f Polynesia blessed waters for
purification, for prayer, and for public and private ceremonies,
and to exorcise demons and drive away diseases, as the priests of
America and Europe do. Holy water was called ka wai kapu a Kane, and
from the baptizing of the new-born child to the sprinkling of the
dying its sacred uses were many. To-day the older people use these
pagan ablutions to alleviate pain and cure maladies. The old Greeks
used salt water for the same purposes, and had holy-water fonts at
the temple gates, as do the Catholic churches to-day.

Levy and Woronick believed, or pridefully affected to believe,
that at a remote period a band of Israelites, perhaps one of the
lost tribes carried away by the Assyrians, peopled these islands;
or settled in Malaysia before the Polynesian exodus from there,
and gave them their lore. Pere Rambaud of the Catholic mission at
Papeete considered it more probable that Spaniards, reaching Hawaii
from wrecked Spanish galleons voyaging between Mexico and Manila,
brought the holy doctrines. His explanation, however, often advanced,
fell utterly before the fact that the Polynesians had no knowledge of
Jesus or any man or god like him, and knew nothing of original sin;
but, more convincing, all Polynesia had these legends, and there
had been no communication with the Maoris of New Zealand and with
Fiji after the Spanish entered the Philippines. It is to me quite
certain that the Polynesians brought with them from Malaysia or India
or from farther toward Europe those traditions of the beginnings of
mankind which grew up hundreds of thousands of years ago, and were
dispersed with each group setting out for adventure or driven from
the birthplace of thinking humans.

Taaroa, whose name was spelt differently in separated archipelagos, was
the father of the Tahitian cosmogony. His wife was Hina, the earth,
and his son, Oro, was ruler of the world. Tane, the Huahine god,
was a brother of Oro, and his equal, but there were islands which
disputed this equality, and shed blood to disprove it, as the sects
of Christianity have since the peaceful Jesus died by the demands of
the priests of his nation.

Haui was the Tahitian Hercules. Of course he, too, bade the sun to
stay a while unmoving, and it did. Joshua, the son of Nun, whose
astronomical exploit at Gibeon brought him immortal fame, was a
glorious warrior; but Haui's unwritten achievements, as chanted by
the orero at the marae where Tetuan