Taputapuatea

← Encyclopedia

The point of land is called Matahira-i-te-ra’i, and it reaches out past the white line of the reef into water that turns from green to a blue so deep it has no floor. On the cleared ground stands a court of stones: a long rectangle paved with flat basalt, walled at the edges, and at its seaward end a low platform faced with slabs of coral and dark stone, against which taller uprights have been set on end like the backs of empty seats. Nothing roofs it. The sky is the ceiling, and the lagoon comes up almost to the pavement, so that a canoe can be steered straight in through the pass and beached at the foot of the holy ground. This is Taputapuātea, on the island the old people called Havai’i, and for the better part of a thousand years it was the senior temple of a world that measured itself in ocean.

The marae and the island called Havai’i

A marae is not a building. The Tahitian word descends from an ancestral Oceanic term for an open, cleared, weeded space, and in the eastern Pacific the marae became exactly that, raised to the order of the sacred: a rectangular court swept clean and paved, bounded by upright stones, with a platform called an ahu built up at one end. On the ahu and along it stand the tall backrest slabs against which the gods and the high chiefs are present during the rites. There is no nave, no cella, no statue housed in a shrine. The court itself is the instrument. In the understanding of the people who built it, the marae is the threshold where two orders of being touch — Te Ao, the world of the living and of daylight, and Te Pō, the world of the ancestors and the gods, the deep darkness out of which the cosmos came. To stand on the pavement in the correct ritual state is to stand at the seam between the two.

Taputapuātea sits at Opoa, on the south-eastern coast of Ra’iatea, the largest of the Leeward group of the Society Islands. Ra’iatea bore an older name, and the name is the whole story compressed into a word: Havai’i. Across the immense triangle of Polynesian settlement the same name recurs, worn down or built up by each tongue that carried it — Hawaiki in Aotearoa, ‘Avaiki in the Cook Islands, Savai’i in Samoa, Hawai’i in the northern archipelago. It is the ancestral homeland, the place voyagers came from and, in many of the traditions, the place the dead return to along a road that runs back across the sea. That a living island in the Society group should carry the homeland’s own name is not a coincidence the tradition needs to explain; Ra’iatea is Havai’i, the navel from which the rest dispersed. The Māori keep a proverb that holds the whole relation in a single line — E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea, “I shall not be lost, for I am a seed scattered from Rangiātea” — and Rangiātea is understood to be Ra’iatea, the marae of the homeland, the seedbed.

When the marae was first built is not known with precision. The settlement of the Society Islands belongs to the long eastward push of Austronesian-speaking voyagers whose Lapita ancestors had reached western Polynesia by roughly a thousand years before the common era, and whose descendants carried the canoes on across the central Pacific and at last to the marginal corners of the triangle — Aotearoa around 1250 to 1300 of the common era, the latest large landmass on earth to be reached by people. Within that frame, the great marae of Ra’iatea was raised and enlarged over centuries; the court that survives may have taken its monumental form by about the year 1000. In the island’s own telling, the place was the work of a line of culture-heroes and chiefs, and its name — Taputapuātea — is read as something like “sacrifices gathered from afar,” a name that already contains its later vocation as the place to which the islands sent their dues.

The marae and ahu at Taputapuātea, Ra’iatea. Photograph by Kounilig, 2017. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

‘Oro of the red feather girdle

The court at Opoa was first held to the supreme creator Ta’aroa — the maker who, in the Tahitian cosmogony, existed alone inside his shell in the long night and broke it open to become the sky and the foundation of all things. But the marae rose to its full authority under a different god. ‘Oro, a son of the high gods and a power of both war and fertility, became the deity of Taputapuātea, and through the marae his cult spread outward across the Leeward Islands and beyond. ‘Oro was not present in the court as a carved likeness in human shape standing for worship. His most concentrated form was a wrapped object — a length of sennit braid bound and feathered, the to’o, the body the god could enter — and his supreme emblem was the maro ‘ura, the girdle of red feathers, worn at the investiture of the highest chiefs. To gird a man with the red-feather maro on the pavement of Taputapuātea was to make him a paramount chief in a way no other rite could; the marae was the source of legitimacy itself, the place where chiefly mana — the realized sacred potency that flows through descent and correct ritual and makes a man’s authority efficacious — was conferred and concentrated.

