nguished from
that of many other islands in the Pacific by its freedom from human
sacrifice and from the gross and licentious practices which prevailed in
other branches of the Polynesian race. The notion of the Rarotongans
that the Samoans were a godless people has proved to be totally
mistaken. On closer acquaintance it was found that they lived under the
influence of a host of imaginary deities who exercised their faith and
demanded their obedience. Among these deities the most numerous and
perhaps the most influential were the _aitu_, which were the gods of
individuals, of families, of towns or villages, and of districts.[71]
These gods were supposed to appear in some visible embodiment or
incarnation, and the particular thing, or class of things, in which his
god was in the habit of appearing, was to the Samoan an object of
veneration, and he took great care never to injure it or treat it with
contempt. In the great majority of cases the thing in which the deity
presented himself to his worshippers was a class of natural objects,
most commonly a species of animal, bird, or fish, less frequently a tree
or plant or an inanimate object, such as a stone, the rainbow, or a
meteor. One man, for example, saw his god in the eel, another in the
shark, another in the turtle, another in the owl, another in the lizard,
and so on throughout all the fish of the sea, the birds, the four-footed
beasts, and creeping things. In some of the shell-fish, such as the
limpets on the rocks, gods were supposed to be present. It was not
uncommon to see an intelligent chief muttering prayers to a fly, an ant,
or a lizard, which chanced to alight or crawl in his presence. A man
would eat freely of the incarnation of another man's god, but would most
scrupulously refrain from eating of the incarnation of his own
particular god, believing that death would be the consequence of such
sacrilege. The offended god was supposed to take up his abode in the
body of the impious eater and to generate there the very thing which he
had eaten, till it caused his death. For example, if a man, whose family
god was incarnate in the prickly sea-urchin (_Echinus_), were to eat of
a sea-urchin, it was believed that a prickly sea-urchin would grow in
his body and kill him. If his family god were incarnate in the turtle,
and he was rash enough to eat a turtle, the god would enter into him,
and his voice would be heard from within the sinner's body, saying, "I
am kil