Forlong - Rivers of Life

444
Fig 173.
THE POLYNESIAN GOD TA-AROA
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
(sic). To this Mr. Bourne adds (showing entire ignorance of the subject), “I suppose it
will be readily granted that this custom of so playing was the origin of our present recreations
and diversions on Easter holidiays, and in particular of playing at hand-ball
for a tanzy cake, which at this season is generally practiced!” Sometimes youths used
to run races for the tanzy cake. Tanzy is thought to represent the bitter herbs which
the Jews used to put on their Passover table. In London one Easter game consisted in
a young man tilting at a shield hung over a stream from a boat which the current
carried swiftly down; if he broke his lance against it fairly, without falling, he
proved himself a gallant man. On Easter Tuesday, says Durand, wives beat their
husbands, and on the following day husbands beat their wives; on one day the men
take off the women’s shoes which can only be redeemed by a present; on another the
women take off the men’s shoes. But we need not multiply instances to show that this
Vernal eqninox was for the promotion of sexual matters, and that these beatings—like
the whippings of Apollo, developed the passions. Shields or ancilia, lances, youths in
boats and such-like, are all symbols of this cult, and sacred cakes with crosses on them,
games of balls especially in churches or arks, and by churchmen even of the highest
dignity, at the holiest seasona, and in rudely pious days, are full of significance. The
great cry at the ball games was “Mea est Pila,” “I have got the ball,” which means
says Erasmus, “I have obtained the victory, or am master of my wishes,” or of “the
situation,”—the same as the Moslem signifies when he turns and kneels towards his
Kibla or ark. Notice also that in the centre of all such sports stood a Pole or Standard
marking Siva’s reign, and more significantly adorned than in our days.
It was a custom in Franconia, in the middle of Lent, for youths to make an image
of straw in the form of death (for Christianity made Europe adopt the dead form rather
than the living) 1 and to suspend it on a pole and carry it about; all
who saw it offered to the bearers a refreshment of milk, peas and
dried pears, or drove it away as a presage of bad omen. The early
Christian Greeks are said to have carried a dish of parboiled wheat on
their heads at funerals, and to have deposited this on the dead body;
and many English used to considar that on mid-lent, or Mothering
Sunday, they were bound to attend at their mother church, and
there make similar offerings on the high altar. These straw figures
are very common in India; but there they represent a living god,
and in harvest times are very indelicate. The God is often only
an upreared figure like this Polynesian Tarao or Ta-Aroa which
the public saw standing all throughout 1874 in the gallery of the
Albert Hall, under the title given him by the missionaries, of
“The Great God of the Polynesians,” of which more in its place.
Asyrians and Hebrews alike offered cakes or Kunim, \ynwk,
which Suidas and others call Nymphæ, 2 to the Queen of Heaven; and certain holy
1
[i.e. by ending human sacrifice in “scapegoat” rituals. See Frazer, The Scapegoat. —T.S.]
2
Anct. Faiths, II. 395.