Tapu

“ To this extent there can be no doubt that the tapu is a wholesome institution—indeed, only such a one could at all control the savage or bring him to distinguish between “mine and thine.” This, however, is but the simplest form of tapu. It is where at the caprice of a brutal chief or king, or an ignorant and malicious priest, the tapu is applied to individuals or communities, that its pernicious influence is at once evident. During the time that an individual is tapu, he is not allowed to touch anything, or even himself, but is fed by another, or takes food from off a stage with his mouth. ”

“ The Ngatahi, rushing up to seize her, heard a cry, "Aie-e-e, Taurau!" They beheld her stand a moment on the brink, and, with a second cry, leap out into the dark. The bones of the women and children remain yet in the cavern. Therefore the place is "tapu." [3]
[3] "Tapu"—sacred, accursed.
The fish swim, uncaught, under the cliff; No fisherman's line plumbs the deep water that covers the bones of the lovers. Once in every moon the spirit of Heruini returns to wail for the lover whom she slew. For one hour she sits in the weed-grown cavern beneath the cliff, and sends her cry across the waters. ”

“ Such was the law of muru.
Of course to yarn about New Zealand without saying anything about the custom of Tapu would be on all fours with yarning about Rome and not mentioning the Pope. So here goes for a few remarks about the ancient but very confusing custom of tapu. [Pg 43]
Anything animate or inanimate could be rendered tapu by the will, or even touch, of a man who was tapu himself. ”

“ Another kind of tapu takes place with regard to any object which is connected with the death of a native. If, for example, a Maori has fallen overboard from a canoe and been drowned, the vessel can never be used again, but is tapu. Or if a man commits suicide by shooting himself, as has already been mentioned, the musket is tapu. But in these cases the articles are tapu to the atuas, and not to men. Sometimes they are left to decay on the spot, no man daring to touch them, or they are broken to pieces, and the fragments stuck upright in the earth to mark the spot where the event occurred. ”

“ Blue was tapu to women in Nuku-Hiva, and red, too. They could not eat bonito, squid, popii, and koehi. They might not eat bananas, cocoanuts, fresh breadfruit, pigs of brown color, goats, fowls and other edibles.
Females were forbidden to climb upon the sacred paepaes, to enter the men’s club-houses (this tapu was enforced in America until the last few years) , to eat with men, to smoke inside the house, to carry mats on their heads, and, saddest of all, to weep. Children might not carry one another pickaback. The kuavena fish was tapu to fishermen, as also peata, a kind of shark. ”

“ The industrious individual I have alluded to, hearing the cry of "A pakeha! a pakeha!" from many voices, and having never had an opportunity to examine that variety of the species, or genus homo, flung down his wooden kaheru or weed exterminator, and rushed towards the town house before mentioned. What could he do? The tapu forbade his entrance, and the front was so completely blocked up by his admiring neighbours that he could not get sight of the wonderful guest. In these desperate circumstances a bright thought struck him: he would, by a bold and ingenious device, give the tapu the slip. ”

“ The war party then goes home, and a similar ceremony is undergone in the presence of the principal tohunga of their pah, the hands being clapped and the war dance performed. The remainder of the hair is given to the tohunga, who, after reciting his incantation, flings the tuft of hair away, and ends by another incantation, which declares that the tapu is taken away.
As a general rule, the tapu can only be taken off by the person who imposed it; but if a man imposed a tapu on anything, another who was very much his superior would not have much scruple in breaking through it. ”

“ Tapu!” sobbed Ghost Girl. The kuku was tapu to her teeth, as the American flag would be to the feet of a patriot. Song was without other belief than in the delight of drink, but Ghost Girl was a woman, 256the support of every new cult and the prop of every old one. Superstition the world over will die last in the breast of the female. She survives subjugated races, and conserves the past, because her instincts are stronger and her faculties less active than man’s, and her need of worship overwhelming.
That word tapu was still one to conjure with in the Marquesas. ”

“ Should a chief die within his whare, that hut and everything it contained at once became tapu and was lost to use; for as soon as his body had been removed, the door was at once blocked up, and the hut with its contents allowed to moulder away, no one daring to touch, much less remove, one single article. Tapu, therefore, in a manner of speaking, was the antipoise of the law of muru, for if the enforcement of the latter rendered the portable property of an individual or tribe precarious, yet tapu made his title indissoluble ”

“ When, therefore, a person falls sick, and cannot remember that he has himself broken any law of the tapu, he has to consult a matakite (seer) and a tohunga to discover the crime, and use the proper ceremonies to appease the Atua; for there is in practice a method of making a person offend against the laws of tapu without his being aware of it. ”

“ A person became tapu by touching a dead body or by being very ill; in this respect it appears to bear a very close resemblance to the Mosaic law relating to uncleanness.
The garments of an ariki, or high chief, were tapu, as well as everything relating to him; they could not be worn by any one else lest they should kill him. “An old chief in my company,” says Mr. Williams, “threw away a very good mat because it was too heavy to carry ”

“ Warriors were tapu in Homer’s day, and land and fish were tapu to Grecian warriors, according to Plato. Confucius in the “Li Ki,” ordained men and women not to sit on the same mat, nor have the same clothes-rack, towel, or comb, nor to let their hands touch in giving and receiving, nor to do a score of other trivial things. The old Irish had many tapus and totems, and many legends of harm wrought by their breaking, a famous one being “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.”
In the Marquesas tapus were the most important part of life, as ceremony was at the court of the kings of France. ”

