1.6.03
Smrt kapitána Cooka
Pokud čtete anglicky a chcete se dozvědět něco nadmíru zajímavého o smrti kapitána Cooka a o Hawaii, máte jedinečnou příležitost. Pokud si svou angličtinou jisti nejste, k dispozici máte i český "převod".
Marshall Sahlins: Islands of History
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1985
Chapter 4
Captain James Cook; or The Dying God
Concerning the Death of Captain Cook:
… what I have here said I do not Aver to be the Real in Every particular although in General it may be pretty Nigh the Matter. I have carefully Assorted such Relations as had the greatest appearance of Truth. But indeed they were so Exceedingly perplexed in their Accounts that it was a hard matter to Colect Certainty, in particular cases, or indeed to write any Account at all.
Log book of Alex: Home, R. N., of Buskenburn, Berkwickshire, while with Captain Cook on his Last Voyage
I. "A chain of events which could no more be foreseen than prevented"
(William Ellis, Surgeon’s second mate, HMS Discovery)
It was the most generous welcome ever accorded any European voyage of discovery in this ocean. [1] “Anchored in 17 fms black sand,” reads a midschipman’s log, “admist an Innumerable Number of Canoes, the people in which were singing & rejoicing all the way” (Riou, Log: 17 Jan. 1779). They were singing! Nor in all his experience had captain Cook ever seen so many Polynesians assembled as were here in Kealakekua Bay. Besides the innumerable canoes, Hawaiians were clambering over the Resolution and Discovery , lining the beaches, and swimming in the water “like shoals of fish.” Perhaps there were 10,000, or five times as many people as normally lived here. And not a weapon to be seen among them, Cook remarked. Instead, the canoes were laden with pigs, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, sugar cane: everything the island produced. Also the women “seemed remarkably anxious to engage themselves to our people” (Ellis 1782, 1:86). A priest came on board and wrapped Captain Cook in the red tapa-cloth decoration of a temple image, then made the offering of a sacrificial pig. On shore, the priest led the Great Navigator by the hand to the temple of Hikiau. Hearing the herald’s cry “O Lono,” the people on their passage flew to their houses or prostrated face to ground. Lono is the god associated with natural growth and human reproduction who annually returns to the Islands with the fertilizing rains of winter; he is also an ancient king come in search of his sacred bride. In January 1779, at the temple, captain Cook was put through the customary rites of welcome to Lono. As the priest Koa’a and Lt. King held his arms outstretched and appropriate sacrifices were made, Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon (constructed of wood staves) which is the appearance of the god. It was a ceremony of the Makahiki, the great Hawaiian New Year Festival. Sir James Frazer described the Makahiki in The Golden Bough : in part 3, The Dying God. [2]
Cook’s death at Hawaiian hands just a few weeks later could thus be described as the ritual sequel: the historical metaphor of a mythical reality. Nor were the myths Hawaiian only. There was the complementary British folklore characterized by Cook’s biographer J. C. Beaglehole as “the English search for a ‘King’.” Early on Sunday morning, 14 February 1779, Captain Cook went ashore with a party of marines to take the Hawaiian king, Kalaniopu’u, hostage against the return of the Discovery ’s cutter, stolen the night before in a bold maneuver–of which, however, the amiable old ruler was innocent. At the decisive moment, Cook and Kalaniopu’u, the God and the King, will confront each other as cosmic adversaries. Permit me thus an anthropological reading of the historical texts. For in all the confused Tolstoian narratives of the affray–among which the judicious Beaglehole refuses at times to choose–the one recurrent certainty is a dramatic structure with the properties of a ritual transformation. During the passage inland to find the king, thence seaward with his royal hostage, Cook is metamorphosed from a being of veneration to an object of hostility. When he came ashore, the common people as usual dispersed before him and prostrated faces to the earth; but in the end he was himself precipitated face down in the water by a chief’s weapon, an iron trade dagger, to be rushed upon by a mob exulting over him, and seeming to add to their own honours by the part they could claim in his death: “snatching the daggers from each other,” reads Mr. Burney’s account, “out of eagerness to have their share in killing him” (Journal: 14 Feb. 1779). In the final ritual inversion, Cook’s body would be offered in sacrifice by the Hawaiian King.
Cook was transformed from the divine beneficiary of the sacrifice to its victim–a change never really radical in Polynesian thought, and in their royal combats always possible (Valeri: in press). Every phase of the transformation had its own kind of offering: the shifting material signs of Cook’s trajectory in cosmic value. In the beginning, as he went “to find the King,” pigs were pressed upon him; and as he waited for Kalaniopu’u to waken, more offerings of red tapa cloth–proving that the English captain was still the image of the Hawaiian god. The King came away willingly and was walking by Cook’s hand to the waiting ship’s boat when he was stopped by his favored wife Kaneikapolei and two chiefs, pleading and demanding that he not go on. By all accounts, British as well as Hawaiian, they told him such stories of the death of kings as to force him to sit upon the ground, where he now appeared–according to Lt. Phillups’s report–“dejected and frightened” (in Beaglehole 1967:535).
Nothing to this point had evoked the King’s suspicions, and likewise it was only now, Phillips recounts, that “we first began to suspect that they were not very well dispos’d toward us” ( Ibid .). The transition comes suddenly, at the moment the King is made to perceive Cook as his mortal enemy. This is the structural crisis, when all the social relations begin to change their signs. Accordingly, the material exchanges now convey a certain ambiguity, like those Maori sacrifices that pollute the gods in the act of placating them. An old man offers a coconut, chanting so persistently that the exasperated Cook cannot make him lay off. A supplication begging the release of the King? Lt. Phillips considered that “the artful rascal of a priest” was carrying on to divert attention from the fact that this countrymen, gathering to the number of two or three thousand, were now arming to defend their King. About this time, report comes that an important chief has been killed by the British blockading the southern end of the Bay. The King is seen still on the ground, “with the strongest marks of terror on his countenance” (Cook and King 1784, 3:44), but he soon disappears from the scene. Events have gone beyond the power of anyone to control them. “Ye natives” are manifesting that disposition the English call “insolence.” The final homage to Cook is tendered in missiles that include stones and clubs among the pieces of breadfruit and coconut. Each side thus responding violently to the perceived threats of the other, they soon reach “the fatal impact.” [3]
But just who done it? In historical texts dating from this day to fifty-odd years later, some eight or ten different men are identified as “the man who killed Captain Cook,” referring usually to the one who first stabbed him with the iron dagger. Many of the alleged assailants are named–Pahea, Nuha, Pihole, Pohewa, etc. Often they are distinguished by rank, kinship affiliation, and other social indexes: important clues, since as I hope to show, the key to the mystery is elementary categories (my dear Watson). [4]
Death of Cook: Death of Lono. The event was absolutely unique, and it was repeated every year. For the event (any event) unfolds simultaneously on two levels: as individual action and as collective representation; or better, as the relation between certain life histories and a history that is, over and above these, the existence of societies. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz, the event is a unique actualisation of a general phenomenon (1961:153-54). Hence on the one hand, historical contingency and the particularities of individual action; and on the other hand, those recurrent dimensions of the event in which we recognize some cultucal order. The paradox for an historical “science” is that the contingent circumstances–such as the accidents of biography and geography–are necessary conditions . If Cook hadn’t done this or that, then … Then what? Conversely, the historian will always be tempted to find the one decisive act on some one ’s part that set off the whole chain of happenings. For Beaglehole, it was when Cook, worn out from his global adventures, lost control and fired the first shot. And this way of thinking even holds the promise that history can be rescued from its “idiographic” plight by real science . For example, according to the diagnosis recently made by a distinguished English physician, Cook during this third voyage was showing all the symptoms of a parasitic infection of the intestine (Watt 1979). Worms done him in. Really, there is something faintly heroic in the idea: a medicine man’s homage to the place Cook has assumed in Western folklore as a constituting being, responsible for the shape of the world as we know it–as if Hawaiians, then, could have done no more than respond to his determining presence, in the ways predictable by some naïve psychology. Still, if the tide had been higher and the boats closer in, Cook would have gotten clean away, whatever his intestinal condition, and despite that–another decisive factor–he couldn’t swim.
Even to understand what did happened, it would be insufficient to note that certain people acted in certain ways, unless we also knew what that signified. The contingent becomes fully historical only as it is meaningful: only as the personal act or the ecological effect takes on a systematic or positional value in a cultural scheme. An historical presence is a cultural existence. So the specific effect of Cook’s individuality was mediated by the cultural category (or categories) which he represented as a logical individual. Implied, then, are categorical relations to others. Frazer could have included Hawaiians the among those Polynesians he found able to testify that the king’s enemy is a stranger. And if, that day, the Hawaiian people proved so sensitive about the life of their King, was it not because, as Frazer also argued, the divine king lived the life of the people?
