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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

The Incantations remained Musical and Religious to — the End, and evidently belonged to the Last — Immigrants and Conquerors

The Incantations remained Musical and Religious to
the End, and evidently belonged to the Last
Immigrants and Conquerors

(11) It is only the incantations in the poetical literature that reveal the same progress. For they, as handed down unchanged for generations, being steeped in the religion that greatest preservative of the pastgive true pictures of the manners of the primeval past. Every turn and act of life page 223that belonged to the conquering minority had its incantation; every step in the making and launching of a canoe, every movement in preparation for war, in battle and siege and in returning from the expedition; every item of every ceremony, birth, baptism, naming, cutting of the hair, tattooing, death, mourning, burial, re-burial of the bones; every act in the industries that the arikis condescended to engage in, net-making, weaving the ornamental border of mats, dyeing with red, kumara-planting and kumara-harvesting. There were no incantations for the employments of common men or slaves, and in the lives of chiefs' daughters there were only a few.

(12) And all the incantations were in the peculiar unequal rhythm of the Polynesians; they were meant to be poetry, and were accordingly chanted or intoned by the priests, often with response or chorus. This chanting with response is a marked feature of the Hauhau religion; and when visiting Matatua in the Urewera country, the shrine of Hauhauism, last summer, I heard this going on in the carved house morning, noon, and night; and in the middle of the night I was wakened by the religious exercises of my host and hostess in a tent beside the whare. The husband intoned and the wife gave the responses. That this was not derived from the Anglicanism in which Te Kooti, the founder of the new religion, had been brought up is clear from an observation of Crozet on the religion of the Bay of Islands, when he visited it in 1772: "I noticed that the savages who came to sleep on board our vessels were in the habit of communing with themselves in the middle of the night, sitting up and mumbling a few words that resembled a prayer, in which they answered one another and appeared to chant. This sort of prayer lasted eight or ten minutes." Nocturnal intoning and response evidently come amongst the Maoris from very ancient times.

(13) These ancient incantations are generally marked by page 224constant recurrence of a phrase or sentence, appeal or injunction, evidently meant, like the refrain or burden of our song, to indicate poetical form. It expresses the natural periodicity or tiding of emotion. And it is generally explicit in its meaning. But it is not so with the rest of the chant; the references are often to some obscure god or hero or event in legendary history, and are couched in obscure metaphor that does not always reach articulateness or grammar. This is doubtless the stamp of antiquity. And the whole is often steeped in the fierce passions of primeval times, nakedly and violently expressed.

(14) It is no rash inference from previous indications to hold that these karakias or religious chants belong to the last incomers and conquerors, and picture the earlier phases of their culture, probably long before they set out from their birthland in the south of Asia. Religion preserves prehistoric ethics and beliefs, as the amber does the prehistoric fly. Women had nothing to do with either the making or the use of incantations. For poetry, like its parent religion, was, amongst the Aryan peoples at least, who had early thrown off the matriarchate, the affair of the men. That women should have come to any share in poetry and its guiding spirits, music and dancing, reveals the solvent power that new races and new environment had over Polynesian religion. In all the islands they entered more into song and dance than in New Zealand, probably because the enervating climate turned the men to indolence and luxury. In Tonga they were most emancipated in these and other respects, perhaps because of the proximity of Melanesia and its matriarchate. The rest of the poetry was largely secularised, for women shared in it, and it became very noble.

(15) It was rather the growing secularisation of the poetic art that in New Zealand admitted women to share in it. They take a large place in the waiatas and laments and page 225dirges, not merely as themes, but as singers. Even in the old legend of Irawaru, that belongs to the time of the demigods, it is Hina that laments in poetry over the transformation of her husband into a dog by her brother, Maui:

I weep, I call to the steep billows of the sea,
And him, the great, the ocean-god.
And let the waves wear their mourning, too,
And sleep as sleeps the dead.

O heaven, now sleeping, rouse thee, rise to power:
And O, thou earth, awake, exert thy might for me,
And open wide the door to my last home,
Where calm unruffled waits me in the sky.

But as a rule the more ancient the song or lament, the more is it occupied with the feelings, desires, passions, and deeds of the men, and the more evident is it that it was written by a man. There are dirges over the dead slain in battle, sung by the whole tribe, dirges over children who have died a natural death, laments over the loss of the kumara crops or over the sweeping away of the eel-weir, and laments of the hungry, the defeated, the enslaved, the men taken in battle and led to sacrifice. It is only as we come towards modern times that love-songs begin to predominate, and many of them are sung by women. But the most striking feature about these is that they are often by married women expressing lawful and noble love and sorrow. There is never a mention of the lawless lover or paramour, who takes such a large place in the song and ballad of Christendom. Free, even chartered, though the Maori girl might be before marriage, and little though the emphasis that was laid on that ceremony, after it there was never a thought of disloyalty or lawlessness; of course there was in actual life; but not in the poetry or romance.

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The song of love is that for a husband at a distance from his wife, beginning:

How weary my eyes are with looking for thee,
And watching the hill o'er which thou didst pass!

The lament is that of the wife who has had words of anger used to her by her husband, that of a wife abandoned by her husband, that of one who mourns over her husband slain in battle, that of a mother over her dead daughter. The dirges are those of widows. And they are instinct with the beauty that comes from true love and real grief, along with a refined poetic sense:

But father, come, come back to home,
And sleep with all thine own beloved ones now,
While I my palpitating heart will hold,
And weep my loss of long-kept bird,
Whose song awoke me at the earliest dawn.
And now that bird has swooped
And gone far, far away from me.

(16) Of course the poetic beauty of passion is not confined to the women; the love songs and laments of the men are full of longing regret for the past, and sorrow over the dead; they have their songs of the love of days long past, love songs that are also dirges of woe, dirges sung by the dying, and dirges of love sung just before death. And we can understand why they kept alive for so many centuries the memories of their birthland, Hawaiki, when we see their songs that mourn over the homes they have to leave or have left; there is the full germ of passionate patriotism in them. What can be more beautiful than the departure south of the Maori Napoleon, Te Rauparaha, with his relatives and tribe from their old home, Kawhia? As they reached the last hill that looked back on the ancestral hearth they page 227were leaving, they wailed aloud, and, weeping, sang a song of farewell:

O, my own home! Ah me! I bid farewell to you,
And still at distance bid farewell.

(17) But that which appeals most in the Maoris to our modern sense of humanity is the love they bore their children. Their lullabies are many and poetical; but it is naturally over the little ones that have gone that their poetry rises to its highest. They have many beautiful ancient dirges over the dead; but these as sung by the whole tribe over the warriors and the honoured have something official in them. It is the laments over the dead children that are so poignant in the intensity of their grief. Take this ancient dirge for example:

O let my restless spirit
Dream that thou, Riki, still art in the world,
And I with thee can view the waves,
That cover all the sea around the point,
Where life was joy at my own home.
But now alone, I am alone and desolate.

Even that fierce warrior Te Rauparaha has a most pathetic lament over his child.