“ Burial places were naturally tapu. A Maori of the olden time would rather die than break their sanctity; and his descendants of the present day have hardly got over the feeling. They were called wahi tapu, and no one dared to enter them. The tohunga and his assistants passed within them to bury the dead, but only with much karakia and ceremony. Spirits of some kind were supposed to keep watch and ward over them, and to wreak terrible vengeance upon trespassers. Water flowing from a wahi tapu was sacred, and whatever it touched became tinctured with the same dread property. ”

“ Food of many kinds was permanently tapu; for animal food was always scarce, and choice vegetables could be cultivated only after a tough struggle with the land. Therefore, since one tribe frequently infringed the rights of another it became necessary to render the common stock of provisions secure against depredators from within. Ordinary food which happened to come in contact with anything tapu, was instantly thrown away, lest by touching or eating it some innocent person should himself become tapu. ”

“ One of the finest examples of native architecture was made tapu by this same chief, who seems to have had a singular pleasure in exercising his powers. It was a pah called Waitahanui, and was originally the stronghold of Te Heu-heu. It is on the borders of the lake, and the side which fronts the water is a full half-mile in length. It is made, as usual, of upright posts and stakes, and most of the larger posts are carved into the human form, with visages hideously distorted, and tongues protruded seaward, as if in defiance of expected enemies. ”

“ A slow disease follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the bones of the same fish burned with the due mysteries. The cocoa-nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly. Suppose you have eaten tapu fruit at the evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy; in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have attacked your neck, whence they spread upward to the face ”

“ But to remove the tapu was a wholly different matter. That could not be done so easily. In all cases of importance a whole ritual had to be gone through before the tapu could be lifted. Ceremonies of high import were sometimes necessary, even a sort of propitiatory sacrifice seems occasionally to have been made. The karakia, a kind of invocation or prayer, had to be uttered with due solemnity, and this necessitated the intervention of the tohunga. ”

“ In almost every populous native village there was a person who, probably for the sake of immunity from labour, or from being good for nothing else, took up the undertaking business as a regular profession, and, in consequence, was never for a moment, for years together, clear of the horrid inconveniences of the tapu, as well as its dangers. One of these people might be easily recognized, after a little experience, even by a pakeha. ”

“ Some forms of tapu were removable by tohungas, as those existing at the baptism of children and at tattooings. It would seem that tohungas—who, often priests, also were wizards, seers, physicians, tattooers and barbers, and not uncommonly builders of houses and canoes—had enough to do merely in lessening and preventing the results of tapu violations; but it was not so. Much of their time was spent as physicians. As such their services were required for ills both real and imaginary. ”

“ When we read the story of Ka-we-lu in The Arrow and the Swing, or of Kama in The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess Kama, we can easily see how, as the simplicity of tapu was forgotten, the maiden would be given a fantastic security like that of Danaë in her brazen tower, or like that of Eithlinn in her inaccessible island, and we can see how motives would be invented for keeping her apart: Danaë’s son and Eithlinn’s son are destined to slay their grandfathers. Every race has had tapu. ”

“ The tapu, or sacredness of Kahu, was supposed to be transferred to the kohukohu, and when this was eat by the ancestral spirits, the tapu was deposited with them. ↑ Maihi are the two boards placed at an angle at front gable of a house. If the wood of a sacred house were to be accidentally used as firewood for cooking purposes, anyone who ate the food thus cooked would be guilty of a crime, to be punished by the Atua with disease or death. ↑ Turakanga (=throwing down) was a ceremony in which a stick set up to represent the path of death was thrown down. ”

“ Of course, she never sat in chairs, anyhow, nor did Vai Etienne, but he had provided these for the whites.
The subject of the tapus of the South Seas was endless. The custom, tabu or kapu in Hawaiian, and tambu in Fijian, was ill expressed in our “taboo,” which means the pressure of public sentiment, or family or group feeling. Tapus here were the conventions of 258primitive people made awe-inspiring for enforcement because of the very willfulness of these primitives. The custom here and throughout society dated from the beginning of legend. ”

“ These nocturnal interviews having led me to mention Tapuzi, I cannot refrain from dedicating a few lines to this [174] remarkable retreat, where men, when proscribed by the law, live together in a sort of accord and union of a most extraordinary kind.
Tapuzi,3 which in the Tagal language, signifies “end of the world,” is a little village, situate in the interior of the mountains, nearly twenty-five leagues from Jala-Jala. ”

“ They are generally employed making tappas, or, as they call them in English, “Strong’s Island trowsers,” for the chiefs to whom they belong. Tappa is manufactured from the fibres of the banana-tree, colored with different barks to suit their taste, and woven, by means of a small but ingenious loom, into bands of four or five feet in length, and eight or ten inches in width, with the different colors very ingeniously and beautifully intermixed. ”

“ Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death. ”

“ Nature did not gift us with a mighty Mekong like Thailand and Vietnam, with their vast and naturally fertile plains. Nature instead put our islands ahead of our neighbours in the path of typhoons from the Pacific. ”

“ The Tapas and the other hard Yogas that were practiced in other Yugas do not work now. What is needed in this Yuga is giving, helping others. ”

“ The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face. ”

“ For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. ”

“ As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward. I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea. Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green. Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red. Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks. Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf. ”