Also, the life of the cosmos. My own argument about the death of Cook will begin with the creation, with the famous Hawaiian chant ‘Beginning-[in-]Deep-Darkness’, Kumulipo (Beckwith 1972). It is the birth chant of Ka-‘I-I-mamao, father of the King of Cook’s time, and Hawaiians read it alternately as the story of the universe or the biography of the King: the royal child is thus “the cosmos described” (Luomala in Beckwith 1972:xiii). According to late Hawaiian tradition, the Kumulipo chant was intoned by the priest in the temple ceremonies by which Cook was welcomed as Lono. The tradition cannot be confirmed historically. Its truth perhaps lies in the metaphoric relation between Cook and the royal subject of the creation chant. For this man, Ka-‘I-I-mamao, was Cook’s latest Hawaiian predecessor in the capacity of Lono: deprived of his rule, his life, and his wife by political rivals.
II. Nānā I ke Kumu: Look to the Source
The Kumulipo is connected to Cook in another way. The chant sets the origin of the universe at the autumnal rising of the Pleiades at sunset: celestial event that anticipates the beginning of the Hawaiian ritual year, the annual return of Lono–and by eight days in November 1778, the appearance off Maui of Captain Cook. Conversely, the Hawaiian New Year ceremony, the Makahiki, has the sense of an eternal return: the rebirth of the world in the change of seasons, as effected or conceived by Lono. Yet neither Lono nor any other determinate Hawaiian god had presided over the initial creation. In the Kumulipo, as in certain cosmogonic myths of the Maori, the world of natural things is born of primordial notions that are principles themselves of reproduction (cf. chapter 2). The divine first appears abstractly, as generative-spirit-in-itself. Only after the seven epochs of the pō , the long night of the world’s self-generation, are the gods as such born–as siblings to mankind. God and man appear together, and in fraternal strife over the means of their reproduction: their own older sister. Begun in the eight epoch of creation, this struggle makes the transition to the succeeding ages of the ao , the ‘day’ or world known to man. Indeed the stuggle is presented as the condition of the possibility of human life in a world in which the life-giving powers are divine. The end of the eight chant thus celebrates a victory: “Man spread about now, man was here now; / It was day [ ao ].” And this victory gained over the god is again analogous to the triumph achieved annually over Lono at New Year, which effects the seasonal transition, as Hawaiians note, from the time of long nights ( pō ) to the time of long days ( ao ) (see Kepelino 1932).
The older sister of god and man, La’ila’i, is the firstborn to all the eras of previous creation. By Hawaiian theory, as firstborn La’ila’i is the legitimate heir to creation; while as woman she is uniquely able to transform divine into human life. The issue in her brothers’ struggle to possess her in accordingly cosmological in scope and political in form. Described in certain genealogies as twins, the first two brothers are named simply in the chant as “Ki’i, a man” and “Kane, a god.” But since Ki’i means ‘image’ and Kane means ‘man’, everything has already been said: the first god is ‘man’ and the first man is ‘god’. So in the chant, the statuses of god and man are reserved by La’ila’i’s actions. She “sit sideways,” meaning she takes a second husband, Ki’I, and her children by the man Ki’i are born before her children by the god Kane. Thus the descendants of the man are senior:
There was whispering, lip-smacking and clucking,
Smacking, tut-tutting, head shaking,
Sulking, sullenness, silence.
Kane kept silence, refused to speak,
Sullen, angry, resentful
With the woman for her progeny…
She slept with Ki’i.
Kane suspected the first-born, became jealous,
Suspected Ki’i and La’ila’i of a secret union [?]…
Kane was angry and jealous because he slept last with her,
His descendants would hence belong to the younger line,
The children of the elder would be lord,
First through La’ila’i, first through Ki’i,
Child of the two born in the heavens there
Came forth.
(Beckwith 1972:106)
In the succeeding generations, the victory of the human line is secured by the repeated marriages of the sons of men to the daughters of gods, to the extent that the descent of the divine Kane is totally absorbed by the heirs of Ki’i (Kamokuiki Genealogy). It is the paradigmatic model of the Hawaiian politics of usurpation. But the story also evokes a more general Polynesian idea of the human condition: that men are sometimes (or even often) compelled to secure their own existence by inflicting a defeat upon the god, appropriating thus the female power–the bearing earth.
If I am allowed to lift a page from The Golden Bough : each year the sylvan landscapes of old New Zealand provided: the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.” In a small sweet-potato garden set apart for the god, a Maori priest enacted a sacred marriage that would be worthy of his legendary colleague of the grove of Nemi. Accompanying his movements with a chant that included the phrase, “Be pregnant, be pregnant,” the priest planted the first hillocks ( puke , also ‘mons veneris’) of the year’s crop (Kapiti 1913; Johansen 1958). The priest plays the part of the god Rongo (-marae-roa, @Ha. Lono), he who originally brought the sweet potato in his penis from the spiritual homeland, to impregnate his wife (Pani, the field). During the period of growth, no stranger will be suffered to disturb the garden. But at the harvest, Rongo’s possession is contested by another god, Tū (-matauenga)–ancestor of man “as tapu warrior”–in a battle sometimes memorialised as the origin of war itself. Using an unworked branch of the mapou tree–should we not thus say, a bough brokem from a sacred tree?–a second priest, representing Tū, removes, binds up, and then reburies the first sweetpopato tubers. He so kills Rongo, the god, parent and body of the sweet potato, or else puts him to sleep, so that man may harvest the crop to his own use. Colenso’s brilliant Maori informant goes to the essentials of the charter myth:
Rongo-marae-roa [Rongo as a sweet potato] with his people were slain by Tu-matauenga [Tū as warrior]… Tu-matauenga also baked in an oven and ate his elder brother Rongo-marae-roa so that he was wholly devoured as food. Now the plain interpretation, or meaning of these names in common words, is, that Rongo-marae-roa is the kumara [sweet potato], and that Tu-matauenga is man (Colenso 1882:36).
Recall that in Polynesian thought, as distinguished from the so-called totemism, all men are related to all things by common descent. The corollary would be that, rather than the ancestral or kindred species being tabu, Polynesian social life is a universal project of cannibalisme généralisé , or even of endocannibalism, since the people are genealogically related to their own “natural“ means of subsistence. The problem was not as acute for Hawaiians as for the Maori; but still the Hawaiian staple, taro, is the older brother of mankind, as indeed all useful plants and animals are immanent forms of the divine ancestors–so many kino lau or ‘myriad bodies’ of the gods. Moreover, to make root crops accessible to man by cooking is precisely to destroy what is divine in them: their autonomous power, in the raw state, to reproduce. (Hence the ritual value of the raw-cooked distinction in Hawaii as elsewhere in Polynesia, especially New Zealand.) Yet the aggressive transformation of divine life into human substance describes the mode of production as well as consumption–even as the term for ‘work’ (Ha. hana ) does service for ‘ritual’. Fishing, cultivating, constructing a canoe, or, for that matter, fathering a child are so many ways that men actively appropriate “a life from the god”.
Men thus approach the divine with a curious combination of submission and hubris whose final object is to transfer to themselves the life that the gods originally possess, continue to embody, and alone can impart. It is a complex relation of supplication and expropriation, successively bringing the sacred to, and banishing it from, the human domain. Man, then, lives by a kind of periodic deicide. Or, the god is separated from the objects of human existence by acts of piety that in social life would be tantamount to theft and violence–not to speak of cannibalism. “Be thou undermost, / While I am uppermost,” goes a Maori incantation to the god accompanying the offering of cooked food; for as cooked food destroys tabu, the propitiation is at the same time a kind of pollution–i.e., of the god (Shortland 1882: 62; cf. Smith 1974-75). The aggressive relation to divine beings helps explain why contact with the sacred is extremely dangerous to those who are not themselves in a tabu state. Precisely, then, these Polynesians prefer to wrest their existence from the god under the sign and protection of a divine adversary. They put on Tū (Kū), god of warriors. Thus did men learn how to oppose the divine in its productive and peaceful aspect of Rongo (Lono). In their ultimate relations to the universe, including the relations of production and reproduction, men are warriors.
It will lend some conviction to this comparative excursion to note that Captain Cook appears in Maori tradition as “Rongo-Tute” (Rongo-Cook), the precise cognate of his historical appearance in Hawaii. Indeed, the Hawaiians had a sweet-potato ritual of the same general structure as the Maori cycle. It was used in the “fields of Kamapua’a,” name of the pig-god said by some to be born of Lono, whose rooting in the earth is a well-known symbol of virile action. While the crops were growing, the garden was tabu, so that the pig could do his inseminating work. No one was allowed to throw stones into the garden, thrust a stick into it, or walk upon it–curious prohibitions, except that they amount to protection against human attack. If the garden thus belonged to Lono, at the harvest the first god invoked was Kū-kuila, ‘Kū-the-striver’ (Kamakau 1976:25 f.).
