establishes his beneficent character by his childhood dispositions. The war club, says the young prince as pupil, might be better used to take food from the earth oven, and the man who can parry the spear is worth more than the spear. Just so, in later life the victories of this Lono are defensive triumphs against invading kings, while his own conquests are achieved by feats of genealogical memory, ritual knowledge and athletic skill. Occult knowledge is the Lono side of things. When as a child this Lono first entered the temple, he was frightened by the images — of Kū, from the description of their military function. So bizarre was the young Lono’s behaviour that his father the King foretold the boy would grow to contravene the laws governing redistribution of lands; meaning, clearly, that Lono would never be a conqueror and would lose the kingship (Fornander 1917:256-61). But the opposite is said by the very name of Lono’s rival. In myths of Lono-the-god and the earlier king, the young rival who seduces Lono’s wife is He‘a-o-ke-koa — ‘Blood-sacrifice-of-the-warrior’.2 Lono’s enemy is thus associated with the human-sacrificial cult of Kū. He is the categorical image of the upstart warrior, in contradistinction to Lono as sacred chief or god. In the Kotzebue myth, the divine oppo­ nent of Lono-the-god can be identified as the volcano deity Kamohoali‘i: form of Kahoali‘i, who as the “living god” of the Hawaiian king presides at human sacrifices. 3. Lono injures (or kills) his wife, when he discovers (suspects) sh e is unfaithful. Lono causes his wife (Kaikilani-chiefly-woman-of-Puna) to lose consciousness by hitting her with a game-board or else he kills her. Death and unconsciousness are the same state (m a k e) in Hawaiian thought; indeed, in certain myths, although dead she later recovers. The woman is fertility, which, of course, seasonally revives, and is precisely the divine gift destined to be captured by inferior mortals. Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 209

The god would withhold (kill) her. 4. Lono wanders demented and impoverished in the wilds of Kaua‘i; he decides finally to leave the Islands, promising to someday return. Overcome with remorse at having lost his wife, the grieving Lono travels westward through the Islands. He wanders destitute in the uplands of Kaua'i. Voyage in the direction of death and a state of nature, such is the condition of Lono during the ascendancy of warrior- man — as annually dramatised by the exile of the god at the Makahiki Festival. In myth, Lono may then return to power at Hawai'i and die there; or he sails off to Kahiki — the Hawaiian spiritual origins — pro­ mising to return. Lono is the link between Kahiki and Hawai‘i, divine and human. His movements back and forth are the inverse of human strength and weakness. 5. The travels of Lono are associated with scenes or games of combat. In the anodyne versions, the people institute competitive games to commemorate their departed god or king, who was expert in the pugilistic arts. More commonly, legend indicates some conflict bet­ ween the people and Lono, with the effect of a human victory since the god takes his departure for Kahiki, if only provisionally. So Lono-the- god, crazed with remorse, goes about the Islands drubbing everyone he meets; later, he departs for Kahiki. Or the late King Ka-T-‘i-mamao is banished by the commoners of Ka-u for sleeping with his daughter — making him also “Wakea”, the original incestuous ancestor of kings, analogous in this respect to Tāne of the Maori. The traditions corres­ pond to the ritual combats of the New Year (Makahiki) of Lono, when people of the out-districts give battle to the retainers of the god. Analogous practices in Central Polynesian mortuary rites suggest that the common people, fighting the chiefs in Lono’s train, not only lay the ghost of the god but also punish those responsible for his death.

