**MAIN PAGE: [[http://www.hks.re/wiki/freeman|DEREK FREEMAN: MARGARET MEAD AND SAMOA]]**
====== 12 Religion: Pagan and Christian ======
Mead's graduate studies, which she completed under Boas' supervision shortly before leaving for Samoa in 1925, involved the comparative study of canoes, houses, and tattooing as described in the then available literature on Hawaiians, Tahitians, the Maori of New Zealand, Marquesans, and Samoans. In 1928 she approached the pagan religion of Samoa in a similar way, asserting that Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, and the Marquesas all out-distanced Samoa "in richness and variety of religious forms and beliefs and in the relative importance of religion in the lives of the people." As compared with other parts of Polynesia, the pagan Samoans (especially in Manu'a) gave, she claimed, but "the slightest attention to religion," and had "no temples," and "no religious festivals." "A libation poured to the family god" at the evening kava ceremony completed an individual's religious duties; "all contacts with the supernatural were accidental, trivial, uninstitutionalized," and both "institutionalized religion and personal psychic experience" were "exceedingly underdeveloped." Mead offered an apparently plausible explanation to accompany these assertions: "A strong religious interest," she surmised, was among the things that would have disturbed "the nice balance of Samoan society," and so it had been "outlawed" from a "social structure" that simply had "no room for the gods."1
These views, at which Mead arrived at a time when the pagan religions of western Polynesia were still little understood by anthropologists (Raymond Firth's The Work of the Gods in Tikopia was not published until 1940) almost wholly misconstrue the nature and significance of religion in both ancient and twentieth-century Samoa. Fortunately, the writings of John Williams and others provide a detailed and accurate account of the highly developed religious life of the pagan Samoans of the early 1830s as well as of Samoan Christianity from that time onward.2
Having had extensive experience of Raiatea and other parts of eastern Polynesia from 1817 onward, Williams, when he encountered the Samoans in the early 1830s, was immediately impressed by the "very peculiar" nature of their system of religion, which differed greatly from that "of every other group" then known "in the South Seas." What initially struck Williams was that, in marked contrast to eastern Polynesia, there were in Samoa no idols, "no altars stained with human blood, no maraes strewed with the skulls and bones of its numerous victims," and no elaborate temples devoted to special rites. Because of the conspicuous absence of these basic elements of eastern Polynesian religion it was common for Rarotongans and others to refer to the Samoans as "godless," yet, as Williams emphasized, the pagan Samoans in fact had many gods to whom they constantly offered "mouth worship" and with whom they were wont "on all occasions" to converse. "Each chief and almost every man," as Aaron Buzacott noted in 1836, "had his god, or aitu, the representations of which he would consider sacred, and treat... with the utmost respect." These aitu, which were commonly incarnate in some bird, fish, reptile, or insect, were looked upon, however, as inferior deities, far above which was Tagaloa-a-Lagi, the "supreme god and creator of everything."3
These accounts by Williams and Buzacott are confirmed by Horatio Hale, the ethnographer who accompanied the Wilkes Expedition on its visit to Samoa in 1839. According to Hale, when a Samoan woman was in pains of child birth, numerous gods were invoked in succession, and the deity whose name was being invoked at the moment of birth became the "tutelary deity" of the infant. Connected with each tutelary deity was "some particular prohibition" (generally against eating the creature in which this deity was supposed to be incarnate), which the person under this god's protection was required scrupulously to observe. Again, when an individual swore by his god nothing would "induce him to make a false asseveration." George Turner, whose study of Samoan religion extended over some forty years from 1841 onward, mentions a total of 120 of these tutelary deities. In addition to this personal or tutelary god, according to Turner, everyone revered at least four other gods: a family god, a village god, a district god, and a war god. In his classic Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before, published in 1884, Turner lists the names of some four score of these deities. He also records that "a flaming fire" was the "regular evening offering to the gods," at which time the members of a family bowed their heads while their chief "prayed for prosperity from the gods great and small." Again, W.T. Pritchard records that at every kava ceremony the first cup was offered to some god, most eomonly to Tagaloa, by being "held up and waved with a circular motion towards the heavens," and then "solemnly poured on the ground."4