But much more significantly–universally and cosmically–the Hawaiians recapitulated the agricultural cycle of the Maori, down to fine details, in their great New Year ceremonies called Makahiki (cf Sahlins: in press). Each year the critical battle between Tū (Kū) and Rongo (Lono) unfolded in a complex set of rites extending over four lunar months. Except that in Hawaii it is the king, the warrior par excellence , who enters the lists against Lono: the king whose gift of victory comes precisely from his feather-god, ‘Kū, Snatcher-of-the-Island’ (Kū-ka-ili-moku). At the risk of oversimplification, one could say that what pertains to man-in-general in New Zealand is epitomized by the king in Hawai’i. This is the Hawaiian permutation of the Polynesian system: a hypertrophic evolution of hierarchy (rather in the Dumontian sense) or divine kingship (in the Frazerian). The life of the king encompasses the existence of humanity–capacity in which the king seeks to incorporate Lono.
So when the legends of Cook’s Hawaiian predecessors in the capacity of Lono are put in chronological order, they likewise illustrate the principle of hierarchy by transposing the primordial struggle of man and god into latter-day wars of dynamic succession–in which the Lono figure becomes the vanquished king. [5] Beside the original god, the principal Lonos before Cook were the legendary King Lono-at-the-Makahiki (Lonoikamakahiki) and the protohistorical Ka-‘I-i-mamao, for whom the Kumulipo creation chant was composed. Indeed, their several stories are so many versions of the contest between the god, the man, and the woman that had attended the origin of humanity in the creation chant. The discourse of these traditions, however, changes from the mythical to the political as the era of the divine victim in question, the Lono figure, approaches the historical. So the late King Ka-‘I-i-mamao loses his wife by abduction to his father’s sister’s son, leading to the further exchange of insults among the rival kinsmen, and finally to the battle in which the King is (according to the version) deposed and banished, killed or commits suicide. Analogously, the previous King Lono-at-the-Makahiki had deserted or killed his wife because of the amorous advances of a social inferior whose own name, He’a-o-ke-koa, ‘Blood-offering of the warrior,’ is a reference to the distinctive function of kingship and diacritic act of usurpation–human sacrifice.
Prerogative of the king, human sacrifice is what puts the god at a distance and allows mankind to inherit the earth. It is a life for a life. As we saw (chapter 2) in the prototypical sacrifice of Maori tradition, a minor deity called Kaupeka (‘Offering’) was slain by Tū, ancestor of warrior-man, for materials to make the props of heaven; the Sky-Father (Rangi) was thus fixed in a separated state, allowing the gods and their human progeny to abide in the Earth-Mother (Papa). So the temples consecrated in Hawaii by human sacrifice, separating the ‘sacred’ (heavenly) from the “secular” (earthly) or tabu ( kapu ) from noa , would liberate the rest of the terrestrial plane for mankind. Something like that happens during the New Year ritual, as played out in the relation between Lono and the King.
This season of Lono’s passage, period of winter rains, is the transition from “the dying time of the year” to the time when “bearing things become fruitful.” Such is Lono’s beneficial effect. The conjunction with the productive god is made possible by keeping the military god in abeyance: the normal temple rites under Kū are suspended. But when Lono is gone, the king reconsecrates the main Kū temples by means of human sacrifices. He then tours the Island reopening the fishing and agricultural shrines–agricultural shrines of Lono. The king has been able to assume or to put on Lono. Yet in order for the king to thus transfer to the people the fruitful benefits of Lono’s passage, the god himself must be deprived of them. The god will be first sacrifice of the New Year (cf. Valeri” in press). [6]
The king gains a victory, and the people their livelihood. There is a special aloha between the people and Lono, who is in certain myths the original god, and whose annual return is the occasion of general joy. The ritual moment of conjunction with the god is especially celebrated by the people, if the moment of final separation belongs to the king. The joy, then, is part of the argument I make that the image of Lono is annually born of a union between the god and the women of the people, just as in certain myths Lono descends from the heavens to mate with a beautiful woman of Hawaii. So when Cook descended on Kealakekua Bay during the Makahiki season, the young women according to Samwell were spending most of their time singing and dacing–evidently, in a certain marked way, since he collected two very lascivious hula chants in point (see chapter 1). For the New Year was the great period of hula, even as the patron of the dance, the goddess Laka, is described in ancient chant as Lono’s sister-wife. As in analogous rites of the Marquesans and other Polynesians (Handy 1927), the dance would arouse the god: a kind of cosmic copulation between the earthly women and the divine progenitor.
If I am right, the Makahiki image that results from this sacred marriage is thus the offspring of a union socially symmetrical and inverse from the one that ritually produces the king. Recall that on the death of an Hawaiian king, the social order dissolves into outrageous scenes of tabu violation. These scenes are notably marked by public fornication between chiefly women and commoner men, sexual relations otherwise strictly prohibited. The symbolic effect is the heir to the throne, who had been kept apart from the public license for ten days and now returns to restore order (the tabus) in ceremonies of installation that (ideally) imitate the rites of a noble birth. Hence the king is the metaphoric offspring of a sacred woman by a man socially inferior; whereas, the image of Lono is born of an hypergamous union between a divine male and the women of the people. In the deep night before the image is first seen, there is a Makahiki ceremony called ‘splashing-water’ ( hi’uwai ). Kepelino tells of sacred chiefs being carried to the water where the people in their finery are bathing; in the excitement created by the beauty of their attire, “one person was attracted to another, and the result,” says this covert to Catholicism, “was by no means god” (1932:96). At dawn, when the people emerged from their amorous sport, there standing on the beach was the image of Lono.
White tapa cloth and skins of the ka’upu bird hang from the horizontal bar of the tall crosspiece image. The ka’upu is almost certainly the albatross, a migratory bird that appears in the western Hawaiian chain–the white Lanyon albatross at Ni’ihau Island–to breed and lay eggs in October-November, or the beginning of the Makahiki season. The legend of the early King Lono-at-the-Makahiki consists of repeated journeys between Hawai’i and the western island–in a canoe, according to one telling, whose mast is hung with the skins of ka’upu birds (Kamakau 1961:52-53). Discovering his wife’s liaison with a young warrior, Lono quarrels with her and kills her. Overcome with remorse, the grieving king travels about the islands boxing with the people, finally to wander demented and impoverished in the wilds of the western island, Kaua’i. Voyage in the direction of death, privation, and the state of nature: such is the condition of Lono during the triumph of warrior-man, which is better part of each year. For the other part, the Makahiki season, the god returns in his own triumphant procession–the prelude, however, to another banishment, initiated by his boxing with the people.
The yearly tabu of Lono, which includes a prescriptive peace, is proclaimed when the image is seen on the beach. “Peace” means the suspension of human occupation as well as contention, since the god now marries or takes possession of the land–hence “possession” that itself means dominion as well as sexual appropriation. The principle image of ‘Lono-the-parent’ (Lono-makua) accompanied by certain gods of sport, now circles the entire island in a sunwise direction, to return after twenty-three days to the temple of origin. This is a “right-circuit,” keeping the land on the right; and a right-circuit, the Hawaiian sage tells us, “signified a retention … of the kingdom” (Kamakau 1976:5). At the border of each district, food and property were offered to the god, collected the same way that “tributes” are levied by the ruling chief. But after they make the offerings that thus acknowledge the god’s dominion, the people of each district engage in ritual combats with the crowd in Lono’s train. The local people seem to gain the victory, since the god’s tabu is lifted: the fertilized land may now be entered. And even as the people then begin the celebrations that will go on for days, the image of Lono is carried from the district facing backward: “so that,” it is explained, “the ‘wife’ can be seen” (I’i 1959:72).
The apparent paradoxes of this sovereign right-hand triumph of Lono, during which the god cedes district after district, are resolved at the end of the circuit though a global showdown with the king. In a ritual battle with the god, the king resumes all local battles and achieves the final victory, winning life for the people and the sovereignty for himself. Structural climax of the Makahiki, this combat is called kāli’i .Kāli’i means ‘to strike the king’, and ‘to act–or to be made–the king’. All these things happen at once. Struck by a partisan of the god, the king regains his kingship.
