The Ancients - Polynesian Mythology

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

From creation stories to voyager journeys, mythology and oral history are often key to our identities. In this episode Christina Thompson shines a light on some fascinating tales from Polynesian mythology and explains how these tales have been received in more recent history. Christina is the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, we are talking about ancient Polynesian mythology. That's right. It sounds fascinating and it is fascinating. We have got Christina Thompson on the show once again to talk about this aspect of ancient Polynesia. We're going to be focusing on creation myths. We're going to be looking at some voyaging stories. We're going to be looking at the stories of sea creatures that lurked beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean. And we're also going to be shining a light on the reception of this Polynesian mythology in more recent times. So without further ado, here's Christina.

Christina, it's great to have you back on the podcast. I'm totally thrilled to be here. Well, I'm thrilled that you agreed to come back on because we're talking more Polynesians, mythology, oral culture, because Christina, Polynesian oral culture, this was right at the heart of their society. Yes. So the oral traditions of Polynesia are really wonderful just in the way that everybody's oral traditions are wonderful. But they are also mercifully, reasonably well documented. And I think that is thanks to the fact that the European arrival was comparatively late.

So it isn't like where I live in Boston, where you have a lot of this early contact was a very long time ago and not as well documented. And the Europeans who arrived were not as interested, I think, in documenting it. But you do have some people in the 19th century, the late 18th and early 19th century, a pretty small window, actually, kind of 1790s. Well, I mean, it goes on through the 19th century, but the important part of it, I think, is the early decades. And some of them were missionaries and some of them were not, but they just got interested in understanding what Polynesian peoples, what islanders believed. And so sometimes they were interested in it because they were going to convert them. That was the goal. But even if

you wanted to convert people, you had to understand what they already thought. And you also had to understand their language. And when you understood their language, you were then able to talk to them about things that were kind of complicated. So early records of kind of contact do not contain any of this material because there was no capacity of the early visitors to these areas to understand, to converse about esoterica. But once you get people who are living in the islands, and it is mostly missionaries in the first decades of the 19th century, who live in the islands for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, you know, their language ability is pretty significant. And they do a small number of them, not all of them. Some of them do document what people believed. And that is really this record that we have, which is, you know, one has to be grateful for it. And this documents

what the people believed. I mean, one thing which seems to really stand out straight away is really extraordinary. Christina, are the creation myths? Yes. I was very kind of, I think obsessed might be too strong a word, but it's getting near there. You know, I knew I wanted to write about the mythology because what does this group of people believe about what they're doing and where they come from and who they are and everything. And I could have just written about their voyaging myths because there's a big corpus of voyaging mythology and it's totally pertinent. You know, what do they say? Who are their voyaging heroes? Where do they go? What do they think they're doing? Why are they traveling? You know, all of that stuff. What do they take with them? You know, all of that. And that was all totally fascinating. But I got kind of really drawn into the whole

question of the bigger origin story, which is basically cosmological. You know, I mean, I sort of were cosmogonic, which is the term I particularly love, you know, who are we? And that, of course, is not about really voyaging. That's about who are we, you know, in this kind of existential cosmic sense. And I do think that they vary. They're not all the same island group to island group, but there certainly seems to be a kind of, you might call an Eastern Pacific, so Central and Eastern Pacific version, which I know best from New Zealand, but it's got a lot of similarities to some of the other islands, in which the world emerges from darkness, or a kind of, it's not really chaos, although a lot of early Europeans called it that because they connected it with the Greek. It's a kind of a darkness, like there's a world of darkness and a world of light, and the people are in the world of light, and the dead

