ABSTRACT

Tikopia descriptive material about the atua they created was rather like much Christian hagiography—a mixture of accounts of the doings of real men, miracles performed by them and actions of personalities who were pure inventions. The great difference was that whereas the saints were expected to be concerned primarily with moral issues, Tikopia atua, the atua lasi in particular, were primarily referred to situations of power. As I have already mentioned, the Tikopia theological system may be regarded as a field of power split into different conceptual sectors, each personalized as a separate entity, and endowed with individual characteristics. Such personalized endowment would seem to have had several functions, including serving the thought process of differentiation, and giving the human individuals immediately concerned an assurance of a property peculiar to each. Much of this endowment consisted of myth, in the narrow sense of narrative description of non-empirical problem situations, embodying the principle of suspense and some resolution of the situations in dramatic terms. The situations described were believed to have actually occurred as events in time past. But while items of faith, used as backing for religious ritual and practical interests, these narratives undoubtedly served aesthetic, emotional and recreational interests of narrator and listeners. Much of the body of material about atua also consisted of more fragmented pieces of information, assertions as to jurisdiction, statements of relationships and activities, which not only helped to give more firmness to the concepts of atua as personalities but also served to knit together these personalities into a coherent system. At the same time, differences in esoteric information commanded by individuals, differences in their imaginative powers and control of fantasy, and differences in what their personal and group interests would allow them to admit, resulted in the system being neither uniform nor completely symmetrical.