It is the sixteenth day f the first Hawaiian month. The image of Lono, returned from its progress, stands on the shore before the temple, defended by a grest body of armed warriors. The king, also accompanied by a warrior host, but preceded by an expert in parrying spears, comes in by canoe from the sea (a reminder of the origin of the dynasty in Kahiki). Two spears are aimed at the king. The first is deflected by his warrior-defender, but the second, carried on the run, is caused to touch the king. A symbolic death–which is also the beginning of the king’s victory. The tabu on him is lifted, and his warriors charge ashore to engage the defenders of Lono in mock combat. Similarly, in a famous mythical allusion to the kāli’I test, the hero chants
The points of spears of Kamalama passed very near to my navel;
Perchance it is the sign of land possession.
(Fornander 1916-19, 5:20)
The reference would be to traditional rituals of cutting the navel cord at noble births, conferring the child’s sacred dignities; or else to traditions of royal installations of the same form. By the test of the spears, the king dies as an outsider, to be reborn as the king.
The transformation is achieved through, and as , the encompassment of Lono. Appropriating the peaceful, productive indigenous god, the conqueror becomes ruler on the condition of his domestication. He assumes the attributes of his divine predecessor, to appear thus as the people’s benefactor. Valeri (in press) shows that in the ceremonial course of the coming year, the king is symbolically transposed toward the Lono pole of Hawaiian divinity; the annual cycle tames the warrior-king in the same way as (e.g.) the Fijian installation rites (chapter 3). It need only to be noticed that the renewal of kingship at the climax of the Makahiki coincides with the rebirth of nature. For in the ideal ritual calendar, the kāli’i battle follows the autumnal appearance of the Pleiades by thirty-three days–thus precisely, in the late eighteenth century, 21 December, the winter solstice. The king returns to power with the sun. [7]
Whereas, over the next two days, Lono plays the part of the scrifice. The makahiki effigy is dismantled and hidden away in a rite watched over by the king’s “living god,” Kahoali’i or ‘The-Companion-of-the-King’, the one who is also known as ‘Death-is-Near’ (Koke-ka-make). Close kinsman of the king as his ceremonial double, Kahoali’i swallows the eye of the victim in ceremonies of human sacrifice (condensed symbolic trace of the cannibalistic “stranger-king’). The “living god,” moreover, passes the night prior to the dismemberment of Lono in a temporary house called “the net house of Kahoali’i,” set up before the temple structure where the image sleeps. In the myth pertinent to these rites, the trickster hero–whose father has the same name (Kūka’ohi’alaka) as the Kū-image of the temple–uses a certain “net of Maoloha” to encircle a house, entrapping the goddess Haumea; whereas, Haumea (or Papa) is also a version of La’ila’i, the archetypal fertile woman, and the net used to entangle her had belonged to one Makali’i, ‘Pleiades’. Just so, the succeeding Makahiki ceremony, following upon the putting away of the god, is called “the net of Maoloha,” and represents the gains in fertility accruing to the people from the victory over Lono. A large, loose-mesh net, filled with all kinds of food, is shaken at a priest’s command. Fallen to earth, and to man’s lot, the food is the augury of the coming year. The fertility of nature thus taken by humanity, a tribute-canoe of offerings to Lono is set adrift for Kahoali’i and sacrificed. Soon after the houses and standing images of the temple will be rebuilt: consecrated–with more human sacrifices–to the rites of Kū and the projects of the king. [8]
III. History, or Mytho-Praxis
Christmas night 1778 on the Discovery , beating eastward off northern Hawai’I, was celebrated by the crew “according to ancient usage from time immemorial” with a general drunken brawl (Samwell in Beaglehole 1967:1155). Terrified by “such a Scene of Uproer & Cofusion,” an Hawaiian on board had to be rescued by one of the “gentlemen.” Sir James Frazer would have been delighted by this world-historical convergence of ye saturnalian custom of ye natives: British and Polynesians at the same moment celebrating with mock battle and collective revel the advent of the year and of a martyred prince of peace. By the Hawaiian calendar, Christmas 1778 was the fifth day of the twelfth lunar month, or midway through the tumultuous tour of Lono, on a right-circuit about the Island.
Cook was making the same circuit as the Makahiki image, at just the same time. Arriving at Maui some eight days before the Pleiades, the Resolution and Discovery came off northwest Hawai’i on 2 December 1778; whereupon Cook embarked upon a protracted right-circumnavigation of the Island, anchoring on 17 January next at Kealakekua on the west coast–to the joyous reception of 10,000 exulting Hawaiians. At Kealakekua or ‘The-Path-[of-]the-God’, the image of Lono usually begins and ends its own circuit. So here at Hikiau temple Cook became the icon of that icon: anointed with masticated cocnut and fed by the priest, while Lt. King and another held his arms outstretched and the acolytes intoned the customary chants. This ritual feeding of the god ( hānaipū ) is performed several times during Lono’s progress, at the domestic shrines of the king and high priests (cf. Sahlins 1981). True, King Kalaniopu’u had not yet arrived, but there was sufficient testimony to the powers he represented. Cook, for example, “suffered himself to be directed” by the priest in kissing and prostrating before the central image of the temple, figure of the god Kū. In every way Cook acquiesced in the status the Hawaiians would give him. Except that the circuit of this Lono had extended some thirteen days beyond the Year God’s usual course. Yet it was still Makahiki time.
We need not suppose that all Hawaiians were convinced that Captain Cook was Lono; or, more precisely, that his being Lono meant the same to everyone. With regard to the ordinary women cohabiting with the sailors on board the ships, Antigonus’s remark on his own deification might have been more appropriate: “That’s not my valet’s opinion of me.” On the other hand, the priests of Kealakekua assigned a so-called tabu-man to constantly attend Cook, heralding his comings and goings with the cry “Lono,” so that the people could prostrate themselves. This shows that whatever the people in general were thinking, the Hawaiian power-that-be had the unique capacity to publicly objectify their own interpretation. They could bring structure to bear on matters of opinion, and by rendering to Cook the tributes of Lono, they also practically engaged the people in this religion of which they were legitimate prophets. “Equality in condition,” as Lt. King noticed, “is not the happiness of this island” (Beaglehole 1967:605). Neither was it their theory of history.
The difference of opinion on which history would pivot appeared within the ruling class, between certain priests of Lono living near the main temple (Hikiau), where the British also established an astronomical observatory, and the warrior chiefs living with King Kalaniopu’u at Ka’awaloa, on the northern arm of the Bay. Associated with Kū in their capacity as warriors, the King and his chiefs entertained ambivalent relations with Cook/Lono and his priests that seem altogether consistent with the cosmological antitheses of the Makahiki season. And the more the priests reified their conception of Cook as the divine Lono, the more dangerous his relationship to the chiefs. It would end as in the rite of kāli’i , with nothing for the defenders of the dismantled god to do but worship his memory and anticipate his return. Hence the famous question asked by the two priests–one was the “tabu-man”–who stole out to the Resolution bearing a piece of his corpse:
They … asked us, with great earnestness and apparent apprehension, “When the Orono [Lono] would come again? and what he would do to them on his return?” The same inquiry was frequently made afterward by others; and this idea agrees with the general tenour of their conduct toward him, which shewed, that they considered him as a being of a superior nature (Cook and King 1784, 3:69). [9]
Earlier, at the time the high priest Ka’ō’ō came into Kealakekua together with King Kalaniopu’u, the two played out with Captain Cook a complex exchange of objects and courtesies–an “occasion of state” as Samwell called it–that would interpret each to others. [10] kalaniopu’u put his own feather cloak and helmet on Cook, and in the British commander’s hand the flywhisk emblem of the royal tabu status. When it came his turn, however, the high priest of Lono dressed Cook in a mantle of red tapa cloth. (“A sort of religious adoration,” as Lt. King had concluded of an earlier performance: “Their idols we found always arrayed with red cloth, in the same manner as was done to captain Cook” [Cook and King 1784, 3:5].) The King had represented Cook in his own social image as a divine warrior; whereas, the priest represented his own temple image as a divine Cook. King Kalaniopu’u also exchanged names with the Captain, and later received a dinner, a linen shirt, and Cook’s naval sword. The vice-versa movement of regalia and personae is a microcosm of the transfers of sovereignty during the New Year rite, by which the king ultimately incorporates Lono. And in a correlated transaction of this occasion of state, the high priest unilaterally gave King Kalaniopu’u a number of iron adzes that had been collected by his fellow Lono priests in return for their generous hospitality to the British. If this again implied a royal appropriation of Lono’s benefits (at the priests’ expense), it was also a material paradigm of the evolving historic structure. The difference in the respective relations of King and Priest to Cook/Lono would unfold as an opposition of practical interests.