are in the world of darkness, but also the unborn are in the world of darkness. So before we are born and after we die. There's also the beginning of the world is this kind of darkness. It's called tepo. So I don't know, pretty mesmerizing, really. Absolutely. And you mentioned how there seems to be various versions between the different islands, but can you see like an overarching cosmogonic vision with two closely related themes? Well, there is a kind of binary quality to it, which I found kind of interesting, this light and dark and worlds of the sacred and the ordinary. You know, there's an economy there as well, male and female, that plays into it a lot. And then there is this sort of generational principle, which is that creation is a matter of kind of reproduction. And in many cases, basically kind of explicitly sexual reproduction. So you have a story of origin, which begins in darkness, it begins in this kind of nothingness, and then gradually

kind of emerges through this process of things coming together and producing other things. And that isn't just animals or people or gods. It can also be like sand and rocks. There's a phase where rocks generate rocks. Different kinds of rocks and different kinds of sand generate different kinds of rocks and sand. And then there are insects that do that, and there are sea creatures that do that. And eventually sort of everything gets created in this kind of reproduction, sort of reproductive, I don't know really what to call it, fashion. And that is very characteristic of the mythologies of the region. So yeah, that's definitely a feature of it, I would say. So interesting. And just keeping on this one more second, and you actually did mention the figure earlier, Taipo,

but just like to delve into him a bit more in this field because he's right at the heart of these creation myths. He's quite a significant figure. It's not really a figure. It's a space. Space, significant space. Significant space, yeah. There are sort of figures.

Titumu is a masculine principle, which is more almost like a, kind of like a thing. Titumu is a masculine principle, which is more almost like a kind of like a thing. Tipapa is a feminine principle, which is like the earth. You often get, not in all of them, but in some of them, you get a kind of earth and sky pairing, sort of sky father, earth mother, which is a kind of recognizable paradigm also for the Indo-European mythologies. And that was very entrancing, of course, to the early, you know, the people who were trying to write this stuff down, especially the less missionary people,

the people who were kind of interested in more like European mythology, Celtic or in Norse or Greek or whatever. They saw this as a parallel between the two. I don't know whether it's really a parallel. It looks like one, but it's hard to know why. Anyway, there are these pairings. And so Taipo is also a pairing with Te Ao, but it's a world. It's a world. They're each worlds, as it were. I don't know whether space or sometimes they're time. That's the other thing that's kind of wonderful is that that Taipo sometimes is described as there are several of them. They are iterative. And so in time you have one and then another and then another and then another sort of as creation unfolds. It's pretty great, I have to say. And I feel,

you know, difficult as this is the early contact period was and bad as it was for islanders in most respects. The fact that there were people who wrote this stuff down is something that I'm grateful for, because otherwise I think we would have lost a lot of it in the ructions of the 19th century and the, with disease and war and social unrest and yeah. Absolutely. Not a good time to be alive indeed. I mean, Christina, that was so interesting, like how creation was unfolding, this idea of something from nothing. It seems to be some interesting parallels. I mean, the mind instantly thinks of things like the Genesis story. Yeah, well, you know, a lot of myth, not all of them in the world, obviously, but a lot of mythologies throughout the world have a creation period, they have a creation phase, as it were,

so things come into being, and they come into being out of the ocean or out of an egg, or out of the sky or out of like something there is again that this idea of there being an original phase of nothingness as it were which is you sort of pause it before you have something it is common in world mythologies to have something like this yeah absolutely let's not go too deep into that i'm sure we'd be talking for hours i mean but anyways is moving on from the creation myths into these other stories, and we kind of mentioned it slightly earlier, but these are really, really interesting from what I read from your book. These are the voyaging stories. These

seem to be really, really key to Polynesian mythology. Yes, they are. And I think that one of the things that I liked about the voyaging stories, which are when you look at the, you know, creation mythology, you're really in the world of sort of speculative imaginary kind of like nobody knows what's going on in that time. They just say stuff, whatever, they believe it. But when you get to voyaging stories, you feel as though you're approaching the historical, you know, it's really different. Yes, they're mythological. Yes, there are whirlpools and sea monsters and all that kind of stuff. But. Yes, there are whirlpools and sea monsters and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, there are whirlpools and there are sea monsters. So it doesn't seem like it's not that far from the truth in some ways. corpus, I found stories of all kinds in all places that had all kinds of funny details in them. Like they would tell you how many people were on the voyage, like how many people you needed on

