ok
red clay, and kneaded it with his own blood, or with the red water of
swamps. The habits of animals, some of which are gods, while others are
descended from gods, follow from their conduct at the moment when heaven
and earth were violently divorced. New Zealand itself, or at least one
of the isles, was a huge fish caught by Maui (of whom more hereafter).
Just as Pund-jel, in Australia, cut out the gullies and vales with his
knife, so the mountains and dells of New Zealand were produced by the
knives of Maui's brothers when they crimped his big fish.(2) Quite apart
from those childish ideas are the astonishing metaphysical hymns about
the first stirrings of light in darkness, of "becoming" and "being,"
which remind us of Hegel and Heraclitus, or of the most purely
speculative ideas in the Rig-Veda.(3) Scarcely less metaphysical are the
myths of Mangaia, of which Mr. Gill(4) gives an elaborate account.

(1) See "Divine Myths of Lower Races".

(2) Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 115-121; Bastian, Heilige Sage der
Polynesier, pp. 36-50; Shortland, Traditions of New Zealanders.

(3) See chapter on "Divine Myths of the Lower Races," and on "Indian
Cosmogonic Myths"

(4) Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, pp. 1-22.

The Mangaian ideas of the world are complex, and of an early scientific
sort. The universe is like the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, divided
into many imaginary circles like those of mediaeval speculation. There
is a demon at the stem, as it were, of the cocoa-nut, and, where the
edges of the imaginary shell nearly meet, dwells a woman demon, whose
name means "the very beginning". In this system we observe efforts at
metaphysics and physical speculation. But it is very characteristic
of rude thought that such extremely abstract conceptions as "the very
beginning" are represented as possessing life and human form. The
woman at the bottom of the shell was anxious for progeny, and therefore
plucked a bit out of her own right side, as Eve was made out of the rib
of Adam. This piece of flesh became Vatea, the father of gods and men.
Vatea (like Oannes in the Chaldean legend) was half man, half fish. "The
Very Beginning" begat other children in the same manner, and some
of these became departmental gods of ocean, noon-day, and so forth.
Curiously enough, the Mangaians seem to be sticklers for primogeniture.
Vatea, as the first-born son, originally had his domain next above
that of his mother. But she was pa