“A royal feather robe has the chief, a newly opened bud, a royal child/The offering by night, the offering by day: it belongs to the priest to declare [the] ancient transactions.” These lines from a celebrated eighteenth-century chant, perfect caption to the intricate exchanges of the “occasion of state,” speak to a difference that continue.
Marshall Sahlins: Islands of History
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1985
Chapter 4
Captain James Cook; or The Dying God
Concerning the Death of Captain Cook:
… what I have here said I do not Aver to be the Real in Every particular although in General it may be pretty Nigh the Matter. I have carefully Assorted such Relations as had the greatest appearance of Truth. But indeed they were so Exceedingly perplexed in their Accounts that it was a hard matter to Colect Certainty, in particular cases, or indeed to write any Account at all.
Log book of Alex: Home, R. N., of Buskenburn, Berkwickshire, while with Captain Cook on his Last Voyage
I. "A chain of events which could no more be foreseen than prevented"
(William Ellis, Surgeon’s second mate, HMS Discovery)
It was the most generous welcome ever accorded any European voyage of discovery in this ocean. [1] “Anchored in 17 fms black sand,” reads a midschipman’s log, “admist an Innumerable Number of Canoes, the people in which were singing & rejoicing all the way” (Riou, Log: 17 Jan. 1779). They were singing! Nor in all his experience had captain Cook ever seen so many Polynesians assembled as were here in Kealakekua Bay. Besides the innumerable canoes, Hawaiians were clambering over the Resolution and Discovery , lining the beaches, and swimming in the water “like shoals of fish.” Perhaps there were 10,000, or five times as many people as normally lived here. And not a weapon to be seen among them, Cook remarked. Instead, the canoes were laden with pigs, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, sugar cane: everything the island produced. Also the women “seemed remarkably anxious to engage themselves to our people” (Ellis 1782, 1:86). A priest came on board and wrapped Captain Cook in the red tapa-cloth decoration of a temple image, then made the offering of a sacrificial pig. On shore, the priest led the Great Navigator by the hand to the temple of Hikiau. Hearing the herald’s cry “O Lono,” the people on their passage flew to their houses or prostrated face to ground. Lono is the god associated with natural growth and human reproduction who annually returns to the Islands with the fertilizing rains of winter; he is also an ancient king come in search of his sacred bride. In January 1779, at the temple, captain Cook was put through the customary rites of welcome to Lono. As the priest Koa’a and Lt. King held his arms outstretched and appropriate sacrifices were made, Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon (constructed of wood staves) which is the appearance of the god. It was a ceremony of the Makahiki, the great Hawaiian New Year Festival. Sir James Frazer described the Makahiki in The Golden Bough : in part 3, The Dying God. [2]
Cook’s death at Hawaiian hands just a few weeks later could thus be described as the ritual sequel: the historical metaphor of a mythical reality. Nor were the myths Hawaiian only. There was the complementary British folklore characterized by Cook’s biographer J. C. Beaglehole as “the English search for a ‘King’.” Early on Sunday morning, 14 February 1779, Captain Cook went ashore with a party of marines to take the Hawaiian king, Kalaniopu’u, hostage against the return of the Discovery ’s cutter, stolen the night before in a bold maneuver–of which, however, the amiable old ruler was innocent. At the decisive moment, Cook and Kalaniopu’u, the God and the King, will confront each other as cosmic adversaries. Permit me thus an anthropological reading of the historical texts. For in all the confused Tolstoian narratives of the affray–among which the judicious Beaglehole refuses at times to choose–the one recurrent certainty is a dramatic structure with the properties of a ritual transformation. During the passage inland to find the king, thence seaward with his royal hostage, Cook is metamorphosed from a being of veneration to an object of hostility. When he came ashore, the common people as usual dispersed before him and prostrated faces to the earth; but in the end he was himself precipitated face down in the water by a chief’s weapon, an iron trade dagger, to be rushed upon by a mob exulting over him, and seeming to add to their own honours by the part they could claim in his death: “snatching the daggers from each other,” reads Mr. Burney’s account, “out of eagerness to have their share in killing him” (Journal: 14 Feb. 1779). In the final ritual inversion, Cook’s body would be offered in sacrifice by the Hawaiian King.
Cook was transformed from the divine beneficiary of the sacrifice to its victim–a change never really radical in Polynesian thought, and in their royal combats always possible (Valeri: in press). Every phase of the transformation had its own kind of offering: the shifting material signs of Cook’s trajectory in cosmic value. In the beginning, as he went “to find the King,” pigs were pressed upon him; and as he waited for Kalaniopu’u to waken, more offerings of red tapa cloth–proving that the English captain was still the image of the Hawaiian god. The King came away willingly and was walking by Cook’s hand to the waiting ship’s boat when he was stopped by his favored wife Kaneikapolei and two chiefs, pleading and demanding that he not go on. By all accounts, British as well as Hawaiian, they told him such stories of the death of kings as to force him to sit upon the ground, where he now appeared–according to Lt. Phillups’s report–“dejected and frightened” (in Beaglehole 1967:535).
Nothing to this point had evoked the King’s suspicions, and likewise it was only now, Phillips recounts, that “we first began to suspect that they were not very well dispos’d toward us” ( Ibid .). The transition comes suddenly, at the moment the King is made to perceive Cook as his mortal enemy. This is the structural crisis, when all the social relations begin to change their signs. Accordingly, the material exchanges now convey a certain ambiguity, like those Maori sacrifices that pollute the gods in the act of placating them. An old man offers a coconut, chanting so persistently that the exasperated Cook cannot make him lay off. A supplication begging the release of the King? Lt. Phillips considered that “the artful rascal of a priest” was carrying on to divert attention from the fact that this countrymen, gathering to the number of two or three thousand, were now arming to defend their King. About this time, report comes that an important chief has been killed by the British blockading the southern end of the Bay. The King is seen still on the ground, “with the strongest marks of terror on his countenance” (Cook and King 1784, 3:44), but he soon disappears from the scene. Events have gone beyond the power of anyone to control them. “Ye natives” are manifesting that disposition the English call “insolence.” The final homage to Cook is tendered in missiles that include stones and clubs among the pieces of breadfruit and coconut. Each side thus responding violently to the perceived threats of the other, they soon reach “the fatal impact.” [3]
But just who done it? In historical texts dating from this day to fifty-odd years later, some eight or ten different men are identified as “the man who killed Captain Cook,” referring usually to the one who first stabbed him with the iron dagger. Many of the alleged assailants are named–Pahea, Nuha, Pihole, Pohewa, etc. Often they are distinguished by rank, kinship affiliation, and other social indexes: important clues, since as I hope to show, the key to the mystery is elementary categories (my dear Watson). [4]
Death of Cook: Death of Lono. The event was absolutely unique, and it was repeated every year. For the event (any event) unfolds simultaneously on two levels: as individual action and as collective representation; or better, as the relation between certain life histories and a history that is, over and above these, the existence of societies. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz, the event is a unique actualisation of a general phenomenon (1961:153-54). Hence on the one hand, historical contingency and the particularities of individual action; and on the other hand, those recurrent dimensions of the event in which we recognize some cultucal order. The paradox for an historical “science” is that the contingent circumstances–such as the accidents of biography and geography–are necessary conditions . If Cook hadn’t done this or that, then … Then what? Conversely, the historian will always be tempted to find the one decisive act on some one ’s part that set off the whole chain of happenings. For Beaglehole, it was when Cook, worn out from his global adventures, lost control and fired the first shot. And this way of thinking even holds the promise that history can be rescued from its “idiographic” plight by real science . For example, according to the diagnosis recently made by a distinguished English physician, Cook during this third voyage was showing all the symptoms of a parasitic infection of the intestine (Watt 1979). Worms done him in. Really, there is something faintly heroic in the idea: a medicine man’s homage to the place Cook has assumed in Western folklore as a constituting being, responsible for the shape of the world as we know it–as if Hawaiians, then, could have done no more than respond to his determining presence, in the ways predictable by some naïve psychology. Still, if the tide had been higher and the boats closer in, Cook would have gotten clean away, whatever his intestinal condition, and despite that–another decisive factor–he couldn’t swim.
Even to understand what did happened, it would be insufficient to note that certain people acted in certain ways, unless we also knew what that signified. The contingent becomes fully historical only as it is meaningful: only as the personal act or the ecological effect takes on a systematic or positional value in a cultural scheme. An historical presence is a cultural existence. So the specific effect of Cook’s individuality was mediated by the cultural category (or categories) which he represented as a logical individual. Implied, then, are categorical relations to others. Frazer could have included Hawaiians the among those Polynesians he found able to testify that the king’s enemy is a stranger. And if, that day, the Hawaiian people proved so sensitive about the life of their King, was it not because, as Frazer also argued, the divine king lived the life of the people?
