ABSTRACT
In the study of Polynesian religion so much has been reconstruction, so little the result of the actual observation of rites that a statement of the facts, in detail, has seemed to the author to be the most imperative need. In the Work of the Gods it is dear that people have a tremendous mass of detail which is not irrelevant to the main theme, but is die very stuff of religious reality to die Tikopia; it is co-ordinated, woven together into a significant pattern by a scheme of beliefs closely integrated with die particular social structure. The most fundamental is the postulate of the existence of a set of invisible beings, ancestors and spirits who may be called deities, known by the generic term of atua. These beings too are co-ordinated; they have a social organization parallel to that of the Tikopia, and from our point of view are essentially an imaginative and emotional projection of this.