These beliefs and practices were all peculiarly Samoan, yet what made their system of religion so very peculiar in Williams' eyes was the fact that pagan Samoans had direct oracular communication with their gods. As Williams graphically describes in his journal of 1832, the first sign of an individual's coming under the influence of a god was a violent muscular agitation with which he was suddenly seized. This generally commenced in "one of his breasts," which became greatly agitated while the rest of his body remained quiet. At length, however, the other parts of his body yielded to the agitating influence of the indwelling god until the medium shook "most dreadfully" and became "frantic." The god then spoke through the lips of his chosen vessel. If there was, says Williams, any subject that happened to be under consideration, it would be decided by the god's utterances. Again, if a polity or family was suffering under any calamity, the god would "upbraid the chief with his crimes," saying that "he, the god," had been "privy to all his actions." At last the inspired medium, worn out with fatigue, would become quiescent, and, having slept, would awake as if unconscious of anything having happened to him.5
Williams is here describing the institution of spirit medium-ship on which the remarkable pagan religion of Samoa was centrally based. A spirit medium was said to be a taula aitu, or anchor of the spirits, or alternatively a va'a aitu, or vessel of the spirits, and was believed to be especially prone to possession by gods and spirits. As George Brown also noted, the gods and other spirits, including on occasion ancestral ghosts, were supposed to enter into and take temporary possession of spirit mediums. Then, the presence of a god having been evidenced by the medium's profoundly altered (and in fact dissociated) psychological state, the transformed voice with which the medium spoke was taken to be the actual voice of the entity possessing him. A sacred seance followed between the immanently present god and his human audience, who, "in the most polite language," held converse with him, seeking his counsel and hanging on his every word.6
It was usual, as J.B. Stair notes, for each family to have its own taula aitu, and this office could be held by the chief of a family, by his sister, or by some other member with the requisite oracular powers. Through this medium the members of a family were able to maintain contact both with their family god and with the ghosts of their ancestors. Various maladies were believed to be caused by the anger of some ghost in which case a special seance was held to ascertain what might be done to assuage this anger and so heal the hurt it had caused. According to
Pritchard, there was also in each local polity a particular taula aitu whose office was hereditary, with "a nephew, perhaps more frequently than a son, assuming the holy and coveted functions." It was the privilege of this medium to appoint feast days in honor of the god of his community, and on occasion to be possessed by him. Again, in time of impending conflict, the war god of a village would be consulted by spirit mediums.7
At other times, when kava and food were offered in their honor, the gods of a major family would possess for a time one of its acknowledged mediums. Such a medium, as in Tikopia, could be of high rank, and was often one of the titular chiefs with whom the gods of a family were especially identified. Thomas Powell was informed in Ta'u in 1870 that the thirty-fourth Tui Manu'a, who had been killed in about 1820 in a war with Fitiuta, had been a medium of the gods. In Manu'a in 1832, Williams was told that the people "went into the bush ... to hold conversations" with their "great spirit" Tagaloa; it was on such occasions that the Tui Manu'a would have been possessed by Tagaloa, the supreme god from whom the Tui Manu'a was believed to be descended.8
In pagan Samoa, then, a medium could emerge from anywhere in the rank structure as long as he or she had the capacity to evince, when in a dissociated state, oracular powers. Thus, while in most instances, as Ella notes, the office of medium belonged to chiefs, and, if suitable individuals were available, was hereditary, it was also "often taken up, or given, on account of some malformation, or from a striking peculiarity in temper or disposition." Further, because of the central importance that was given in ancient Samoa to direct communication with gods, ghosts, and spirits, spirit mediums were, as Brown records, very important personages who often came to exercise great influence. The most celebrated instance of this in Samoan history was Tamafaiga, who, having become the taula aitu of Manono, the ruling power in the western islands in the early nineteenth century, went on to become the tupu, or "king" of western Samoa, and, because of his seeming occult powers, to be worshipped as a god, before being assassinated for his tyrannical excesses by the people of A'ana in 1830.9
The islands of Ofu and Olosega viewed from Luma on the island of Ta'u, the site of Mead's fieldwork in 1925-1926. These three islands collectively are known as Manu'a.
The island of Ta'u at about the time of Mead's stay there in 1925-1926. The U.S.S. Ontario is at anchor beyond the reef of the village of Luma. Faleasao bay and village are at the far left.
The naval medical dispensary on Ta'u, where Mead made her headquarters. This photograph was taken in 1967 when the building was no longer in use.
A taupou (ceremonial virgin) wearing the traditional tuiga, photographed in 1967.
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Franz Boas in 1906.
Mead was thus plainly in error in asserting in 1928 that in ancient Samoa "the individual whose religious interest and unstable temperament gave him a reputation for oracular powers was given no accepted place in a pattern where religion claimed so little attention," and that "all contacts with the supernatural were accidental, trivial and uninstitutionalized" and personal psychic experience "exceedingly underdeveloped."10
Similarly, Mead's statements that there were no temples and no religious festivals in pagan Samoa are directly contradicted by the historical evidence. The house in which sacred seances were regularly held was termed a malumalu, and, as the setting in which the gods communicated directly with humans, was very much a temple. Indeed, the term malumalu is now used to refer to the Christian churches, one or more of which is to be found in every Samoan village. Again, as both Pratt and Turner record, almost every month in the Samoan year was the occasion for some kind of festival for a god. The first month of the year, for example, was called Tagaloa Fua (fua meaning fruit), and was preeminently the season for great offerings to Tagaloa. This festival of pagan times still persists, moreover, in modified form, in many parts of Samoa, with the principal offerings of food now going to the village pastor as the earthly representative of Jehovah, who supplanted Tagaloa in the mid-nineteenth century.11
The ancient Samoans, then, quite contrary to Mead's assertions, were a highly religious people with a system of religion which was, it is now known, essentially similar to that of pagan Tikopia. Firth, in his illuminating Rank and Religion in Tiko-pia, lists nine major elements of Tikopia paganism, all of which are also characteristic of the pagan religion of the Samoans. These elements, in abbreviated and slightly modified form, are, in the case of Samoa: (1) belief in a pantheon of spirits and gods, culminating in the supreme creator god, Tagaloa; (2) an ancestor cult directly linked with the family system; (3) the worship of gods and ancestors, involving prayers and offerings: (4) the use of material media, including temples and other sacra; (5) a concept of a soul which at death goes to an afterworld; (6) elaborate myths of creation and of the deeds of the gods; (7) numerous spirit mediums, aligned with the system of rank, with the titular chiefs in ultimate control; (8) a series of periodic celebrations at specific seasons of the year, involving social expression in dancing and elaborate ceremonies; and, finally (9) a sense of integral relationship between religious practices and the general welfare of the community. Firth comments that this form of pagan religion was "a highly integrated system with a moral jurisdiction over the Tikopia community." This was also true for pagan Samoa, and particularly so because of the development there, much more than in Tikopia, of a supreme god, Ta-galoa, who overlooked the affairs of those he had created. This development, moreover, was one that Mead conspicuously neglected, as a result of having been "very doubtful," in her ignorance of the historical sources I am about to cite, that Tagaloa was "especially the god of the Manuans."12
When Williams arrived off the island of Ta'u in 1832, his schooner was boarded, to his astonishment, by Paraifara, a Christian convert from Raivavae in Eastern Polynesia who with a number of others had reached Ta'u after becoming lost at sea during a voyage from Tabuai. By 1832 these castaways had been on Ta'u for about three years, had built a small chapel, and, having acquainted themselves with the religious beliefs of the Manu'ans, had persuaded some of them to become Christians. Williams was thus able to obtain from Paraifara a valuable account of the pagan religion of the Manu'ans. The Manu'ans, Paraifara reported, worshiped a "great spirit" called Tagaloa, who "resided in the skies." As well as going to special places in the bush to hold conversations with this great spirit, all of the people, including the chiefs, prayed and made offerings to Tagaloa. For example, "at their great feasts, prior to the distribution of food, an orator arose, and, after enumerating each article, exclaimed, 'Thank you great Tagaloa, for this!' " Again, in 1837, in reviewing his experiences in both eastern and western Polynesia, Williams noted that "the Samoans, in particular, had a vague idea of a Supreme Being" known to them as Tagaloa, whom they looked upon as "the creator of all things and author of their mercies"; and in 1839 Anamia, a Rarotongan teacher stationed on Ta'u, wrote that some Manu'ans, in rejecting Jehovah, had claimed that "Tagaloa, of the skies" was the "true God."13
These accounts by Paraifara, Williams, and Anamia were later amplified by Powell on the basis of his discussions, from the 1860s onward, with the keepers of the sacred traditions of Manu'a. By this time Powell had lived in both the western and eastern islands of the Samoan archipelago for more than twenty years, and was able to collect, with scholarly exactitude, a series of traditional texts of the utmost importance for the understanding of the pagan religion of Samoa. These texts reveal a concept of a supreme being, which far from being vague, as Williams had supposed, is to a remarkable degree for a preliterate people theologically sophisticated and mature. Indeed, so impressed was Powell with the "monotheism" of the Samoan myth of creation that he was led to conjecture that "those who had handed it down, from father to son, from time immemorial, as an inviolable trust," must have been "closely allied to the original possessors of the Mosaic record." Fraser, similarly impressed, compared Tagaloa to Brahma of the Hindu pantheon, in that Tagaloa, like Brahma, is, in the words of Dowson, a "supreme spirit manifested as the active creator of the universe." Thus, the Samoan myth of creation begins, "Tagaloa is the god who dwells in the illimitable void. He made all things. He alone, at first, existed."14
The myth goes on to describe how Tagaloa created both mankind and the other gods. The most important of these deities are his agents and bear, in many cases, modifications of his own name. Tagaloa created the first two human beings, Fatu and 'Ele'ele, male and female, from the primordial matter that took shape beneath his feet, and endowed them with souls (agaga), affections (loto), wills (finagalo) and the power of thought (masalo; literally doubt), which, when mingled together, gave them intelligence (atamai). This recognition of finagalo, the capacity for alternative action, and of masalo, the capacity to assess experience critically, as vital components of human intelligence, is an indication of the great sophistication of theological speculation in pagan Samoa. These tasks accomplished, the primeval creator retired to the tenth "heaven" above the heavens of all the other gods he had brought into being, where, in Fraser's words, he reigned supreme as Tagaloa of the Skies (Tagaloa-a-Lagi) manifesting himself only as necessary "in accordance with the work" he wished to do. Further, it was the son of Tagaloa-a-Lagi, Ta'e 'o Tagaloa, who descended to the world below and became (as Taua-nu'u confided to Powell in 1871) the first Tui Manu'a. It is thus from their supreme god that the paramount chief of the Manu'ans was held to derive his unique sanctity.15
The gods of the skies were believed to assemble in the tenth "heaven," on the Ground of Tranquility, there to hold their sacred fonos in the Fale 'Ula, or Crimson House, of Tagaloa-a-Lagi. At these fonos perfect peace and order prevailed, and when kava was ceremonially served it was Tagaloa-a-Lagi who received the first cup. As myth has it, when a second Fale 'Ula was established by Tagaloa in Manu'a as the sacrosanct fono house of the Tui Manu'a, its practices duplicated those which had originated in the skies. Tagaloa, then, was conceived of by the Samoans not only as the creator of all things but also as the originator of the chieftainship basic to their society. There was thus in ancient Samoa a profound fusion of the theological and the social, and the Samoans were, and still remain, quite contrary to Mead's assertions, a profoundly religious people.16
Pagan Samoans, Turner records, firmly believed that if in their daily lives "there was no prayer to Tagaloa there could be no blessing." Prayers, with appropriate offerings, were made on all occasions of any importance, such as "before going to fish, before planting some fresh section of bush land," and also in times of sickness and war. Fraser notes that Tagaloa was believed to be especially partial to bonito; if those who went angling beyond the reef wished to secure his favor in their ventures, they had to show him respect by the prestation of a bonito as soon as they returned to shore. Thunder was thought to be a sign that a prayer had been heard, and disaster was the lot of those who had neglected their obligations.17
As these facts indicate, Tagaloa was believed to take a vital interest in the doings of the Samoan people. In one myth he is "keen-eyed Tagaloa," whose "all-seeing eyes" follow a guilty man wherever he goes. So, as Turner notes, when Pava fled to the earth below after desecrating the kava of the gods he still saw the "terrible eye" of the indignant Tagaloa looking down on him. When angered by those who had behaved improperly Tagaloa swiftly became a dreaded punishing force. When his son Le Fanoga negligently spoilt an oven of food, Tagaloa pelted him with burning yams, marking his body with reddish spots, like that of the owl in which Le Fanoga later became incarnate as a war god. When carpenters constructed a house for the Tui Manu'a without first consulting Tagaloa, "The rafter-breaking god came down/With wrath inflamed and angry frown," to scatter all before him. When Sina had the temerity to go off with Tagamilagi, a suitor from Tonga, Tagaloa, with lightning and darkness, turned these wayward lovers into stones. And when Sa and Manu pointedly disobeyed Tagaloa by pilfering fish he had given them to tend, he transformed them into sea urchins, to spend the rest of their lives face downward. Tagaloa, then, was an all-seeing, all-powerful creator god, remote yet ever present, peaceloving yet ever ready to punish the disobedient and wayward, who bore a distinct resemblance to the supreme and demanding god of the ancient Hebrews and of the strait-laced Protestant missionaries by whom the pagan Sa-moans were so rapidly converted during the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.18
When Williams reached Ta'u in 1832 he was met by Manu'ans who, having been converted by Paraifara, pleaded, as sons of the word of Jehovah, to be sent a missionary. By as early at 1840, soon after teachers from Rarotonga and Rurutu had been stationed in Ta'u, the Tui Manu'a himself became a Christian. The following year the missionary Matthew Hunkin arrived, and by the beginning of 1846 the entire population of Manu'a had been converted to Christianity, having found in Jehovah a god apparently superior to Tagaloa. The pagan religion of the Samoans had been thick with prohibitions, and as Wilkes observed in 1839, wherever Christianity had taken root in Samoa the ten commandments rapidly became law, with any infringement of them being punished by immediate withdrawal of the privilege of attending worship. The observance of Sunday also became very strict; it became "impossible to get a native to do anything whatsoever on that day, but perform his religious duties." These duties, which included morning and evening prayers on every day of the year, were attended to "with a devotion rarely to be seen among civilized men."19
At the time of Mead's brief sojourn in Samoa this strict adherence to Christian principles had long been integral to the lives of Manu'ans, who, as Holmes has noted, have a history of being "almost fanatical in their practice and observance of Christianity." Governor H. F. Bryan, in his report of October 1926, which covers the period from September 1925 to June 1926, during which Mead was in Tutuila and Manu'a, describes the Samoans as "innately and intensely religious," with "family prayers in the morning and evening in every Samoan home" and with Sunday "very religiously observed as a day of rest." A. F. Judd, who visited American Samoa early in 1926, when Mead was still in Manu'a, emphasized in his notes on the ethnology of Samoa the extraordinary preoccupation of the Samoans with the Christian religion, remarking on the well-attended congregational services at Ta'u, which were held twice each Sunday in a church standing partly in Luma and partly in Si'ufaga. Bruce Cartwright, after a tour of Tutuila in September 1927, described the Samoans as being very religious, with services "participated in every evening in every family by every individual"; Dr. Peter Buck, on the basis of his observations in Manu'a, Tutuila, Upolu, and Savai'i from September 1927 to February 1928, wrote of the Samoans as being "strongly religious," and of their pastors as occupying high positions of great influence; while Tufele Iosefa averred of the Samoans in 1929 (to the Congressional Commission on American Samoa) that "probably no people on the face of the earth" had "accepted the teachings of Christianity with such wholesome enthusaism and sincere pur-pose."20
At the time of Mead's Samoan research, then, the Manu'ans were devout adherents of the strict ordinances of protestant Christianity. Yet instead of analyzing the consequences of this situation for the adolescents she was studying, Mead, as part of her depiction of a society essentially "characterized by ease," misdeseribed Samoan Christianity as being just "a pleasant and satisfying social form in which choirs sing and married women wear hats and pastors pray and preach in the most beautiful language." Indeed, the sterner tenets of protestant Christianity had been so "remoulded," according to Mead, that there was "passive acceptance" by religious authorities of the premarital promiscuity which was, so she claimed, customary among female adolescents, with the result that, as she asserted in 1929, "no one" became a church member "until after marriage."21
To this misrepresentation of a crucially important aspect of their social and religious lives, Samoans take the keenest exception. For example, when I discussed^this statement of Mead's withJjQ'oaiiiakmasina Malietoa infl967yshe called it "a most mistaken story" and added that throughout Samoa girls were prepared for church membership from as young as 10 years, with many adolescent girls becoming full members of the church, or Ekalesia, from 15 or 16 years of age onward. This was borne out by my detailed study in Sa'iinapu in 1967 of all of the girls of this community aged between 12 and 22. In this sample of sixty-seven girls and young women the youngest full member of the church was 13 years of age, and of the twenty-two fully pubescent unmarried girls aged 16 to 18, no fewer than eighteen, or 82 percent, were members of the Ekalesia. All of these eighteen girls, moreover, being church members, were regarded by others of their community as virgins, as fornication is strictly forbidden to all church members and any suspicion of indulgence in this "sin" results in expulsion from the church. Indeed, it is largely as a safeguard to their socially valued virginity (as is further discussed in Chapter 16) that Samoan girls when they reach puberty are strongly enjoined by their parents, their chief, and their village pastor to become church members. In January 1943, for example, after the pastor of Sa'anapu had made an appeal for new members of the church, Lauvi Vainu'u, a senior talking chief, cried out from the front of the church were he was sitting "Fly a banner for our family!" At this his adopted daughter, Taotasi, aged 13, walked forward, under considerable emotion, to join the Ekalesia.
In Ta'u in 1967 I was assured, by both male and female in-
formantswho adults at the . time of Mead's reseaches
and well remembered the years 1925-1926, that an i3entjcaTsys-tem—with the recruiting of unmarried pubescent girls to clTUrch membership and the strict groBEitibn_ofYo^eatiQn to all members of the Ekalesia—had also existed in Manu'a at that time. That this was the case is also evident from the information that Mead herself gives, despite her lack of attention to the religious behavior of the adolescents she was studying. Thus, table 1 in Coming of Age in Samoa reveals that no fewer than nine of the twenty-five adolescents listed were resident members of a pastor's household, which means they would have been either actual or prospective members of the Ekalesia. Again, in chapter 11 Mead makes specific mention of a girl who had become a "church member" in compliance with the expressed wish of her pious father, and of another who, while a church member, had "transgressed her vows." Mead, then, was plainly in error in generalizing that in Manu'a in 1925-1926 "no one" became "a church member until after marriage"; nor is there any substantive evidence for her assertion that premarital promiscuity on the part of female adolescents was passively accepted by the "religious authorities" in Manu'a. Rather, in the 1920s the female adolescents of Manu'a lived in a moralistic society that specifically interdicted premarital sexual intercourse. Mead's failure to give due attention to this socioreligious regime (which is accorded great prominence in the accounts of other contemporary observers, such as Judd and Buck) can only be construed as an active—albeit unconscious—denial of the realities of Samoan life.22
With the rapid conversion of Manu'a and other parts of Samoa from their pagan religion to Christianity, many pagan practices survived in but slightly modified form. Just as Tagaloa had "all-searching eyes," so was Jehovah, the Samoans were told by their missionaries, able to "see ... in the dark"; and just as Tagaloa, as Fraser notes, was believed to be "swift to know, and to requite the evil... done among men," so, the Samoans were instructed in their catechisms, did Jehovah become greatly angered at the sinful actions of mankind, which he never failed to punish.23 As in pagan times, chiefs and their families prayed directly to Jehovah, while the pastor of a local polity came to be viewed, like the pagan taula aitu, as its major intermediary with the deity, being often referred to as "the representative of God." Whereas in pagan times a person under suspicion of stealing would, as Turner records, touch a sacred stone and say, "In the presence of our chiefs now assembled, I lay my hand upon the stone. If I stole ... may I speedily die," this same imprecation came to be sworn on a Bible, in the belief that death would result if such an oath were falsely sworn. Again various of the prohibitions of the pagan religion were transferred to Christianity. For example, each evening when the heads of families pray to Jehovah there is a curfew during which no one is supposed to be abroad and unseemly behavior is forbidden on pain of divine retribution. In March 1966, for example, when the 13-year-old daughter of one of the titular chiefs of Sa'anapu, climbing in a pua tree instead of attending evening prayers, fell and broke her arm, it was said that God had punished her. Again, the thunder and lightning that were once the awesome attributes of Tagaloa have been transferred to Jehovah, to whom, in one of their hymns, Samoans sing:
Your voice, Jehovah, That I hear In the thunder clap Fills me with fear; The lightning is also yours And conveys your tidings.24
Jehovah is conceived of as being, in the words of a Samoan pastor, "full of anger against those who sin." Thus, when in October 1966 a 2-year-old of Sa'anapu who had been playing un-tended in the lagoon was found drowned, his mother exclaimed, again and again, in her distress, "Alas! O God! I fear Thee, God!" At the burial service the officiating pastor, as is common in such cases, openly attributed the child's death to the potency of human sinfulness, adding that he had died as a substitute for some other sinful person.
The Samoan Jehovah, then, like Tagaloa before him, is an austere, all-seeing God who is believed to punish relentlessly those who willfully disobey his commandments. There is thus no truth in Mead's assertion, in Coming of Age in Samoa, that the even tenor of the life of Samoan adolescents is disturbed by "no implacable gods, swift to anger and strong to punish." Equally at error are Mead's parallel assertions that the Sa-moans she studied in Tutuila and Manu'a had "no conviction of sin" and that, having taken only such parts of Western ways as made their own culture "more flexible," they were "without the doctrine of original sin." These, once again, are unhistorical statements, to which Samoans take immediate exception, pointing out that sinfulness, or agasala (literally, behavior in contravention of some divine or chiefly ruling and so deserving of punishment), is a basic Samoan concept antedating the arrival of Christianity, and, further, that the doctrine of original sin contained in the scriptures is something with which, as converts to Christianity, they have long been familiar.25
The early missionaries, as Pratt notes, readily adapted the Samoan concept of agasala to the Hebrew notion of sin, as is shown in the first Samoan catechism of 1842, the fourth chapter of which tells how the original sin of Adam and Eve in disobeying Jehovah was visited on all minkind. This doctrine, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, has been conscientiously imparted to all Samoan children, and the sinfulness of humans, because of their frequent disobedience to God, is said, as in the words of a nineteenth-century Samoan hymn, to be exceeding great.26 It is thus commonplace in Samoa to hear speakers in fonos and the Tike expatiating on sinfulness. For example, in Sa'auapuin..FehmaryJL9fiZ.I listened as the titular chief Lea'ana Satini declared to his fellow chiefs that "no one in this life is straight, all are sinful." Such homilies, moreover, are apt to end with a repetition of St. Paul's warning that the wages of those who sin is death. So, in one of their well known hymns the Samoans have for a century and more been admonished:
Put down sin,
Cast it away,
Lest disaster flourish
And you come to an evil end.27
It was in the spirit of this nineteenth-century hymn that after a devastating hurricane in 1966 the prime minister of Western Samoa, in a national broadcast, attributed this disaster to the fact that many Samoans had been following bad paths and admonished the nation to "lift its eyes to Jehovah and to fear him."28
Yet another seriously erroneous statement about Samoan religious behavior is Mead's assertion that "transgression and non-transgression are matters of expediency," there being "no room for guilt." This is by no means the case. Rather, growing up in an intensely religious society in which there is constant talk of sinfulness, Samoans are keenly aware of guilt, which in the ordinary course of their lives they are frequently called upon to confess to those in authority. For example, toward the end of a judicial fono in 1966, Sene, an untitled man who had committed the enormity of striking a chief, publicly acknowledged the error of his ways, whereupon the officiating tulafale at once remarked, "You are then conscious of your guilt, for that we are thankful." Further, as Brown notes, the Samoans have long "attached great value to the confession of wrong-doing in times of danger," as when a canoe on the high seas is in danger of being swamped. In 1940, for example, when our long boat was overtaken at night by a squall and seemed likely to founder in the Apolima strait, I witnessed confessions of guilt and fervent appeals to Jehovah by several of the Samoans with whom I was traveling. 29
This practice of confessing guilt is even more significantly displayed in a major Samoan ceremony, the ifoga, in which those who have done others wrong ritually humiliate themselves before them. This they used to do by taking stones and firewood from which an oven is made and, sitting with bowed heads covered with fine mats, so offering these fine mats in reparation and themselves (as Brown notes) as pigs to be cooked and eaten. Such a gesture, which to Samoans is deeply moving, almost always leads to reconciliation. In contemporary Samoa it is usually made with fine mats alone. An ifoga, in my experience, is always accompanied by the public confession of guilt. Thus, when in 1966 the chiefs of Sa'anapu made an ifoga to the chiefs of the neighboring polity of Sataoa, the senior titular chief of Sa'anapu, in offering the fine mat he had brought with him, began with the words, "I have come because of my guilt." Guilt, then, is a quite major element in the religious and social life of the Samoans, particularly associated with the demand for obedience to divine and chiefly authority and with the punishment that is meted out to those, of all ages, who transgress this basic social requirement.30