Also, the life of the cosmos. My own argument about the death of Cook will begin with the creation, with the famous Hawaiian chant ‘Beginning-[in-]Deep-Darkness’, Kumulipo (Beckwith 1972). It is the birth chant of Ka-‘I-I-mamao, father of the King of Cook’s time, and Hawaiians read it alternately as the story of the universe or the biography of the King: the royal child is thus “the cosmos described” (Luomala in Beckwith 1972:xiii). According to late Hawaiian tradition, the Kumulipo chant was intoned by the priest in the temple ceremonies by which Cook was welcomed as Lono. The tradition cannot be confirmed historically. Its truth perhaps lies in the metaphoric relation between Cook and the royal subject of the creation chant. For this man, Ka-‘I-I-mamao, was Cook’s latest Hawaiian predecessor in the capacity of Lono: deprived of his rule, his life, and his wife by political rivals.
II. Nānā I ke Kumu: Look to the Source
The Kumulipo is connected to Cook in another way. The chant sets the origin of the universe at the autumnal rising of the Pleiades at sunset: celestial event that anticipates the beginning of the Hawaiian ritual year, the annual return of Lono–and by eight days in November 1778, the appearance off Maui of Captain Cook. Conversely, the Hawaiian New Year ceremony, the Makahiki, has the sense of an eternal return: the rebirth of the world in the change of seasons, as effected or conceived by Lono. Yet neither Lono nor any other determinate Hawaiian god had presided over the initial creation. In the Kumulipo, as in certain cosmogonic myths of the Maori, the world of natural things is born of primordial notions that are principles themselves of reproduction (cf. chapter 2). The divine first appears abstractly, as generative-spirit-in-itself. Only after the seven epochs of the pō , the long night of the world’s self-generation, are the gods as such born–as siblings to mankind. God and man appear together, and in fraternal strife over the means of their reproduction: their own older sister. Begun in the eight epoch of creation, this struggle makes the transition to the succeeding ages of the ao , the ‘day’ or world known to man. Indeed the stuggle is presented as the condition of the possibility of human life in a world in which the life-giving powers are divine. The end of the eight chant thus celebrates a victory: “Man spread about now, man was here now; / It was day [ ao ].” And this victory gained over the god is again analogous to the triumph achieved annually over Lono at New Year, which effects the seasonal transition, as Hawaiians note, from the time of long nights ( pō ) to the time of long days ( ao ) (see Kepelino 1932).
The older sister of god and man, La’ila’i, is the firstborn to all the eras of previous creation. By Hawaiian theory, as firstborn La’ila’i is the legitimate heir to creation; while as woman she is uniquely able to transform divine into human life. The issue in her brothers’ struggle to possess her in accordingly cosmological in scope and political in form. Described in certain genealogies as twins, the first two brothers are named simply in the chant as “Ki’i, a man” and “Kane, a god.” But since Ki’i means ‘image’ and Kane means ‘man’, everything has already been said: the first god is ‘man’ and the first man is ‘god’. So in the chant, the statuses of god and man are reserved by La’ila’i’s actions. She “sit sideways,” meaning she takes a second husband, Ki’I, and her children by the man Ki’i are born before her children by the god Kane. Thus the descendants of the man are senior:
There was whispering, lip-smacking and clucking,
Smacking, tut-tutting, head shaking,
Sulking, sullenness, silence.
Kane kept silence, refused to speak,
Sullen, angry, resentful
With the woman for her progeny…
She slept with Ki’i.
Kane suspected the first-born, became jealous,
Suspected Ki’i and La’ila’i of a secret union [?]…
Kane was angry and jealous because he slept last with her,
His descendants would hence belong to the younger line,
The children of the elder would be lord,
First through La’ila’i, first through Ki’i,
Child of the two born in the heavens there
Came forth.
(Beckwith 1972:106)
In the succeeding generations, the victory of the human line is secured by the repeated marriages of the sons of men to the daughters of gods, to the extent that the descent of the divine Kane is totally absorbed by the heirs of Ki’i (Kamokuiki Genealogy). It is the paradigmatic model of the Hawaiian politics of usurpation. But the story also evokes a more general Polynesian idea of the human condition: that men are sometimes (or even often) compelled to secure their own existence by inflicting a defeat upon the god, appropriating thus the female power–the bearing earth.
If I am allowed to lift a page from The Golden Bough : each year the sylvan landscapes of old New Zealand provided: the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.” In a small sweet-potato garden set apart for the god, a Maori priest enacted a sacred marriage that would be worthy of his legendary colleague of the grove of Nemi. Accompanying his movements with a chant that included the phrase, “Be pregnant, be pregnant,” the priest planted the first hillocks ( puke , also ‘mons veneris’) of the year’s crop (Kapiti 1913; Johansen 1958). The priest plays the part of the god Rongo (-marae-roa, @Ha. Lono), he who originally brought the sweet potato in his penis from the spiritual homeland, to impregnate his wife (Pani, the field). During the period of growth, no stranger will be suffered to disturb the garden. But at the harvest, Rongo’s possession is contested by another god, Tū (-matauenga)–ancestor of man “as tapu warrior”–in a battle sometimes memorialised as the origin of war itself. Using an unworked branch of the mapou tree–should we not thus say, a bough brokem from a sacred tree?–a second priest, representing Tū, removes, binds up, and then reburies the first sweetpopato tubers. He so kills Rongo, the god, parent and body of the sweet potato, or else puts him to sleep, so that man may harvest the crop to his own use. Colenso’s brilliant Maori informant goes to the essentials of the charter myth:
Rongo-marae-roa [Rongo as a sweet potato] with his people were slain by Tu-matauenga [Tū as warrior]… Tu-matauenga also baked in an oven and ate his elder brother Rongo-marae-roa so that he was wholly devoured as food. Now the plain interpretation, or meaning of these names in common words, is, that Rongo-marae-roa is the kumara [sweet potato], and that Tu-matauenga is man (Colenso 1882:36).
Recall that in Polynesian thought, as distinguished from the so-called totemism, all men are related to all things by common descent. The corollary would be that, rather than the ancestral or kindred species being tabu, Polynesian social life is a universal project of cannibalisme généralisé , or even of endocannibalism, since the people are genealogically related to their own “natural“ means of subsistence. The problem was not as acute for Hawaiians as for the Maori; but still the Hawaiian staple, taro, is the older brother of mankind, as indeed all useful plants and animals are immanent forms of the divine ancestors–so many kino lau or ‘myriad bodies’ of the gods. Moreover, to make root crops accessible to man by cooking is precisely to destroy what is divine in them: their autonomous power, in the raw state, to reproduce. (Hence the ritual value of the raw-cooked distinction in Hawaii as elsewhere in Polynesia, especially New Zealand.) Yet the aggressive transformation of divine life into human substance describes the mode of production as well as consumption–even as the term for ‘work’ (Ha. hana ) does service for ‘ritual’. Fishing, cultivating, constructing a canoe, or, for that matter, fathering a child are so many ways that men actively appropriate “a life from the god”.
Men thus approach the divine with a curious combination of submission and hubris whose final object is to transfer to themselves the life that the gods originally possess, continue to embody, and alone can impart. It is a complex relation of supplication and expropriation, successively bringing the sacred to, and banishing it from, the human domain. Man, then, lives by a kind of periodic deicide. Or, the god is separated from the objects of human existence by acts of piety that in social life would be tantamount to theft and violence–not to speak of cannibalism. “Be thou undermost, / While I am uppermost,” goes a Maori incantation to the god accompanying the offering of cooked food; for as cooked food destroys tabu, the propitiation is at the same time a kind of pollution–i.e., of the god (Shortland 1882: 62; cf. Smith 1974-75). The aggressive relation to divine beings helps explain why contact with the sacred is extremely dangerous to those who are not themselves in a tabu state. Precisely, then, these Polynesians prefer to wrest their existence from the god under the sign and protection of a divine adversary. They put on Tū (Kū), god of warriors. Thus did men learn how to oppose the divine in its productive and peaceful aspect of Rongo (Lono). In their ultimate relations to the universe, including the relations of production and reproduction, men are warriors.
It will lend some conviction to this comparative excursion to note that Captain Cook appears in Maori tradition as “Rongo-Tute” (Rongo-Cook), the precise cognate of his historical appearance in Hawaii. Indeed, the Hawaiians had a sweet-potato ritual of the same general structure as the Maori cycle. It was used in the “fields of Kamapua’a,” name of the pig-god said by some to be born of Lono, whose rooting in the earth is a well-known symbol of virile action. While the crops were growing, the garden was tabu, so that the pig could do his inseminating work. No one was allowed to throw stones into the garden, thrust a stick into it, or walk upon it–curious prohibitions, except that they amount to protection against human attack. If the garden thus belonged to Lono, at the harvest the first god invoked was Kū-kuila, ‘Kū-the-striver’ (Kamakau 1976:25 f.).