the canoe. Or they would say, you know, gather the water in the bamboo, you know, in the gourds or in the bamboo canes or whatever. Like they would talk about what you had to take with you. Or they would have these very explicit motives. We are going because this, we need to go and get this thing. There are a lot of stories about going and getting things and bringing them back. So for example, the kumara, which we talked about, the sweet potato, there are in New Zealand, lots of stories about going to the place where the kumara is, which is of course a land of plenty and bringing it back, which is like if you're on an island culture, you do have to go and get stuff and bring it back. You can't subsist on just what you have. You have to trade. You have to you have to procure. You know, if you're on an atoll,

you need stone. You don't have any stone. If you're on a high island, you might want pearls or you might want turtles or you might want birds of a certain kind. You might go to an atoll to get some of those. So there's a lot of, you know, going and getting and bringing back. And I think that's part of what we're seeing in the voyaging stories, especially for kind of high value objects, not just going and getting birds eggs, but going and getting ceremonial objects or people or, I don't know, food, important food. So it sounds like some of these voyaging stories, I mean, perhaps maybe we think like the Trojan War, perhaps there actually was a siege of Troy, perhaps there were these figures that actually were alive. But of course, there were all these fabulous stories within those

myths. Perhaps with these voyaging stories, you get these elements which seem plausible historical parts, but then you also get the fabulous parts too. I think so. Absolutely. I really feel that that's the way to think about them. I mean, I talk about it at one point as sort of having both the texture of history and the texture of myth. And I think that's exactly what it is, is that you feel that you're being drawn through them to sort of the kind of truth of the experience of the historical experience. And yet it's not specific. You know, it's not like in, you know, 1235, we traveled to this place to pick up X. I mean, that's the thing about not having a written history. You know, that's the thing about oral traditions is that they are, they're sort of mixed in this way. They're both true and, and I don't want to say untrue because there's nothing

untrue about them, but they're both kind of sort of specific and general, I guess is what I would say at the same time. And it's a little hard to disentangle which are the sort of specific parts in which you don't want to use them to say, oh, yes, these people went exactly to that place because that place, I don't know, like they talk a lot about going to Hawaii. A lot of the myths are about going to Hawaii. Well, where is Hawaii? You know, I think it's different depending on where you are. Well, you mentioned hawaii what was hawaii what is hawaii so hawaii is the also known as avaiki savai hawaii hawaii you know it's the name of the big island in the hawaiian chain and also the archipelago but that is named after

the ancestral homeland it is the name of the ancestral homeland the ancestral homeland for a lot of people in the kind of eastern pacific it's not true in the Western Pacific. But there are a number of actual islands that bear this name, inoa that has the same kind of name. The Cook Islanders who are interested in getting rid of the name Cook Islands want to call their islands Awaiki, I think. So yeah, so it's an ancestral homeland name, which is applied in a number of different places. But the myths will speak of going back to it. And so then you're like, well, did that mean going back to sort of like the Garden of Eden? You know, I mean, did it mean something mythological in that sense? Or did it mean like this particular island that actually had that name?

You can't know. Absolutely. You absolutely can't know, can you? It's really interesting. I didn't know that. I think it kind of is too. That's super interesting as well for today's age. Let's focus in then on a couple of these stories, a couple of these myths I've got down here. And Christina,

the Canoe Song of Rue, what is this? So this is a definitely more mythological one, less sort of specific, but it's typical of a certain kind of canoe song, you might say, where you have the story of a hero, in this case, Rue, but also his sister, Hina, who is another kind of mythological sort of figure. And they travel from one island to another. I think of these as like map songs. They describe the islands of an archipelago in order. So if you were to talk to someone about what islands, where they are, you might use a song like this to say, well, you know, that would say, well, Rue goes to this island, and then he goes to this island, then he goes to this island, then he goes to this island. And they are actually in the

correct order, if you say come from the west to the east. There are versions of this in Hawaii as well, well-known story of Pele, the volcano goddess, who comes and travels from island to island in the correct order. And that is obviously a geography song. It's a song about where islands are in relation to one another. If you travel from one, the next one you will reach is this one. If you travel from that one, the next one you will reach is this one. So that's one kind of a story or one kind of a song, which is not so much about what it takes to get there. Or maybe it's not so much about a historical figure doing it particularly. It's about where are we?

