The Pacific: the coming of the ancestors - creation of myths and ancestor worship are widespread in the Pacific islands

Creation myths and ancestor worship are widespread in the Pacific islands

The world of islands that is the Pacific Ocean embraces very many different cultures. But from the Ryukyus of Japan, to Samoa and Tahiti, local mythology largely agrees on how the islands came into being.

In the Japanese archipelago of Yaeyama, rituals and oral tradition recall the customs of Oceania. A myth current in one of these islands, Ishigaki-jima, tells how the gods and the ancestors created them.

Once upon a time, it goes, the sun god ordered another god, Amang, to come down from the sky to create an island on earth. Amang did so and mixed sand and earth with the end of his spear. From this mixture, the first island sprang. Then, in the pandanus palm forest which grew up on the island, he created the hermit crab, amang-cha. Next he gave the crab human seed, and a pair of human beings, a man and a woman, eventually emerged from the crab's hole in the sand.

On the west coast of the neighbouring island of Iriomote-jima, the inhabitants use annual events, such as the year-end sabani canoe races, to invoke the blessing of the gods and the ancestors for the coming year. Such benediction is in the form of the yuu, which brings prosperity and plant growth from beyond the horizon, from the sky or from the deep - vague places where the gods and the ancestors also live.

At the festival of Soru (in the seventh lunar month), the dead and the ancestors are invited back to the village, to the houses where they were born. There they receive offerings, and celebrations in their honour go on for three nights. A group of masked young people, the Anggama, conjure up through dance the community of the dead and the ancestors.

From nature to culture

The man and the woman from the story of the creation are the ancestors of those who settled in the Yaeyama islands. Many variants of this myth are to be found in the islands of Hateruma, Taketomi and Miyako. Among the Austronesians of Belau, Samoa and Tahiti, the creation is seen in a similar way - out of chaos, with life descending from the sky to the earth or the sea. In the stories, small sea creatures such as fish, crabs, worms or shellfish give birth to a child or to the first human couple.

Often the couple consists of a brother and a sister, whose incest becomes the foundation of human society. The couple's first child is usually an aquatic creature or an incomplete human being.

In the Ryukyu Islands as in Polynesia, these myths go along with stories about floating islands or floating lands that the gods have immobilized through various stratagems to create the world of islands which humans gradually settled. The creation myths usually present this settlement as a transition from nature to culture. They hark back to the way of life of ancient maritime communities in Southeast Asia and on the edges of the East China Sea, based on fishing and gathering seaweed and shellfish.

The original link

For the Pacific peoples, genealogy, traced from a founding ancestor, establishes an order of precedence among all the clans and descendants or "houses" which make up an island society. Such genealogy is part of the "framework of origins" which brings together the status of communities, social ranks and individual titles according to criteria legitimized by myths and ancient stories about settlement of the islands.

The Polynesians "remember" the ancestral migrations which brought them to the islands where they now live. Oral history preserves the names of major ancestors who came from the other side of the ocean and are revered as gods. All the details of these voyages (the names of canoes, the chiefs, priests and the famous artists, as well as the objects, plants and animals they brought with them) are familiar to the descendants of the founders.

In the minds of the indigenous peoples, the origins of the islands and their settlement are connected. This link is ritually reaffirmed at great annual festivals. Veneration for ancestors permeates all social life. Once upon a time they came from the sky and the sea, and now they turn up in the islanders' dreams, enabling the living to communicate with the spiritual world of gods and impersonal natural forces.

These relationships with the ancestors take many forms. Some prestigious goods, like ceremonial objects or those used in rites such as births, marriages and funerals, have a collective value, because they make the link between the ancestors and the living - the transmission of spiritual power (mana), the ancestors' blessing of the living.

Depictions of ancestors, whether full-face, sitting or standing, are among the most powerful works of art in Oceania. In wood, stone or ivory, they are found from eastern Indonesia to Polynesia. The finest and most dramatic examples are on the eastern edge of the Pacific, on Easter Island, where the huge moai erected on dry-stone terraces by the shore recall the mana of the divine ancestors to which the inhabitants of the island once gave sacrifice. The long-eared moai look out across the sea whence the spirits of the ancestors came, sentinels of the route they took.

ANTONIO GUERREIRO, a French ethnologist and film-maker, is associate researcher at the Southeast Asian Research Institute in Aix-en-Provence (France). He co-edited a special issue of the French magazine Autrement (no. 11, 1991) devoted to the Indonesian island of Borneo.

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