But much more significantly–universally and cosmically–the Hawaiians recapitulated the agricultural cycle of the Maori, down to fine details, in their great New Year ceremonies called Makahiki (cf Sahlins: in press). Each year the critical battle between Tū (Kū) and Rongo (Lono) unfolded in a complex set of rites extending over four lunar months. Except that in Hawaii it is the king, the warrior par excellence , who enters the lists against Lono: the king whose gift of victory comes precisely from his feather-god, ‘Kū, Snatcher-of-the-Island’ (Kū-ka-ili-moku). At the risk of oversimplification, one could say that what pertains to man-in-general in New Zealand is epitomized by the king in Hawai’i. This is the Hawaiian permutation of the Polynesian system: a hypertrophic evolution of hierarchy (rather in the Dumontian sense) or divine kingship (in the Frazerian). The life of the king encompasses the existence of humanity–capacity in which the king seeks to incorporate Lono.
So when the legends of Cook’s Hawaiian predecessors in the capacity of Lono are put in chronological order, they likewise illustrate the principle of hierarchy by transposing the primordial struggle of man and god into latter-day wars of dynamic succession–in which the Lono figure becomes the vanquished king. [5] Beside the original god, the principal Lonos before Cook were the legendary King Lono-at-the-Makahiki (Lonoikamakahiki) and the protohistorical Ka-‘I-i-mamao, for whom the Kumulipo creation chant was composed. Indeed, their several stories are so many versions of the contest between the god, the man, and the woman that had attended the origin of humanity in the creation chant. The discourse of these traditions, however, changes from the mythical to the political as the era of the divine victim in question, the Lono figure, approaches the historical. So the late King Ka-‘I-i-mamao loses his wife by abduction to his father’s sister’s son, leading to the further exchange of insults among the rival kinsmen, and finally to the battle in which the King is (according to the version) deposed and banished, killed or commits suicide. Analogously, the previous King Lono-at-the-Makahiki had deserted or killed his wife because of the amorous advances of a social inferior whose own name, He’a-o-ke-koa, ‘Blood-offering of the warrior,’ is a reference to the distinctive function of kingship and diacritic act of usurpation–human sacrifice.
Prerogative of the king, human sacrifice is what puts the god at a distance and allows mankind to inherit the earth. It is a life for a life. As we saw (chapter 2) in the prototypical sacrifice of Maori tradition, a minor deity called Kaupeka (‘Offering’) was slain by Tū, ancestor of warrior-man, for materials to make the props of heaven; the Sky-Father (Rangi) was thus fixed in a separated state, allowing the gods and their human progeny to abide in the Earth-Mother (Papa). So the temples consecrated in Hawaii by human sacrifice, separating the ‘sacred’ (heavenly) from the “secular” (earthly) or tabu ( kapu ) from noa , would liberate the rest of the terrestrial plane for mankind. Something like that happens during the New Year ritual, as played out in the relation between Lono and the King.
This season of Lono’s passage, period of winter rains, is the transition from “the dying time of the year” to the time when “bearing things become fruitful.” Such is Lono’s beneficial effect. The conjunction with the productive god is made possible by keeping the military god in abeyance: the normal temple rites under Kū are suspended. But when Lono is gone, the king reconsecrates the main Kū temples by means of human sacrifices. He then tours the Island reopening the fishing and agricultural shrines–agricultural shrines of Lono. The king has been able to assume or to put on Lono. Yet in order for the king to thus transfer to the people the fruitful benefits of Lono’s passage, the god himself must be deprived of them. The god will be first sacrifice of the New Year (cf. Valeri” in press). [6]
The king gains a victory, and the people their livelihood. There is a special aloha between the people and Lono, who is in certain myths the original god, and whose annual return is the occasion of general joy. The ritual moment of conjunction with the god is especially celebrated by the people, if the moment of final separation belongs to the king. The joy, then, is part of the argument I make that the image of Lono is annually born of a union between the god and the women of the people, just as in certain myths Lono descends from the heavens to mate with a beautiful woman of Hawaii. So when Cook descended on Kealakekua Bay during the Makahiki season, the young women according to Samwell were spending most of their time singing and dacing–evidently, in a certain marked way, since he collected two very lascivious hula chants in point (see chapter 1). For the New Year was the great period of hula, even as the patron of the dance, the goddess Laka, is described in ancient chant as Lono’s sister-wife. As in analogous rites of the Marquesans and other Polynesians (Handy 1927), the dance would arouse the god: a kind of cosmic copulation between the earthly women and the divine progenitor.
If I am right, the Makahiki image that results from this sacred marriage is thus the offspring of a union socially symmetrical and inverse from the one that ritually produces the king. Recall that on the death of an Hawaiian king, the social order dissolves into outrageous scenes of tabu violation. These scenes are notably marked by public fornication between chiefly women and commoner men, sexual relations otherwise strictly prohibited. The symbolic effect is the heir to the throne, who had been kept apart from the public license for ten days and now returns to restore order (the tabus) in ceremonies of installation that (ideally) imitate the rites of a noble birth. Hence the king is the metaphoric offspring of a sacred woman by a man socially inferior; whereas, the image of Lono is born of an hypergamous union between a divine male and the women of the people. In the deep night before the image is first seen, there is a Makahiki ceremony called ‘splashing-water’ ( hi’uwai ). Kepelino tells of sacred chiefs being carried to the water where the people in their finery are bathing; in the excitement created by the beauty of their attire, “one person was attracted to another, and the result,” says this covert to Catholicism, “was by no means god” (1932:96). At dawn, when the people emerged from their amorous sport, there standing on the beach was the image of Lono.
White tapa cloth and skins of the ka’upu bird hang from the horizontal bar of the tall crosspiece image. The ka’upu is almost certainly the albatross, a migratory bird that appears in the western Hawaiian chain–the white Lanyon albatross at Ni’ihau Island–to breed and lay eggs in October-November, or the beginning of the Makahiki season. The legend of the early King Lono-at-the-Makahiki consists of repeated journeys between Hawai’i and the western island–in a canoe, according to one telling, whose mast is hung with the skins of ka’upu birds (Kamakau 1961:52-53). Discovering his wife’s liaison with a young warrior, Lono quarrels with her and kills her. Overcome with remorse, the grieving king travels about the islands boxing with the people, finally to wander demented and impoverished in the wilds of the western island, Kaua’i. Voyage in the direction of death, privation, and the state of nature: such is the condition of Lono during the triumph of warrior-man, which is better part of each year. For the other part, the Makahiki season, the god returns in his own triumphant procession–the prelude, however, to another banishment, initiated by his boxing with the people.
The yearly tabu of Lono, which includes a prescriptive peace, is proclaimed when the image is seen on the beach. “Peace” means the suspension of human occupation as well as contention, since the god now marries or takes possession of the land–hence “possession” that itself means dominion as well as sexual appropriation. The principle image of ‘Lono-the-parent’ (Lono-makua) accompanied by certain gods of sport, now circles the entire island in a sunwise direction, to return after twenty-three days to the temple of origin. This is a “right-circuit,” keeping the land on the right; and a right-circuit, the Hawaiian sage tells us, “signified a retention … of the kingdom” (Kamakau 1976:5). At the border of each district, food and property were offered to the god, collected the same way that “tributes” are levied by the ruling chief. But after they make the offerings that thus acknowledge the god’s dominion, the people of each district engage in ritual combats with the crowd in Lono’s train. The local people seem to gain the victory, since the god’s tabu is lifted: the fertilized land may now be entered. And even as the people then begin the celebrations that will go on for days, the image of Lono is carried from the district facing backward: “so that,” it is explained, “the ‘wife’ can be seen” (I’i 1959:72).
The apparent paradoxes of this sovereign right-hand triumph of Lono, during which the god cedes district after district, are resolved at the end of the circuit though a global showdown with the king. In a ritual battle with the god, the king resumes all local battles and achieves the final victory, winning life for the people and the sovereignty for himself. Structural climax of the Makahiki, this combat is called kāli’i .Kāli’i means ‘to strike the king’, and ‘to act–or to be made–the king’. All these things happen at once. Struck by a partisan of the god, the king regains his kingship.