So in that one, you can kind of once again, you can see that historical element perhaps behind it in regards to going from island to island. Well, sure. And also the fact that if you live in islands, you live in an archipelago, you have to know what is around you. You can't see the other islands all the time. Mostly you can't at all. And so you have to know. If I know the next island over is this, well, what's beyond that? And what's beyond that? In order for you to know those things, there has to be a story of them or a song of them or a chant of them or something, because you haven't got a map and you haven't got a book and you haven't got a written account. So what you have is a chant or a song of this geography, and that is your knowledge of it. I mean, it's an expression of your knowledge. It's not all of your knowledge of it, but it's

an expression of a piece of information that is important to you. And it's important for survival. Like we think of mythology as maybe religion or spirituality or something sort of always in the realm of the not practical. But in fact, this stuff is hugely practical. You know, this is like having GPS on your phone. I mean, we're not worshipping it. We're using it to get to another Starbucks or something, you know. So that's what I think some of that stuff is. I mean, I'm not the last word on this, by the way. This is just what I think it is. Absolutely. No problem. Get that out there. What caused the anarchy?

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hearing from the best and brightest minds. We will disentangle fact from fiction, bring you the latest discoveries, and reveal how the so-called Dark Ages laid the foundations for much of the world we're living in today. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, but Christina, keeping on that just a little bit longer, because we've talked about sea creatures already, but it seems that in this song in particular, there are some striking sea creatures mentioned. In the story of Rata, there are lots and lots of sea creatures. Ah, the story of Ratta. Okay, my apologies. The story of Ratta, that's a brilliant tangent onto the next one.

Yeah, this is a little different because Ratta is one of these more, you know, one feels he's a culture hero. He's a culture hero like Odysseus, almost exactly like Odysseus in some ways. And he is on a voyage. He actually is going to, he's going to right a wrong and retrieve his family members who have been sort of kidnapped by an evil figure. But he, in order to get there, he has to pass through these challenges and they vary from version to version, but sometimes it's a shoal, a shoal of fish. So it's like a lot of fish. Sometimes it is a giant like trevally or something like a giant fish. Sometimes it is a whirlpool often. The similarities with discus are striking, isn't it? You immediately think of Charybdis and the whirlpool there. And this is similar, the whirlpool in Vrata. I know I had that feeling at all. I had

still in Charybdis in my head, you know, when I was read, the first time I read that, I went, whoa, look at that. Or, you know, the sirens or something, you know, all of it, all of it. It just feels like the same template. But I think that's what, you know, that's what quests and voyaging are like. If you think about the sort of archetypal structure, you have a person going out, comparatively unprotected, so putting himself, herself or whatever, at risk, vulnerable, out into an unknown space, which putting himself, herself, or whatever, at risk, vulnerable,

out into an unknown space, which will have stuff in it which is dangerous. And whether that's, you know, oceanic stuff or stuff in the forest or whatever. There are often, in some of these stories, there are giant birds, giant predatory birds who are dangerous and who capture people and take them away, which is a kind of, to me, was slightly surprising, but that's part of the story. Maybe, you know, they have an environment where they have a lot of fish

and they have a lot of birds. They don't have tigers. They don't have bears. So maybe, you know, the imagination takes the birds and turns them into a monster. Absolutely. I think absolutely right on that. Of course, I can't say I'm a complete amateur on this,

