Australian and Pacific Religions: The Dreaming, Mana and Tapu

The religions of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific Islands are the indigenous traditions of the peoples of Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Aboriginal religions centre on what English speakers call the Dreaming: the creative acts of ancestral beings who shaped the land, established law and remain present in it. Polynesian religions honoured great gods such as Tangaroa, Tāne and Lono and organised life through the principles of mana (sacred power and authority) and tapu (sacred restriction), while Melanesian societies developed rich ancestral and spirit cults and, in the colonial era, new prophetic movements.

Aboriginal Australia and the Dreaming§

Aboriginal Australians have lived on the continent for at least 50,000 years and, at the time of British colonisation in 1788, spoke some 250 languages organised into many nations. Their religions were never one system, but most share a cluster of ideas that English speakers have called the Dreaming or Dreamtime. The phrase arose in the 1890s, when the ethnographers Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen rendered the Arrernte word altyerre (spelled alcheringa in their works) as "dream times". Aboriginal people today often prefer their own words, such as Tjukurpa among the Anangu of Uluru, or simply "Law".

The Dreaming is not a vanished past. It refers to the era when ancestral beings, often in the form of animals, plants or forces such as the Rainbow Serpent, travelled across a formless land, created its features through their actions, gave the people their languages and kinship rules, and then entered the ground, the sky or water, where they remain. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his 1953 essay "The Dreaming", called it an "everywhen": a sacred reality that underlies the present and can be renewed through ritual.

Country, Songlines and Sacred Law§

Because the ancestors shaped specific places, religion is inseparable from country, the land for which a group is responsible. The tracks of ancestral journeys, often called songlines or Dreaming tracks, run across hundreds or thousands of kilometres and are recorded in song cycles, dances and painted designs. Each segment is held by particular kin groups, who must sing and care for it; knowing the songs is a form of title to land.

People are linked to ancestors through totemic relationships. A person may belong to the Kangaroo or Honey Ant Dreaming through descent, place of conception or birth, and so share responsibilities for that being and its sites. Durkheim used reports of these systems in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) to build a general theory of religion, though modern anthropologists regard his reading as too schematic.

Ceremonies maintain the order of the Dreaming: increase rites at sacred sites, initiation of young men and women through stages of knowledge, and funeral and mourning customs. Rock art, some of it many thousands of years old, records and renews ancestral presence. Much of this knowledge is gendered and secret; "women's business" and "men's business" are restricted to those entitled to them. Missions, government reserves and the removal of children, now known as the Stolen Generations, disrupted religious transmission severely, yet ceremony and law have continued in many regions, and courts since the Mabo decision of 1992 have recognised native title based partly on such knowledge.

Polynesian Gods and Cosmology§

Polynesia, the great triangle of islands from Hawai'i to Aotearoa New Zealand and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), was settled by voyagers within the last three thousand years, and its religions share a common ancestry. Many begin with a genealogy of creation. In Māori tradition the sky father Ranginui and the earth mother Papatūānuku lay locked in an embrace until their children, the gods, forced them apart; Tāne, god of forests, succeeded in pushing up the sky. The great departmental gods recur across the region under related names: Tangaroa or Tangaloa of the sea, Tāne or Kāne of forests and life, Rongo or Lono of cultivated food and peace, and Tū or Kū of war.

In Hawai'i, the four major gods were Kū, Kāne, Lono and Kanaloa. Public religion was conducted at stone temple platforms called heiau by a hereditary priesthood, under the patronage of ruling chiefs. The annual Makahiki season, sacred to Lono, suspended war and brought processions to collect tribute. The ancestors of chiefly lines were themselves divine, and genealogies recited back to the gods legitimated rule. On Rapa Nui, the moai statues are generally understood as representations of deified ancestors; a later birdman cult centred on the god Makemake and an annual contest at Orongo.

Mana and Tapu§

Two Polynesian concepts became famous far beyond the Pacific. Mana denotes effective power, prestige and authority that comes from the gods and ancestors and shows itself in success. Chiefs had great mana; it could be increased by victory and lost through defeat or misconduct. Tapu (Hawaiian kapu, Tongan tabu) marks what is sacred and therefore set apart or forbidden: the person of a high chief, temple grounds, or certain foods reserved for men. Breaking tapu brought danger to the offender and the community.

Captain James Cook recorded the Tongan word in 1777, and "taboo" quickly entered English. Mana entered scholarship through the missionary R. H. Codrington's The Melanesians (1891); theorists such as R. R. Marett and Marcel Mauss later treated it as a universal idea of impersonal sacred power, a generalisation that Pacific scholars now criticise. In Hawai'i the kapu system was famously abolished in 1819, shortly after the death of Kamehameha I, when the new king Liholiho and the regent Ka'ahumanu ate together in public; temples and images were then destroyed, months before the first Christian missionaries arrived.

Melanesia and Micronesia: Ancestors, Spirits and New Movements§

Melanesian religions, from New Guinea to Fiji, were extraordinarily diverse. Common features included the cult of ancestral skulls and spirits, men's houses with secret instruments and initiation, exchange ceremonies that bound communities together, and sorcery accusations. Micronesian islands such as Palau and Pohnpei had their own priesthoods, ancestral deities and navigational lore.

During the colonial period Melanesia produced prophetic movements that outsiders called "cargo cults", in which leaders taught that ancestors or a returning hero would bring the manufactured goods (cargo) enjoyed by Europeans, and that new rituals would hasten a transformed world. The best known is the John Frum movement on Tanna in Vanuatu, which emerged in the late 1930s and still celebrates John Frum Day on 15 February. Peter Worsley's The Trumpet Shall Sound (1957) interpreted these as anti-colonial millenarian movements; later scholars, and many Melanesians, regard the "cargo cult" label as condescending and stress the movements' concern with dignity, exchange and political autonomy.

Christianity and Revival in the Pacific§

Christian missions from the early nineteenth century converted most Pacific peoples, and island churches are now among the most devout in the world. Christianity often absorbed earlier forms: genealogical oratory, tapu concepts applied to the Sabbath, and chiefs as church patrons. Since the 1970s cultural renaissance movements have revived navigation by the stars, chant, hula and the honouring of ancestral sites; in Hawai'i some practitioners again make offerings at heiau, and Māori tikanga (customary practice) shapes public ceremony throughout New Zealand. Aboriginal artists, especially from the Western Desert painting movement that began at Papunya in 1971, have brought Dreaming designs before a world audience while keeping their deepest meanings private.

Frequently asked questions§

What does "the Dreaming" mean?§

It is an English term for the ancestral creative era and the continuing sacred order it established. It covers creation stories, law, kinship and the meaning of particular places, and Aboriginal people use many different words for it in their own languages.

What is the difference between mana and tapu?§

Mana is sacred power and authority, shown in success and leadership. Tapu is the condition of being sacred and restricted, which protects powerful people, places and things from contact that could harm them or others.

Are cargo cults real religions?§

They were genuine religious movements, combining ancestral belief, Christian ideas and responses to colonial rule. Scholars now prefer neutral terms because "cargo cult" became a byword for irrational belief and obscures the movements' social and political aims.

Sources and further reading§

• The Dreaming and Other Essays — W. E. H. Stanner, 2009
• Australian Religions: An Introduction — Mircea Eliade, 1973
• A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being — Tony Swain, 1993
• The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore — R. H. Codrington, 1891
• The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia — Peter Worsley, 1957
• Hawaiian Mythology — Martha Beckwith, 1940
• Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii — Valerio Valeri, 1985
• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life — Émile Durkheim, 1912