It is the sixteenth day f the first Hawaiian month. The image of Lono, returned from its progress, stands on the shore before the temple, defended by a grest body of armed warriors. The king, also accompanied by a warrior host, but preceded by an expert in parrying spears, comes in by canoe from the sea (a reminder of the origin of the dynasty in Kahiki). Two spears are aimed at the king. The first is deflected by his warrior-defender, but the second, carried on the run, is caused to touch the king. A symbolic death–which is also the beginning of the king’s victory. The tabu on him is lifted, and his warriors charge ashore to engage the defenders of Lono in mock combat. Similarly, in a famous mythical allusion to the kāli’I test, the hero chants
The points of spears of Kamalama passed very near to my navel;
Perchance it is the sign of land possession.
(Fornander 1916-19, 5:20)
The reference would be to traditional rituals of cutting the navel cord at noble births, conferring the child’s sacred dignities; or else to traditions of royal installations of the same form. By the test of the spears, the king dies as an outsider, to be reborn as the king.
The transformation is achieved through, and as , the encompassment of Lono. Appropriating the peaceful, productive indigenous god, the conqueror becomes ruler on the condition of his domestication. He assumes the attributes of his divine predecessor, to appear thus as the people’s benefactor. Valeri (in press) shows that in the ceremonial course of the coming year, the king is symbolically transposed toward the Lono pole of Hawaiian divinity; the annual cycle tames the warrior-king in the same way as (e.g.) the Fijian installation rites (chapter 3). It need only to be noticed that the renewal of kingship at the climax of the Makahiki coincides with the rebirth of nature. For in the ideal ritual calendar, the kāli’i battle follows the autumnal appearance of the Pleiades by thirty-three days–thus precisely, in the late eighteenth century, 21 December, the winter solstice. The king returns to power with the sun. [7]
Whereas, over the next two days, Lono plays the part of the scrifice. The makahiki effigy is dismantled and hidden away in a rite watched over by the king’s “living god,” Kahoali’i or ‘The-Companion-of-the-King’, the one who is also known as ‘Death-is-Near’ (Koke-ka-make). Close kinsman of the king as his ceremonial double, Kahoali’i swallows the eye of the victim in ceremonies of human sacrifice (condensed symbolic trace of the cannibalistic “stranger-king’). The “living god,” moreover, passes the night prior to the dismemberment of Lono in a temporary house called “the net house of Kahoali’i,” set up before the temple structure where the image sleeps. In the myth pertinent to these rites, the trickster hero–whose father has the same name (Kūka’ohi’alaka) as the Kū-image of the temple–uses a certain “net of Maoloha” to encircle a house, entrapping the goddess Haumea; whereas, Haumea (or Papa) is also a version of La’ila’i, the archetypal fertile woman, and the net used to entangle her had belonged to one Makali’i, ‘Pleiades’. Just so, the succeeding Makahiki ceremony, following upon the putting away of the god, is called “the net of Maoloha,” and represents the gains in fertility accruing to the people from the victory over Lono. A large, loose-mesh net, filled with all kinds of food, is shaken at a priest’s command. Fallen to earth, and to man’s lot, the food is the augury of the coming year. The fertility of nature thus taken by humanity, a tribute-canoe of offerings to Lono is set adrift for Kahoali’i and sacrificed. Soon after the houses and standing images of the temple will be rebuilt: consecrated–with more human sacrifices–to the rites of Kū and the projects of the king. [8]
III. History, or Mytho-Praxis
Christmas night 1778 on the Discovery , beating eastward off northern Hawai’I, was celebrated by the crew “according to ancient usage from time immemorial” with a general drunken brawl (Samwell in Beaglehole 1967:1155). Terrified by “such a Scene of Uproer & Cofusion,” an Hawaiian on board had to be rescued by one of the “gentlemen.” Sir James Frazer would have been delighted by this world-historical convergence of ye saturnalian custom of ye natives: British and Polynesians at the same moment celebrating with mock battle and collective revel the advent of the year and of a martyred prince of peace. By the Hawaiian calendar, Christmas 1778 was the fifth day of the twelfth lunar month, or midway through the tumultuous tour of Lono, on a right-circuit about the Island.
Cook was making the same circuit as the Makahiki image, at just the same time. Arriving at Maui some eight days before the Pleiades, the Resolution and Discovery came off northwest Hawai’i on 2 December 1778; whereupon Cook embarked upon a protracted right-circumnavigation of the Island, anchoring on 17 January next at Kealakekua on the west coast–to the joyous reception of 10,000 exulting Hawaiians. At Kealakekua or ‘The-Path-[of-]the-God’, the image of Lono usually begins and ends its own circuit. So here at Hikiau temple Cook became the icon of that icon: anointed with masticated cocnut and fed by the priest, while Lt. King and another held his arms outstretched and the acolytes intoned the customary chants. This ritual feeding of the god ( hānaipū ) is performed several times during Lono’s progress, at the domestic shrines of the king and high priests (cf. Sahlins 1981). True, King Kalaniopu’u had not yet arrived, but there was sufficient testimony to the powers he represented. Cook, for example, “suffered himself to be directed” by the priest in kissing and prostrating before the central image of the temple, figure of the god Kū. In every way Cook acquiesced in the status the Hawaiians would give him. Except that the circuit of this Lono had extended some thirteen days beyond the Year God’s usual course. Yet it was still Makahiki time.
We need not suppose that all Hawaiians were convinced that Captain Cook was Lono; or, more precisely, that his being Lono meant the same to everyone. With regard to the ordinary women cohabiting with the sailors on board the ships, Antigonus’s remark on his own deification might have been more appropriate: “That’s not my valet’s opinion of me.” On the other hand, the priests of Kealakekua assigned a so-called tabu-man to constantly attend Cook, heralding his comings and goings with the cry “Lono,” so that the people could prostrate themselves. This shows that whatever the people in general were thinking, the Hawaiian power-that-be had the unique capacity to publicly objectify their own interpretation. They could bring structure to bear on matters of opinion, and by rendering to Cook the tributes of Lono, they also practically engaged the people in this religion of which they were legitimate prophets. “Equality in condition,” as Lt. King noticed, “is not the happiness of this island” (Beaglehole 1967:605). Neither was it their theory of history.
The difference of opinion on which history would pivot appeared within the ruling class, between certain priests of Lono living near the main temple (Hikiau), where the British also established an astronomical observatory, and the warrior chiefs living with King Kalaniopu’u at Ka’awaloa, on the northern arm of the Bay. Associated with Kū in their capacity as warriors, the King and his chiefs entertained ambivalent relations with Cook/Lono and his priests that seem altogether consistent with the cosmological antitheses of the Makahiki season. And the more the priests reified their conception of Cook as the divine Lono, the more dangerous his relationship to the chiefs. It would end as in the rite of kāli’i , with nothing for the defenders of the dismantled god to do but worship his memory and anticipate his return. Hence the famous question asked by the two priests–one was the “tabu-man”–who stole out to the Resolution bearing a piece of his corpse:
They … asked us, with great earnestness and apparent apprehension, “When the Orono [Lono] would come again? and what he would do to them on his return?” The same inquiry was frequently made afterward by others; and this idea agrees with the general tenour of their conduct toward him, which shewed, that they considered him as a being of a superior nature (Cook and King 1784, 3:69). [9]
Earlier, at the time the high priest Ka’ō’ō came into Kealakekua together with King Kalaniopu’u, the two played out with Captain Cook a complex exchange of objects and courtesies–an “occasion of state” as Samwell called it–that would interpret each to others. [10] kalaniopu’u put his own feather cloak and helmet on Cook, and in the British commander’s hand the flywhisk emblem of the royal tabu status. When it came his turn, however, the high priest of Lono dressed Cook in a mantle of red tapa cloth. (“A sort of religious adoration,” as Lt. King had concluded of an earlier performance: “Their idols we found always arrayed with red cloth, in the same manner as was done to captain Cook” [Cook and King 1784, 3:5].) The King had represented Cook in his own social image as a divine warrior; whereas, the priest represented his own temple image as a divine Cook. King Kalaniopu’u also exchanged names with the Captain, and later received a dinner, a linen shirt, and Cook’s naval sword. The vice-versa movement of regalia and personae is a microcosm of the transfers of sovereignty during the New Year rite, by which the king ultimately incorporates Lono. And in a correlated transaction of this occasion of state, the high priest unilaterally gave King Kalaniopu’u a number of iron adzes that had been collected by his fellow Lono priests in return for their generous hospitality to the British. If this again implied a royal appropriation of Lono’s benefits (at the priests’ expense), it was also a material paradigm of the evolving historic structure. The difference in the respective relations of King and Priest to Cook/Lono would unfold as an opposition of practical interests.
“A royal feather robe has the chief, a newly opened bud, a royal child/The offering by night, the offering by day: it belongs to the priest to declare [the] ancient transactions.” These lines from a celebrated eighteenth-century chant, perfect caption to the intricate exchanges of the “occasion of state,” speak to a difference that continue.