but yes, as you say, the environment said, there's no lions, there's no Nemean equivalent out in polonise out and out in the ocean but as you say there are these albatross like huge seabirds aren't there which they would have known they would have seen so it's the perfect alternative for a great big predator like this this enemy for a heroic traveler to face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, they don't have albatrosses in the tropics, but they do have, you know, because they're for the,

maybe they get up there once in a while. I don't know. Mostly they're down in the roaring 40s or whatever. But I definitely think that's part of it. And there's a lot of bird stuff. There's just a lot of bird stuff, a lot of bird mythology all over the place. Sea creature mythology, bird mythology.

Oh, giant clam. that's one of the other things there's a giant clam or a mollusk of some kind and they have to it's trying to snap itself down on them that is super cool super super cool now one more myth one more story that i've got written down we can go on to others if you'd like as well. But this is the story of Acca. What is this? So Acca is basically, I think, you know, it's cognate with rata. You drop the R, you have a K instead of a T. Again, another hero story in which I was very interested in. This one comes from the Marquesas. I was interested in it because it was an example to me of one of the stories that did seem to have this historical texture to it. It's had a lot of detail to it. So Akka is going to go and procure red feathers. So red feathers are an item. Red is a high value

color. Red feathers are a treasure item throughout. I think it comes from actually way over on the West. I mean, it's very common to see it. And he's going to go and get these red feathers because they come from these certain parrots. They don't have them everywhere, you know, and he gets his group of people together. He talks about how many people he needs to do this. Then one of the other things in this story is that in this story, what they do is as they set out, they speak to the stars. They speak to these kind of star figures and the star figures tell them to move on to the next star or the next thing i mean it's really a star path is what you're seeing in that story you know it's like the island chain so the island chain is narrated in one kind of a story but in

this one there is a piece of navigational information about taking the route which route you're going to take. And there are other things like that in some of these stories. They'll talk about which island you go to first. You go to a series of islands again. But the star references were kind of interesting. But then another thing about it that interested me is that they go, they get their stuff. The voyage back is very hard.

And on the voyage back, many die. And that was kind of unusual in the stories that I read. You know, hero stories are usually success stories. They're not usually stories about how the hero went out and everybody died. They're like, the hero went out, he got the golden fleece or whatever, you know, he brought it back. I mean, I don't know. I don't know really the golden fleece, but whatever. And in this story, they come back with the red feathers and they do manage to procure them and they do manage to bring them back, but many die on the voyage home. And there's a kind of a vision of the people waiting to see them arrive from the shore, the women particularly waiting to see the canoe come back. And then the

realization that there are not that many people in it. And I thought, wow, wow, that is probably exactly what it was like, you know, on on many occasions people went out and they didn't all make it back if any of them made it back so there was some like deep feeling in that to me of reality you know of what it was like to be a voyaging culture to be the people who lived on these islands that were remote from one another and had to make these long and dangerous voyages that's an incredible story right there and especially you say that highlight the end and as you just said it does kind of again, harken back to this idea that there was perhaps these historical plausible parts of these voyaging stories in particular.

I think so. One has one's ups and downs in writing a book. And I have to say that when I got into this part of my book, I had a lot of trouble for a while, partly because there was so much cool material. So, you know, part of it is you just have to pick and choose. But also I felt like there wasn't much guidance. I didn't feel in some parts of this field, there is a lot of work that has been done. So in archaeology, for example, there are a lot of experts. There are a lot of people who know the stuff and I can just turn to them. But when we come to the mythology, so, you know, tip to those of you who are doing PhDs, there is work to do here.

