he worst crimes of the hungry ghost-god, or
god framed on the lines of animism. This very interesting Supreme Being,
in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by
Ellis in that fascinating book 'Polynesian Researches.'[39] 'Several of
their _taata-paari_, or wise men, pretend that, according to other
traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.'
Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with
ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is
not a statement of national belief. Taa-roa was 'uncreated, existing from
the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the _po_, or world of
darkness.' In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was _Toivi_, fatherless and
motherless from all eternity. In the highest heavens he dwells alone. He
created the gods of polytheism, the gods of war, of peace, and so on. Says
a native hymn, 'He was: he abode in the void. No earth, _no sky_, no men!
He became the universe.' In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the
rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology. Thus it may
be argued, Taa-roa is no 'primaeval theistic idea,' but merely the
Heaven-God (Ouranos in Greece). But we may distinguish: in the Zuni hymn
we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not
the Eternal, Awonawilona, who 'thought himself out into the void,' before
which, as in the Polynesian hymn, 'there was no sky.'[40]

Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a
ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may
be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin
had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more
plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental
polytheism to develop them out of. In Tahiti, _Atuas_ are gods, _Oramutuas
tiis_ are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors. These
were mischievous: they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed
propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to
whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]

Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early
savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen,
the Andamanese, and so on. I therefore suggest that in an advanced
polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites
unpractised by low savages co