The Makahiki is a popular festival with more than one indication of the solidarity of the common people with Lono, in opposition to the king and the cult of his warrior-god Kū. The ordinary domestic ritual of the people, centring on the men’s eating-house, is likewise domi­ nated by signs of Lono, and appropriately devoted to the fertility, wealth and health of the family. Prominent in the domestic shrine is the ip u -o -L o n o‘gourd of Lono’, in which sacramental foods were placed. (The gourd is a k in o ‘body’ of Lono, signifying luxuriant vegetal growth.) The family elder presided at the sacrificial meals, ap­ parently in the capacity of Lono: he sucked upon the daily offering of kava root, “which was said to be Lono’s drinking of it” (Handy and Pukui 1972:96). In contrast with Maori, where every male child is a warrior of Tu, the initiation of the Hawaiian boy child, his “expulsion” at an early age to the men’s house, is described as a consecration to Lono (Handy and Pukui 1972:95-8). Not that other gods great and little were ignored in the domestic rituals, any more than Lono and his priests were absent from royal temples. In this connection, the special or festive offerings at familial and royal altars alike were signs of the 210 Marshall Sahlins human male, symbolic forms of the sacrifiers themselves, such as coconuts, pigs and certain bananas. The sacrifices are appropriate especially to Kū who, like the Maori Tū, represents the generic male, in ancient myth playing opposite to Hine — ‘Woman’. Submission of the self to the god, this completely iconic sacrifice, is the principle also of the Hawaiian exaggeration of political hierarchy. The king’s temple is distinguished from the domestic shrine precisely as the apotheosis of the cult of self-sacrifice. Here are actual human victims, offered by the king as a royal sign and privilege, to the image of an ‘All-encompassing Kū’ (Kūnuiakea). By the mediation of a victim with whose fate as well as whose form he is identified, the king assumes in his own person the value of Kū or man-in-general (Valeriin p ress). In this capacity the king confronts Lono at the Makahiki. Everything happens as if the agricultural rites of Maorih a p ū were expanded in the Hawaiian Makahiki to the totality of the and the generality of the universe. The cosmological exaggeration is corollary to the hierarchical transformation, to the incarnation of the human species in the king. True, the Hawaiians also knew general agricultural rituals of the Maori type. They were used in certain sweet potato “fields of Kanepua‘a”, the name of the Hawaiian pig-god said to be a form of Lono, whose rooting in the earth (female) is a well-known figuration of sexuality. While the crop was growing, the garden was ta p u (Hawaiian:k a p ti), so that the pig-god could do his inseminating work (cf. the Maorita p u of Rongo). No one was allowed to throw stones into the garden while it was possessed by the pig-god, thrust a stick into it or walk upon it — curious prohibitions, except that they amount precisely to protection against human attack. At the harvest, however, man enters, invoking first of all the god Kū-kuila — ‘Kū-the- striver’. But all this is minor ritual in Hawai‘i. At the Makahiki, there is a much more general representation of the same relationships, when Lono comes not merely to fructify a garden but to revive the whole of nature. In “dead” of winter, for a period of 23 days, the image of Lono takes a circuit around the periphery of the Island. Lono thus makes the transition between “the dying time of the year”, as Hawaiians say, and the season when “bearing things become fruitful”. Marked naturally by heavy winter rains that are associated with Lono — dark rain clouds and thunder arek in o ‘bodies’ of Lono — the turn of the season is the beneficial effect of the god’s passage. Lono indeed inseminates a world about to be reborn. Or, Lono makes possible the passage between the season of long night p( ō), as Hawaiians also say, and the time of long days (ao). The intervention of the god recapitulates on an annual scale the cosmogonic transition from the long night(p o ) of divine creation to the day(ao) of humanity. This was exactly the moment in the creation chant when the god and the man struggled over the fertile woman. Accordingly, in the Makahiki there are the successive ritual moments of the conjunction of the people with Lono and of Lono with the land, followed by conflict notably between the king (or Kū) and the Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 211

Year God, and ending with the banishment of the god Lono to Kahiki (Land of spirit). The initial union with the productive god is made possible by keeping the warrior-god in abeyance. During the cycle of Makahiki rites, lasting four lunar months, the royal temples are closed to the normal mensual ceremonies. But after Lono has gone, the king reconsecrates the principal Kū temples and images by means of human sacrifices. More particularly, as Valeri (in press) shows, these sacrifices transform a natural Kū in the form of an ‘ōh ia tree (Metrosideros macropus) into a humanised temple image through successive ritual processes of capture, birth and initiation. The god thus fashioned in his own image, the king in principle tours the island reopening the fishing and agricultural shrines of the districts — agricultural shrines