Zone of the Marvellous by Martin Edmond

Author:Martin Edmond [Edmond, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS A TENDENCY among Europeans to see the so-called primitive societies they found as not just pristine but changeless as well: as if they had existed since time immemorial in the state in which they were first met. This was never true; and subsequent research into the Tahiti of the mid-eighteenth century has shown it was already undergoing rapid change. A new god, ‘Oro, was establishing ascendancy, supplanting Tane; and his worship was being carried from island to island. It was a complex cult, still not completely understood. The power of ‘Oro could manifest in two ways, in peace or in war. In war he was a bloody exemplar but in his aspect of god of peace he was known as ‘Oro of the laid-down spear and his symbol was three spears disposed in a triangle; this was also the marker of the Arioi, his chief worshippers and the promoters of the cult.

The Arioi were a society of lovers, warriors, navigators, orators, priests and artists who went from place to place performing music, dance and drama, tattooing, painting tapa and so forth. Their dances might be bloodthirsty re-enactments of battles or sacrifices; or lubricious rehearsals of sexual exploits. The Arioi, who were both men and women, were not allowed to raise children and so practised infanticide. When they travelled from island to island, pairs of dead men, and dead fish, sharks or turtles, lay on the prows of their canoes. Upon landing, the bodies of these human sacrifices to ‘Oro might be hung up in trees on ropes strung through their heads; or laid as rollers under the keels of the canoes as they were dragged up the sand. Perhaps the Arioi were themselves a sacrifice to ‘Oro; their aim was to win the fertility and abundance the god could grant through dedicating their own lives to him, whether as performers and artists or as avatars of war. Infanticide too was a way of ensuring fertility: in Tahiti a high-born child who was allowed to survive carried the accumulated mana of all those in the line who had died before he or she was elected to live.

It seems that the Dolphin’s arrival could be understood by Tahitians only in terms of this new and sometimes bloody cult, which was not confined to the Society Islands – there was a similar institution called Ka‘ioi in the Marquesas at this time. For by the mid-eighteenth century ‘Oro’s marae at Taputapuatea on Rai‘atea was the centre of a great voyaging network that stretched as far as the Cook and Austral Islands to the south, the Marquesas in the north and the Tuamotus to the east: a nascent empire of the revenant god. Tupaia, whom Cook would take with him to New Zealand, was an Arioi; the map he drew for Cook and Banks covered 40 degrees of longitude and 20 of latitude, showing the whereabouts of seventy or more islands and spanning, for example, the 2500 miles between Tahiti and Fiji away to the west.

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