The priesthood that served the court was a trained order, keepers of the chants and the genealogies and the exact procedure on which the rites depended, for a rite performed wrongly was not merely ineffective but dangerous — the sacred is potent, and mana mishandled recoils. The whole world the marae served ran on the paired ideas of mana and tapu: mana the realized efficacy that flows from the gods through the lines of descent and through correct action, and tapu the sacred restriction that fences and channels it, marking certain persons and places and acts as set apart and not to be crossed. The marae was the most concentrated tapu ground there was, and the highest chiefs the most charged with mana; the two met on the pavement at the moment of investiture, when the red-feather girdle made the charge of the gods visible on a living man.

The rites held there were the great rites of the society: the investiture of chiefs, the seasonal observances, the consecration of war, the rites that bound the gods to the living. Among them was human sacrifice. At the highest marae, and at Taputapuātea above the rest, ‘Oro received human offerings — the gravest instrument the religion possessed, reserved for the gods of war and the moments of greatest consequence, and brought to the court as a tribute owed. This is set down here as the tradition’s own grave institution and not as anything else: the marae was a place where the cost of dealing with the powers that govern life and death was understood to be paid in the highest currency there was.

What raised this particular court above the hundreds of others was a single practice, and it is the practice that turned a temple into a network. When a chief or a priest left Ra’iatea to settle a far island and to raise his own marae there, he carried away with him a stone taken from the pavement of Taputapuātea and set it into the foundation of the new court. The new marae was thereby a daughter of the old. Its sanctity, its right to perform the great rites, its descent and its mana all traced back through that one stone to Opoa. So marae across thousands of miles of open water — through the Leeward and Windward Islands, out to the atolls, and in the traditions of peoples far beyond — held themselves to be founded from Ra’iatea, and the genealogy of stones ran parallel to the genealogies of chiefs. The homeland was not only remembered; it was carried, fragment by fragment, and rebuilt wherever the canoes made landfall.

The court and platform of Taputapuātea, Opoa. Photograph by Kounilig, 2017. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The court that gathered the islands

Because of the founding stones, Taputapuātea was the hinge of an alliance. A confederation of districts and islands — remembered under a name rendered as Fa’atau Aroha, an alliance of friendship, joining a broad reach of the eastern Pacific — held its standing through the senior marae, and the alliance was kept alive by gathering. Priests, chiefs, and warriors sailed in to Opoa from the other islands at appointed times, entering through a single named passage in the reef, Te Ava Moa, the sacred pass; through that one gap in the coral the great fleets came, and through it alone could the consecrated canoes approach the holy ground. The delegations brought their dues, renewed their bonds, took part in the rites, and carried home the authority that only this court could confer. For a maritime world without a capital city, the marae of Ra’iatea served as the fixed point — the place that the dispersed pieces of a single civilization could return to and recognize as the center.

That such gatherings happened at all is the measure of the civilization’s true distinction, which was its command of the open sea. The eastern Pacific was settled not by drift but by deliberate, repeated, two-way voyaging across distances that the maritime nations of the rest of the world would not attempt for centuries. The navigators read the rising and setting points of the stars as a compass of named houses around the horizon, held the swells under the hull as a steady bearing, watched the flight-lines of birds and the loom of land in the clouds, and carried in memory the relative positions of islands they could not see. The court at Opoa stood at the working center of this — the node a navigator could steer for and a fleet could converge upon. The marae and the voyaging were not two facts about Polynesia but one: a sacred geography held together by a science of the sea. (For the deep history of that settlement and the peoples who carried it, see the Polynesians and the sea-god of the voyagers’ deep, Tangaroa; on the homeland itself and the canoe traditions that descend from it, the Māori.)

