Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/360

346 Heaven in the New Zealand myth of Heaven and Earth, the great first parents. If this inference be just, then it seems that Taaroa the Creator is no personification of a primæval theistic idea, but simply the divine personal Heaven transformed under European influence into the supreme Heaven-god. Thus, when Turner gives the Samoan myths of Tangaloa in heaven presiding over the production of the earth from beneath the waters, or throwing down from the sky rocks which are now islands, the classic name by which he calls him is that which rightly describes his nature and mythic origin — Tangaloa, the Polynesian Jupiter. Yet in island district after district, we find the name of the mighty heavenly creator given to other and lesser mythic beings. In Tahiti, the manes-worshipper's idea is applied not only to lesser deities, but to Taaroa the Creator himself, whom some maintained to be but a man deified after death. In the New Zealand mythology, Tangaroa figures on the one hand as Sea-god and father of fish and reptiles, on the other as the mischievous eaves-dropping god who reveals secrets. In Tonga, Tangaloa was god of artificers and arts, and his priests were carpenters; it was he who went forth to fish, and dragged up the Tonga islands from the bottom of the sea. Here, then, he corresponds with Maui, and indeed Tangaroa and Maui are found blending in Polynesia even to full identification. It is neither easy nor safe to fix to definite origin the Protean shapes of South Sea mythology, but on the whole the native myths are apt to embody cosmic ideas, and as the idea of the Sun preponderates in Maui, so the idea of the Heaven in Taaroa. In the Fiji Islands, whose native mythology is on the whole distinct from that of Polynesia proper, a strange weird figure takes the supreme place among the gods. His name is Ndengei,