nota bene of Lono — or at least, these local temples can be dedicated when the rites of the royal temple have been concluded. The king has been able to assume the gifts, even the capacity of Lono. Yet in order for the king to so transfer to the people the fruitful benefits of Lono’s passage, the god himself must be deprived of them. Just as Rongo is buried by the Maori priest in order for man to harvest the kūm ara, so Lono becomes the first sacrifice of the Hawaiian New Year. The king gains this victory, and the people gain their livelihood. There is a special aloha between the people and Lono, who is in certain myths the original god, and whose annual return is the occasion of general joy. The ritual moment of conjunction with the god is es­ pecially celebrated by the people, if the decisive episode of separation belongs to the king. The people’s joy is part of the argument I make that the image of Lono is annually born of a union between the god and the women of the land — just as in certain myths Lono descends from the heavens to mate with a beautiful woman of Hawai‘i; or, as the Maori Rongo enters into sacred marriage with the kūmara field. When Captain Cook, himself a figure of Lono, first descended at Hawafi Island, which was during Makahiki season, the young women were spending most of their time singing and dancing. Such was Surgeon Samwell’s observation, and he collected two quite lascivious hula chants as a sample of this division of labour. For the New Year was the great period of hula dancing, even as the patron of the dance, the goddess Laka, is described in ancient chant as sister and wife of Lono. The hula would thus rouse the returning god of cosmic rebirth, if it did not more directly signify the copulation of Lono with the living daughters of the goddess. My idea is that the hula functions as the dances and chants of analogous Marquesan rites. In some of the Marquesan chants that were intoned as part of the great festivals celebrated during the season of fertility, Atea, the personification of the illumined sky as generator of life, is called upon to impregnate his wife. The erotic dances performed upon the same occasions were certainly calculated to rouse and perhaps to empower, the sky god (Handy 1927:307). If I am right, the Makahiki image is the offspring of a “sacred marriage” socially symmetrical and inverse to the one that ritually 212 Marshall Sahlins produces the king. For upon the death of the king, the social order dissolves into outrageous scenes of k a pu violation, including the fornication in public places of chiefly women with commoner men they would otherwise despise. The ritual result is the heir to the throne, who after 10 days of seclusion emerges to restore order (the k a p u )and to be installed in a rite that imitates the ideal ceremonies of a noble birth. Hence the king is the metaphoric offspring of a sacred woman by a man socially inferior; whereas the image of Lono is born of an hypergamous union between a divine male and the women of the people. In other words, the overall relationship of the king, the god and the woman recapitulates the primordial triad of Creation — and finds, in the Makahiki, an analogous denouement. In the deep night before the effigy of Lono is first seen abroad, there is a Makahiki ceremony called h V u w a i ‘splashing-water’. The Hawaiian intellectual Kepelino (1932) tells of sacred chiefs being carried to the water where the people in their finery are bathing. In the excitement created by the beauty of their attire, “one person was attracted to another and the result,” says this convert to Catholicism, “was by no means good.” At dawn, when the people emerged from their common sport, there, standing on the beach, was the effigy of Lono. The annual k a pu of Lono, which includes a prescriptive peace, is proclaimed when the image is seen. White tapa cloth and skins of the k a ‘u p ubird hang from the tall crosspiece image. The k a ‘u p uis almost certainly the albatross, a migratory bird that appears in the Western Hawaiian chain — the white Lanyon albatross at Ni‘ihau Island, off Kaua‘i — to breed and lay eggs in October-November, or the beginning of the Makahiki season. Images of similar form, and simi­ larly associated with birds, function as signs of truce in the Marquesas and Tahiti. At Tahiti, standards of this type were carried in procession around a ruling chief s domain in connection with his accession to title; in the famous case of Pomare II, the cloth hung from the crosspiece was the Union Jack.3 In the same vein, the “peace” of the Lono k a pu is a global concept, signifying the god’s possession of the land: “possession”, moreover, that does not distinguish between dominion and sexual appropriation. On the day of Lono’s appearance, he is ceremoniously received at the domestic shrine of the king. Here, he is accorded a fine loincloth by the royal wife — representing initiation and sexual maturity — and a whale-tooth necklace by the king — representing rights of rule. Accompanied by certain gods of sport and a crowd of retainers, the image of Lono now embarks on the circuit of the Island. The pro­ cession moves in a sun-wise direction. This is a “right-circuit”, keeping the land on the right. A right-circuit, says the Hawaiian sage, “signified a retention of the kingdom”. At the border of each a h u p u a ‘a ‘district’, food and