NOTES ON MAORI RELIGION. 457 



'Crude it may be, silly it may be,, but keenly felt and honestly be- 

 lieved in, which really means this. Now, the custom of kuhak has 

 to do witii sickness. Should one feel ill, then all who stay a night 

 in the same place nmst remain with him until he recovers, on pain 

 of doing the sick one what may prove a personal injury. If the visitor 

 should leave and pass a night elsewhere, the sick one will become 

 worse, which condition is said to be the kuhak of so and so. Hence, 

 it is customary to isolate the sick, and only those who can stay with 

 them till they are better or dead, are allowed to sleep in the same 

 liouse or in the same enclosure. This superstition has a great hold 

 upon the people. It hampers work and progress. 



There are other traditions and customs of interest among the 

 people, also beliefs of an interesting character, but those set foi'th 

 in this paper are sufficient to establish that which I stated at the 

 beginning — viz., that savages are the world's most fen^ent spiritualists. 

 One would like to get at the savage's real mind, his philosophy of all 

 these beliefs, and customs, for where we see root ideas striking so 

 deeply into human life, and know that here we have the beginning of 

 ideas having the capacity for a profound and far-reaching develop- 

 ment, the savage becomes to the man who knows him a personage 

 of deep interest. He is not the fool some think him to be, neither is 

 he wdthout capacity for great things, and he often does them in depart- 

 ments of liuman life and thought where we least expect to find it. He 

 is worth deep study, but when the study is most searching we can 

 110 more fully understand and explain the savage than we can fully 

 understand and explain the civilised man. He possesses, like other 

 men, the mysteiy and majesty of personality which we clearly see 

 when we have penetrated the outer husk of ignorance, and gained a 

 glimpse of the man liimself. 



^.— MAORI RELIGION.— NOTES ON THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS, RITES, 

 AND INVOCATIONS OF THE MAORI PEOPLE OF NEW ZEA- 

 LAND. 



'By ELSDON BEST. 



Among a primitive people, religion and magic are inseparable. 

 We may put it in this way, that religious rites are often rites of 

 magic, or that black magic entered largely into the religion of these 

 folk, while ever as we fare on we note the firm belief in omens and 

 the most absurd superstitions. There can be no line drawn between 

 magic and religion, because the power that gives force and effective- 

 ness to the rites of magic, or the milder ones which may be termed 

 religious rites, proceeds in each case from the same source — namely, 

 from the gods. This leads us to the fact that, in all primitive cults, 

 morality is not a concomitant of religion, but is looked upon as 

 having no connection with it whatever. 



It is well to remark here that the Maori did not worship his gods. 

 He possessed a budget of charms, spells, incantations, invocations, &c., 

 that were numbered by hundreds, and were used in connection with 

 almost eveiy imaginable subject. None of tliese, however, would be 

 termed prayers by any one studpng them from our point of view. 

 A small number of them mav be classed ns invocations, but tha 