The alliance did not last unbroken. In the eighteenth century the marae suffered. A blood-feud at the court — in which leading priests were killed — sent a faction fleeing out through an inauspicious passage rather than the sacred one, an act read as a curse that fell on the alliance and on the place. Warriors from Bora Bora struck at Opoa, breaking the god-houses, wrecking the platform, and felling the sheltering trees. The unity that the marae had held for centuries was fracturing well before any European reached the lagoon.

Cook, Tupaia, and the long silence

When the Endeavour anchored in the Leeward Islands in 1769, James Cook took aboard a man from this very tradition: Tupaia, a high priest of Taputapuātea and a master of the navigational science, who had been driven from Ra’iatea in the Bora Bora wars. Tupaia sailed with the expedition, named for the British the islands within thousands of miles of his home, and produced for them a chart of the central Pacific — a document that the European visitors could only partly understand, since it organized the ocean by a logic of sailing directions and named islands rather than by their grid of latitude and longitude. The chart survives. It is, in its way, the marae’s geography drawn on paper: the dispersed world of the founding stones, set down by one of the court’s own priests.

Chart of Pacific islands after the Ra’iatean priest-navigator Tupaia, c. 1769 (British Library, Add MS 21593 C). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The longer reckoning came with the missions. The London Missionary Society reached the Society Islands at the very end of the eighteenth century, and over the first decades of the nineteenth the new faith took hold among the chiefs. The old rites were given up. The to’o of ‘Oro and the feathered images were destroyed or surrendered; the great marae fell out of use; the red-feather girdle ceased to gird kings. Christianity arrived in this corner of the Pacific as it arrived across much of the region — carried by missionaries who saw the marae as the seat of everything they had come to overturn, and who recorded what they suppressed in the very act of suppressing it. Much of what is known of ‘Oro and the rites of Taputapuātea reaches the present through this filtered channel: the ethnographic compilations assembled from missionary materials, most fully in Teuira Henry’s Ancient Tahiti, drawn from the papers of a London Missionary Society predecessor. The record is invaluable and it is not neutral, and both things have to be held at once. (On the faith that displaced the rites, see Christianity; on the homeward road of the dead that the marae’s geography presupposes, the soul and immortality; on the star-knowledge by which the navigators found the pass, the reading of the heavens belongs with divination.)

For more than a century the stone court stood disused, its trees grown back, the platform spread by roots and weather. Restoration of the marae was undertaken in the latter twentieth century, the court re-cleared and the ahu rebuilt. And in 1995 the place was rejoined to the living world it had once governed. A fleet of voyaging canoes — among them the Hawaiian double-hull Hōkūle’a, whose construction and Tahiti voyage in the mid-1970s had reignited the navigational tradition, together with canoes from Aotearoa, Tahiti, and elsewhere — sailed to Opoa for a gathering of the kind the marae had not seen in centuries. The Māori canoe entered first through Te Ava Moa, the sacred pass, in order to lift the old tapu that had lain on the passage since a chief was killed on the marae generations before. The alliance of the voyagers was, in a measured and deliberate way, renewed.

In July of 2017 Taputapuātea was inscribed on the World Heritage List — the first site in French Polynesia, and the first in any French overseas territory, to be so named. UNESCO entered it as a cultural landscape of outstanding universal value: the political, ceremonial, and funerary heart of the Mā’ohi world, an exceptional witness to a thousand years of a pre-colonial civilization, set at the center of the Polynesian triangle, the last great region of the earth that people reached. The wording recognized, in the formal vocabulary of heritage, what the founding stones had always asserted — that this was the place from which a world descended.

The canoes still come. Wayfinders trained in the revived navigation steer for the lagoon and the single pass, and crews from across the triangle put in at the point where the pavement meets the water. The court at Opoa has been swept clean and disused and swept clean again, but the relation it was built to embody has proved harder to break than the platform was — for the seed scattered from Rangiātea, by the proverb’s own account, does not get lost.

→ Related: The Polynesians · Tangaroa · Tane · Maui · Pele Goddess · Orongo · Mauna Kea · Tongariro · The Maori · The Hawaiians · Divination · Soul · Immortality · Christianity