property were offered to the god, collected in the manner of h o 'o k u p u‘tributes’ rendered to the ruling chief. Implying thus the god’s sovereignty, the payment also frees the land of k a p u ,and Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 213 the people now fight with those in Lono’s train. Meanwhile, as it leaves the district, the image of the Lono faces backwards, “so that”, it is explained, “the wife can be seen”. The apparent paradoxes of this sovereign right-hand triumph of Lono, during which the god cedes district after district, are resolved at the end of the circuit in a global showdown with the king. In ritual combat with the god, the king resumes all local battles and achieves the final victory, winning life for the people and the kingdom for himself. Structural climax of the Makahiki, this combat is called kalii. Kalii means ‘to strike the king’ and ‘to act the king’ or ‘to be made the king’. All these things happen at once. Struck by a partisan of the god, the king regains the Island. It is the 16th day of the first Hawaiian month. The image of Lono, returned from its progress, stands on the shore before the temple, defended by a great body of armed warriors. The king, also accom­ panied by a warrior host, but preceded by an expert in parrying spears, comes in by canoe from the sea. Here is a ritual reminder of the origin of the dynasty in Kahiki — and an heroic trace of the canoe-borne stranger of Maori rite, likewise enemy to Rongo. Two spears are aimed at the Hawaiian king as he debarks. The first is deflected by his warrior-guard, but the second, carried on the run, is caused to touch the king. A symbolic death — which is also the beginning of the king’s victory. The kapu on him is lifted, and his warriors charge ashore to engage the defenders of Lono in mock combat. Similarly, in a well- known mythical allusion to the k a lii test, the hero chants: The points of the spears of Kamalama passed very near to my navel; Perchance it is the sign of land possession. Here is analogue and reversal of the initiation of Lono that began the circuit. The reference would be to traditional rituals of cutting the navel cord at noble births, conferring the child’s sacred dignities, or else to certain traditions of royal installation taking the same ceremonial form. So in another reversal, in the legend of the early King Lono-at-the-Makahiki, the young Lono, after commenting that the man who parries the spear is more valuable than the weapon itself, has the war spears of his father bound in a bundle with his own navel cord. And this Lono was destined to surrender the kingdom and his royal wife to his (half-) brother. By the Makahiki test of the spears, the king dies as an outsider, to be reborn as the king. The transformation is achieved through, and as, the encompassment of Lono. Appropriating the peaceful, productive and in­ digenous god, the conqueror becomes ruler on the condition of his own domestication — his neutralisation as a dangerous stranger, or as Hawaiians say of chiefs, as “a shark who travels on land”. The king assumes the attributes of his divine predecessor, to appear as the people’s benefactor. In him, Kū and Lono are reconciled. Valeri (in press) in­ geniously demonstrates that through the course of the year that follows, the king is ritually transposed towards the Lono pole of divinity. It need 214 Marshall Sahlins only be added that the annual rebirth of the kingship at the kdlii test coincides with the rebirth of nature. In the ideal ritual , the kdlii follows the autumnal rising of the Pleiades (at sunset) by 33 days. For the late 18th century, the autumnal rising would be about November 18; hence the kdli‘i takes place on the 21st of December — the winter solstice. The king returns to power with the sun. But in the days following the king’s cosmic triumph, Lono plays the part of the sacrificial victim. The Makahiki effigy is dismantled and hidden away in the royal temple. The rite is watched over by the king’s double and man-god Kahoali‘i, one of whose other titles is Koke-ka- make — ‘Death-is-near’. Kahoali'i passes the night previous to the dismemberment of Lono in a temporary house, called “the net house of KahoaliT’, set up before the temple structure where the image sleeps. In a myth pertinent to the relationships of these Makahiki rites, the trickster hero Kaulu — his father is Kūka‘ohi‘alaka, one of the names of the Kū-image of the temple — uses a certain “net of Maoloha” to en­ circle a house, entrapping thus the goddess Haumea. Haumea is generally identified with the ancestress Papa, and in the Kumulipo creation chant both appear as versions of the archetypal fertile woman La‘ila‘i. Just so, the next Makahiki rite, consequent upon the dis­ mantling of the Lono image, represents the gains in fertility accruing to the kingdom. A large loose-mesh “Net of Maoloha” filled with all kinds of food is shaken at a priest’s command. Fallen to earth, hence to man’s lot, the food is the augury of the coming year. The fertility of nature thus seized by humanity, a tribute-canoe of offerings to Lono is set adrift for Kahiki. The New Year draws to a close. At the next full moon, Kahoali'i will seize a human sacrificial victim. Soon after that, the houses and standing images of the temple will be rededicated, by more human sacrifices, to the rites of Kū and the projects of the king.

