ABSTRACT
Tikopia pagan religion was a system which necessitated periodic relations between men and putative ancestral and other spirit powers. It did not make much use of notions of intimate personal communion of an ideational or emotional character with such spirits. The Tikopia were not mystics in any developed systematic way. They held that personal invisible communication with the spirit world could occur, as in dreams, but expected that for the most part any manifestations of spirit would be accompanied by some visible material forms of behaviour. Communication by ritual was the key mode. But such ritual communication was not expected to be carried out separately by every individual. In the pagan system the people had no direct access to the gods; they communicated— or expressed the ritual relations of their society—by means of their regularly instituted representatives.
