Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
"Oh Moso! make haste, show your power, send down to the lower regions, sweep away like a flood, may they never see the light of another day." These were the usual imprecations shrieked out over the bowl. One of the kings of the district of Atua was supposed to be a man and move about among mortals in the daytime; but at night he was Moso, and away among the gods.
Among themselves, the New Zealanders appear to have a great variety of other gods, besides the one whom they call emphatically the atua. Crozet speaks of some feeble ideas which they have of subordinate divinities, to whom, he says, they are wont to pray for victory over their enemies. But Savage gives us a most particular account of their daily adoration of the sun, moon, and stars.
From the outset I realized the iniquitous character of the Atua who had tried to destroy or set adrift the people of the presqu'ile of Taiarapu, for they were handsomer and, if possible, more hospitable than those of Tahiti-nui. The road was closer to the water of the lagoon, and the reef and coral banks were nearer.
"It was," they said, "no act of treachery on our part; we did not invite you to our shores for the purpose of plunder and murder: but you came, and ill-used us; you broke into our tabooed grounds. And did not Atua give those bad white men into the hands of our fathers?" I am confident that a body of Europeans may now reside in perfect security in any part of these islands.
The characteristics of the gods in Tongan theology are exactly those of men whose shape they are supposed to possess, only they have more intelligence and greater power. The Tongan belief that, after death, the human Atua more readily distinguishes good from evil, runs parallel with the old Israelitic conception of Elohim expressed in Genesis, "Ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good from evil."
The part of the heavens in which the gods reside is represented as beautiful in the extreme. "When the clouds are beautifully chequered," writes Kendal, "the atua above, it is supposed, is planting sweet potatoes. At the season when these are planted in the ground, the planters dress themselves in their best raiment, and say that, as atuas on earth, they are imitating the atua in heaven."
The religions of savagery are far less analytical, and much more naïve in their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of malevolent and benevolent spirits. Their gods are numerous as in Greek religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro.
Cook speaks, in the account of his third voyage, of a young man he had taken on board the ship, who, having one day performed this ceremony, could not be prevailed upon to eat a morsel till night, insisting that the atua would most certainly kill him if he did.
They believe that whenever any person is sick, his illness is occasioned by the atua, in the shape of a lizard, preying upon his entrails; and, accordingly, in such cases, they often address the most horrid imprecations and curses to the invisible cannibal, in the hope of thereby frightening him away.
Lu caught two fowls, and when the sea rose took them with him into the vessel. He was not many days afloat, some say six, when his vessel rested on the top of the mountain called Malata, in Atua, east end of Upolu. Lu lived there at the village called Uafato, and had there his Sa Moa, or preserve fowls, which were not to be killed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking