Burning the gods: a letter to Visesio Siasau

Malie Sio,

it was exciting to meet you again recently, in the cottage at the edge of Hamilton that has served as your headquarters-in-exile this summer, and to watch you unwrap, tenderly but also gleefully, the new gods, with their erect penises and sharply pointed breasts, that you have cast and carved over these past few months, using the industrial materials and technology that are so scarce and expensive in Tonga.

As you talked about cooking the gods, along with a steak-sized Tongan bible, on a barbeque fitted to the pulpit of a church, and about building a bonfire of gods and broken crucifixes, I worried again about the clause in Tonga’s constitution forbidding blasphemy against the Christian faith. I remembered the complaints by some conservative Tongans, including members of your own family, after you showed sculptures of a crucified Tangaloa, and tapa portraying a Jesus branded with a dollar sign.

Of course, your art is not blasphemous. As you explained, while I admired the deities you had lain out on the table, you seek not to denigrate Tongan Christianity, but rather to put it on the same level – the same ontological level, the same epistemological level – as the country’s older, obscurer religious traditions. When you crucify Tangaloa, or throw Bibles onto the sort of bonfire that consumed so many pagan statues during the religious wars of the nineteenth century, you are demanding that we look evenly at the whole three thousand years of Tongan history, instead of dichotomising that history into ‘Christian’ and ‘pre-Christian’ periods.

The historiography of the Free Wesleyan Church is like a house with only two rooms, one damp and cramped and dimly-lit and malodorous, and the other bright and high-ceilinged and air conditioned. The door between the room called the Age of Darkness and the room called the Age of Enlightenment was fashioned, of course, by Taufa’ahau and his earnest advisor, the Reverend John Thomas. They were the architects of the Free Wesleyan Church and the modern Tongan monarchy, and it is not surprising that the publication of Thomas’ History of Tonga last year in Nuku’alofa was hailed by the church and the royal family alike.

Copies of Thomas’ tome flew out the door of the Friendly Islands Bookshop, but I wondered how any Tongans bought the book out of a sense of religious and political obligation, rather than out of genuine curiosity. I wonder, as well, whether Thomas would appreciate the way that many scholars, Tongan and palangi alike, will inevitably read his text.

The title of Thomas’ book is, of course, absurd: after a short account of Tongan creation myths and geography, he devotes himself almost entirely to an alternately pious and splenetic narrative of his work as a missionary in the 1820s and ‘30s, when Taufa’ahau was fighting and besting pagans and Papists. For Thomas, the ‘20s and ‘30s are the doorway between the Age of Darkness and the Age of Enlightenment, and Taufa’ahau is the man holding open the door.

And yet a paradox afflicts the writings of other nineteenth century missionaries like Thomas. These men devoted their lives to the destruction of the teeming gods and spirits of the pagan Pacific, and their letters and diaries and memoirs celebrate this long work of extermination. Today, though, historians and anthropologists and ethnobotanists value the  missionaries because of the information they left behind about the societies and creeds they helped destroy.

As you know, Thomas’ book is full of scornful yet informative descriptions of the old, pagan Tongan culture that dominated Western Polynesia for hundreds of years, and raised stone monuments to its kings and queens at the sacred city of Mu’a. We skip the pages the reverend devoted to glories of John Wesley and the exposition of Christian doctrine, and linger instead over a description of the wooden goddess who presided over a godhouse in Mu’a, or an account of a visit to the persistently pagan village of Pe’a, where tapa makers refused Thomas’ demand that they cease their pounding on the Sabbath.

Thomas wrote to justify his cause, but the text he produced has ended up betraying his cause. He may have helped Taufa’ahau destroy important parts of Tonga’s pre-Christian culture, but his History of Tonga helps us to recover some of that culture.

We spent a lot of time last year talking about the theory, advanced so controversially by Niel Gunson and his disciples, that ancient Tongan religion was shamanic, and that the Tu’i Tonga who fascinated Captain Cook was a sort of shaman-king. We drove around Tongatapu, looking amongst coconut groves for the scorched foundations of the godhouses where priests drank green kava, shook with terror or delight, and channelled the voices of the dead and immortal. We used Thomas’ book, with its almost lascivious accounts of the mutilation of goddesses, the burning of godhouses, and the running of pigs through sacred groves and enclosures, to guide us.  

But I wanted to talk about a couple of other books I encountered last year, books which help me to understand your art.

I remember us poring over a copy of Sadie Plant’s Writing on Drugs, as we drank a few cups of our favourite narcotic. Plant’s discussions of shamanism endeared her book to us, because we were looking for some general account of the history of shamanism and its relation to drug taking.

Since I returned to the land of fast internet connections and libraries I’ve been reading some of the reviews and discussions that Plant’s book prompted. I’ve been amused to note how many potheads and acid freaks – the type of people who turn the solemn ceremonies of shamanic cultures into a dissipated, enervated lifestyle – have sought out Writing on Drugs, hoping for tips about peyote cultivation or analyses of Grateful Dead lyrics, and found instead a dense collage of quotations from Coleridge, De Quincey, Benjamin, Michaux, and other tough-minded investigators of mind-altering substances.

As one piqued stoner complained, Plant often seems more interested in literary highs – in the dreamy lift of De Quincey’s endless sentences, or the hallucinatory flares of Michaux’s metaphors – than in chemical pleasures.

What I thought most provocative about Plant's book, and most relevant to your own art, was her claim that imagery and rituals associated with shamanism lie behind many features of contemporary popular culture. Do you remember the way that she insists that Santa Claus is a stand-in for a spirit summouned by Siberian shamans? Why else, Plant asks, would he dress in red and white, the colours of the agaric mushroom, and drive reindeer, animals associated with the spirits of the dead, through the sky, and bring gifts from a faraway magical realm?

If scholars like Gunson and Plant are correct, and places as distant as Tonga, Siberia, and Africa once practiced the same shamanic religion, then questions about the origins and dispersal of that religion must be asked. In his fascinating but ultimately whimsical essay ‘Understanding Traditional Polynesian History’, Gunson seems, disappointingly, to answer questions about the widespread nature of shamanism by disinterring the doctrine of hyper-diffusionism.

Claiming that Hinduism and Polynesian religions have deep similarities, Gunson suggests that Malay traders who bowed to Shiva and Vishnu introduced Vedic cosmology to the Pacific. It’s curious how they didn’t also introduce their language and material culture. As critics of Thor Heyerdahl showed decades ago, hyper-diffusionism is a busted flush. Ideas and rituals and technological discoveries don’t occur in one, blessed locale and then spread miraculously around the globe. Innovation occurs everywhere, and most cultures develop in situ.

I want to mention David Lewis-Williams' book The Mind in the Cave because it offers another, and much more credible, explanation for the apparent similarities between the ancient religions of distant parts of the world. Lewis is an art historian who has spent decades stooped in the caves, grottoes, and canyons of southern Africa, studying the paintings the San people made there hundreds or thousands of years ago. The Mind in the Cave compares these African images to the much more famous paintings found in Neolithic European galleries like Lascaux, and argues that both are the products of a shamanic religion.

Drawing on the labours of archaeologists and ethnographers, Lewis-Williams suggests that the ancient inhabitants of Europe and Africa drugged or danced themselves into trances and went on journeys through hallucinated land and seascapes. Turning abruptly to neuroscience, he claims that the architecture of the human brain means that we will all experience roughly similar visions, should we choose to dance ourselves to exhaustion around a campfire or swallow magic mushrooms. The cavemen of both Europe and Africa imagined flying over water, watching their limbs expand vastly, and wandering with spirit-versions of beasts familiar to them, like the deer or the gnu. According to Lewis-Williams, they left descriptions of their visions on those cave walls.

Lewis-Williams' arguments have attracted a lot of attention, and have even been the subject of a documentary film that was playing for a while on Sky TV’s Discovery channel. It seems to me that, whether or not he is correct, he does at least offer an explanation for the alleged ubiquity of shamanic religion in ancient times that does not rely on implausible theories of cultural contact and influence across vast distances. I’d like to see a scholar explore Lewis-Williams' ideas by comparing the visionary journeys recorded in Tongan songs and legends – the journey of Lo’au, that Odysseus of Polynesia, to the roaring water at the end of the world, for instance – with the imagery on the cave walls of Europe and Africa.

As you know, the claim that ancient Tongan culture was shamanic is unpopular with many Tongan scholars. I think there is good reason for this hostility: the notion that Tonga’s traditional religion was similar to those found in many different parts of the world troubles the presuppositions of two important schools of Tongan historiography. On the one hand, it contradicts conservative Christian historians like Sione Latukefu, who assume that it was Christianity in general, and the Thomas-Taufa’ahau double act in particular, that brought Tonga out of darkness and isolation and gave it a global culture.

On the other hand, the shamanism thesis upsets aggressively localist scholars like Linita Manu’atu, who consider that Christianity and modernity destroyed a very idiosyncratic Tongan culture, and want to reconstruct that ‘pure’ pre-contact culture.

Niel Gunson’s arguments have not been broadcast to the general Tongan population, but if they were I think they would be greeted with a mixture of incredulity and anger.

What would we find, though, if we followed Sadie Plant’s sly example, and looked for remnants of a shamanic religion in the culture of contemporary, supposedly Christian Tonga? I have sat in Tongan churches and seen worshippers shake, and writhe, and speak in voices that are not their own: were these performances inspired by the American Pentecostal evangelists whose rituals are broadcast on Tongan television, or do they owe something to the paroxysms of possessed priests in ancient godhouses?

What of the widespread Tongan belief that illness, whether mental or physical, is caused by malign or mischievous spirits, and the flourishing trade of folk healers, who use massages and canes to try to force unwanted visitors from the bodies of the ill? What about the ui ui tevolo craze, which sees young people in the villages operating homemade ouja boards at night, in an effort to summoun the spirits of ancestors?

If your art, with its implicit claim that Tonga’s Christian and pre-Christian cultures should be treated as equals, causes anger, then that anger might come from a recognition that, in the twenty-first century, the place of Christianity in Tongan society is not so simple and not so secure as John Thomas would have liked.

Cheers,

Scott