There is some analysis of some of this stuff, but a lot of people's approach to it has, I think, been comparatively simplistic. people's approach to it has, I think, been comparatively simplistic. It's not been rich enough in terms of the way the texts are read and the way they're understood. For one thing, they're very layered, you know, because of the circumstances of their collection and their, and the way they were recorded and so forth. So they're complicated, very complicated as texts. You know, I come to this whole field as a sort of a textual scholar. So it was right up my alley. But of course, then I got too excited and was in danger of spending way too much time here. And I didn't know that everybody else would be in the world would be interested. So I'm very

pleased that you're asking me these questions, frankly. Absolutely. I find this is so, so cool. And I mean, we've only really talked about like three or four myths and stories so far christina but i mean before we start really wrapping up are there any other particular myths that you'd like to highlight in this podcast i realize this might be a quite a tricky question if there's so many but are there any particular you'd like to highlight there are really great stories of female navigators and voyagers and goddesses and stuff like that. And I didn't have enough room to really do them justice. The story of Pele in the Hawaiian Islands is a particularly wonderful one.

And I was kind of sorry that I didn't get to spend more time with and on it, because I think it illustrates a lot of the same things, but also it has this powerful female figure, which was kind of intriguing. And so I do think that would be one that I love. I guess one other thing I would just say is that anybody who would be interested in this material, I think once you get into it, you realize that there's a lot of kind of cheap versions. There's a lot of unsophisticated adoption of some of these ideas. I guess what I mean is Moana is a good example. I think they did their homework, but it's also got some elements that to me looked,

you know, Disney-fied or something. I mean, not surprisingly, it is a Disney movie. But I think the reality of these stories is more interesting, more complicated, more layered than most of the sort of books about this stuff would indicate or movies or whatever. So as we start to wrap this up, all this mythology, all that stuff is really, really interesting. And you mentioned how it was documented when Europeans do reach the islands, the reception of Polynesian mythology, has it changed over time how Europeans in particular have responded to the

mythology? Yes, definitely. Although I think the most interesting thing about this, and this was a bit of a revelation to me, was that in the 19th century, Europeans who are living in the islands, who have language skills, who've been there a long time, and who are there during this great period of transition from traditional Polynesian culture to colonial Europeanized culture, you have these people who make this effort to write this stuff down and learn about it and so forth. And they are very admiring and very entranced by this stuff. They see it as very rich.

They see it as historical. They see it as complex. They see it as evidence of Polynesian action in history. You know, it's a kind of a nuanced understanding, not perfect, to be sure. They have sometimes see it as kind of primitive, you know, in that way. Mainly, they have a kind of a complex understanding. And as you come into the 20th century, one of the things that happens in the field of kind of Polynesian history or anthropology, say, is that there is a little bit less enthusiasm for these traditions in the early part of the 20th century because they seem to be fuzzy. And they are fuzzy. I mean, they're not, you know, can't lock them

down. They aren't the same kind of evidence, for example, as radiocarbon dating. They just aren't in the same category. They sort of suffer a loss of prestige in the 20th century. And then they are rediscovered. So as we move sort of into the latter part of the 20th century, and now, of course, they're high on the list of people's areas of interest. So that's great. So they were originally seen as kind of, for example, you might take these voyaging stories as evidence of Polynesian voyaging. Then you see them as like not really anything except, you know, later in the 20th century, early in the 20th century. You see them as kind of like fairy tales. So they're denigrated as like fairy tales or fairy stories. And then they regain their sort of position as people begin to understand that they really do have really valuable content. You just have to

think about it differently. It just requires a different mindset. And so then you start to get people looking at them. But I think they've been, in some ways, they haven't attracted quite as much attention as they should have. And there are a handful of people who wrote about them in the second half of the 20th century. And there is some stuff now, and it's coming more and more and more. But they have definitely come to be understood as an important dimension of the overall story of Polynesia. Well, that certainly sounds exciting and bodes well for the future indeed. Christina, wonderful chat as always. It's always great to have you on the podcast. And last but certainly not least, your book on this topic is called? It's called Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesia.

Fantastic. Christina, great to see you again. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. on this topic is called? It's called Sea People, the Puzzle of Polynesia. Fantastic. Christina, great to see you again. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks so much. It's Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

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