HIERARCHY AND HUMANITY

The institutional correlations of the transformation are fairly well known. At his accession, which is a new constitution of the world, the Hawaiian king redistributes the land districts among related ruling chiefs. Such heroic privileges erode the genealogical organisation of the underlying population (Sahlins 1983). There is nothing in Hawai‘i like the Maori hapū ‘clan’ or iwi ‘tribe’. Rather, the lives of the people are calqued upon the powers-that-be. Their own biographies are reckoned in dynastic history. For its own part, this history is full of events to prove the people are incapable of collective consciousness or action independent of the king — Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children, and our sins, lay on the king! Henry V, IV, i. The king encompasses the people in his own person, as projection of his Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 215 own being. Whereas any member of the independent Maori h a p ū ,it seems, could use the first-person singular “I” to refer to the whole group. Or perhaps the chief says to his people, “let us-two be going” (Johansen 1954:35-8). Maori extend this kinship to the universe, which poses for them the Polynesian problem of consuming divinity in the particularly acute form of endo-cannibalism. Maori are engaged in valiant projects of sacralisation ( ta p u) and desacralisation (whakanoa), alternatively of themselves and the gods. They make offerings of cooked food that ostensibly entail a transfer of ta p u to the god or a propitiation, but also imply pollution of the god. More generally, they are prepared to use negative human presences or acts to be rid of the divine and make things human (n o a), or to be rid of the human and make themselves divine (ta p u ). Hence the role of women. Women cook the food in New Zealand — which is the Polynesian great transformation, i.e., from ta p u to n oa — and certain women also are designated to consume strategic sacrifices. Whereas, in the special Hawaiian project of male self-sacrifice, the value of the offering precisely precludes the participation of women. Women cannot eat the species of food that have been set aside as male and thus as offerings (pigs, coconuts, etc.); nor can they share in men’s meals, which are sacraments; or cook the food, which would be sacrilege. Accordingly, women, who are basically the party of humanity in Polynesia, are attributed ritual values that affect even the division of labour by sex. These values also mirror the development of kingship. Hawaiians differ from Maori in this salience they accord the iconic sacrifice — i.e., the element of identity between the sacrifier and the offering, or, in other words, their disposition for self-immolation based on the well-known principle that the gods know how to repay such favours rendered them. The effect is the aggrandisement notably of the god in human form, Kū. Conversely, as the victim approximates man in value, becomes actual human sacrifice, the sacrifier becomes a human form of the god — thus the king. By offering semblances of themselves, Hawaiians made humanised images of the divine (and vice versa). But Maori had little use for images. Assuming the ta p u of Tū, they metonymically became the god, and in this militant capacity opposed the universe — in contrast with the metaphoric submissions and associations achieved by Hawaiian sacrifice. Especially in eating men to increase their own m a n a ,Maori acted like the Polynesian gods themselves. Whereas, Hawaiians proved the same relationship between anthropophagy and divinity in reverse by making themselves into the gods’ food; they thus ‘cause-the-raana’ of the god or h o ‘o m a na which , is their term and idea of ‘’. There is, then, a complementary relation between cannibalism and human sacrifice. Maori are actual cannibals but their practice of human sacrifice is mainly mythological. Hawaiians make human sacrifices while telling mythic tales of cannibal exploits. The apparent exceptions prove the complementarity rule. Maori “symbolically” 216 Marshall Sahlins dedicate the heart of the first cannibal victim to god Tū while eating the rest; as, conversely, the Hawaiian king’s “living god” Kahoali'i eats the eye of the human victim, a “symbolic” cannibalism, while con­ signing the rest to the altars of sacrifice. The relationship appears to be systematic. It predicts a complementary distribution of cannibalism and human sacrifice, in correlation with the transformation to divine kingship. In Central Polynesia anyhow. . . .

NOTES

1. Johansen 1958:23. The contest of Rongo and his older brother, Whānui, helps explain the mock sacrifice accompanying the rite of planting, i.e., a certain man who this day “sleeps” at the border of the garden, as well as various ritual allusions to theft and revenge. 2. Alternate textual appearances of the name of Lono’s rival are: Hea-a-ke-koa ‘Blood sacrifice of the warrior’, Heakekoa (same), Kekoa ‘The-warrior’, Hea ‘Blood- sacrifice’. 3. Moerenhaut (1837) mentions two banners thus taken on circuit at the installation: one representing the new chief, the other his predecessor. At the Hawaiian Makahild, the effigy of Lono is doubled by a smaller image, theak ua p o ko ‘short god’, in contrast with Lono or theak ua loa ‘long god’. The movement of the ‘short god’, a circuit to the left followed by a return through the bush, again in contrast with Lono’s right-circuit, also suggests death and deposition. Certain important issues in the interpretation of the ‘short god’ remain unresolved. Here we shall follow the relatively unproblematic course of the Lono image only.

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