Chapter 15

When the Waters Met: Some Shared Histories of
Christianity and Ancestral Samoan Spirituality

Samoa, as we know, e fa’avae i le Atua (is founded on God). Le Atua works wonders, and leaves signs, and if non-Samoans were to know anything of Samoa, it would be of their public devotion to God. I show images of Samoan churches in my classes to people who know nothing of Samoa, here in the American Midwest,140 and they wonder that they must be cathedrals in the centre of populous towns or even cities, not – as they often are, one of two or three such buildings in a village where the residents might only number in the hundreds. The largest buildings in Samoan villages and towns, with almost no exceptions, are the monuments that demonstrate this devotion, and the Samoan landscape seems proof of Samoa’s divine foundations.

These public relationships with God define much about contemporary public, family and village life in Samoa. Not just in architecture, but in prayer, church attendance, public gratitude, the language of public life, or in any of a thousand other ways, these divine relations can be witnessed in Samoan lives. But in Tui Atua’s call to reflect on Samoan spirituality, there is an implicit turning towards not just these public acts but, because of the focus on whispering, also towards the private, personal, intimate and domestic. In these domains, the already complex cosmos of Samoan spiritual life becomes even more so, not least because there is not always agreement between people’s public demonstrations and their private understandings and practices. But spiritual matters in Samoa are more complex even than that, as a robust Samoan literature has shown.141

Tui Atua writes of “the dualities of our religious lives”, and it is the history of the particular duality between Samoan Christianity and ancestral Samoan deities that this essay addresses. Tui Atua calls us to further debate and reflect upon these dualities, and this paper hopes to refine these processes by sketching and refining our understanding of these dualities in an earlier time. There is much to be known, and in this short space all I can do here is add a few small pebbles to the pile. These spiritual dualities have a history of nearly 200 years, and though histories can never be distilled into simple lessons, it is clear there always was, and continues to be, enough room in Samoa for all the spirits, ancestors and gods that have made, and sustain, Samoans and Samoa. I have studied these histories as an academically trained historian; but many in my family have also whispered about these histories to me. I have chosen here to write with the voices in my ear that have come from libraries and archives; others will choose differently. No doubt like many other Samoans, these subjects make me nervous. It is all I can do to approach the subject cautiously and humbly.

As most Samoans know, the first two lotu in Samoa were named for their Pacific point of origin: Lotu Toga (Methodism, from Tonga) and Lotu Taiti (the Congregational Church, introduced via the London Missionary Society from Tahiti). But something else, no less radical, happened in the course of introducing these two new lotu, and that was the bringing to Samoa of the significant, perhaps completely new, concept of a lotu itself. Symbolically, the concept of lotu came from precisely the same direction that Christianity first did: from the south (Toga). The nearest authority to the time that we have, George Pratt, suggested in his dictionary that lotu was, as he put it, “A Tonga word meaning prayer”.142 Of course, the word lotu has other, seemingly related meanings in Samoan, but the specific meaning of religion seems likely to have come as part of the close and ongoing exchanges between Samoa and Tonga, by Samoans and Tongans, via mostly Tongan vessels, before 1830. The foreignness of the lotu was part of the point: many Samoan deities and ancestors were travellers, with distant origins, just like the Christian lotu. Though different lotu would eventually make their way to Samoa, Christianity was for a century the key to articulating what the concept of a lotu was.

The concept of a lotu was transformational. Christianity sought to transform the ‘soul’ – which became the Samoan agaga – what was thought of as the very centre of a person, as well as people’s lifeways, their families and communities. Elements of these ancestral Samoan ways of being, were (as we know) in Christian eyes, heathen, pagan, sinful or evil: Pouliuli. The enduring Samoan and Christian rhetorical opposition, crafted jointly by foreign, Polynesian and Samoan missionaries, cast Mālamalama (Christian Enlightenment and Knowledge) in opposition to the Pouliuli of ancestral Samoa. This enduring opposition, with its stark contrasts, obscures how much more complex the ‘conversion’ to Christianity was.

Though Samoan and non-Samoan, public and academic historians have long been concerned with precisely these questions about Samoan Christianity, in some respects, these accounts have been unsatisfying and partial. Not only could our understanding of Christian origins in Samoa bear further investigation, the fields in which the Christian Lotu took root – which previously Samoa’s ancestral deities, spirituality and culture had to themselves – are some of the least well-understood aspects of Samoa’s past. Understanding these complex changes is a focus of one of my current projects, which is a study of everyday life in Samoa in the 1800s, and which necessarily turns on the many different dimensions of Samoa and Samoan relationships with Christianity. This is a work in progress: here, in this short space, I want to answer Tui Atua’s call by helping lift two relevant parts of this burden. First, I want (if only quickly) to sketch a picture that I think might help reorient us to the rich world of spiritual, ideological, cultural and social change that Samoans experienced in the 1800s. This is a large task, and what follows is only a bare beginning. Second, I want to turn to the long shadows cast by the opposition between Pouliuli and Mālamalama, and show how these have come to obscure other complicated, nuanced and diverse understandings of Samoans’ spiritual lives.

The complexity of the divine multiplied when missionaries, rather than simply inventing a new language for their Deity, chose to translate key concepts (as they had elsewhere in Polynesia) into existing cloths. This was true of many, including atua. Seizing upon the similarities they saw in the cosmological power of atua, this choice ensured that the Christian project in Samoa would forever be entwined with established discourses and genealogies of Samoan deities and divinity. Different traditions came to inhabit Samoa’s language about the sacred and the divine, and this joint habitation was to prove transformative. The configuring of the Christian God in Samoan – as ‘le Atua’ – was not just a remaking of a particular God, but a partial remaking of Samoa’s conceptions of the divine, and a recasting of ancestral Samoan deities into an increasingly (but far from solely) Christian-centred theology.143 This Christian-centred theology was still profoundly Samoan, and could not be otherwise: it inhabited a range of Samoan concepts, and was clothed in Samoan language, practices and culture, yet it nonetheless assessed ancestral Samoan deities as inferior (while appropriating understandings of Samoan divinity).

Christian engagements with Samoan deities and divinities did not have to follow a single, predictable script, and they did not. It is clear that the Christian faiths and their Bible have room for a variety of relationships with gods other than YHWH, the God of the Hebrew Bible. The Bible tells of many gods who are not YHWH, and as Biblical scholars note, the Bible is not a straightforward, monotheistic text. The Bible instructs not so much in monotheism but in monolatry: that only one god – YHWH – is to be worshipped. This is clear from a variety of texts in the Hebrew Bible, many of which are very familiar, including the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”.144 This is clearly not a denial of other gods’ existence, but an assignment of them to a lesser position, as in Exodus 18:11: “Now I know that YHWH is greater than all gods”. Similar texts can be found throughout the Old Testament.145 My learned friend and colleague, Dr Anselm Hagedorn, explains that before the exile, the Israelites worshipped a diverse group of deities. In addition to scriptural evidence for this, there is evidence from excavations in the Holy Land. There is even, Hagedorn explains, “some inscriptional evidence from Kuntillet Ajrûd [a caravan crossroads in the Sinai] of a female consort of YHWH named Asherah”.146 The glossing of Christianity as a strictly monotheistic religion comes comparatively recently, with the word ‘monotheism’ itself only being coined in English in either 1660 or 1672.147

The complex presence of other gods in the Bible – still the subject of open and robust debate in theology and scriptural scholarship – underscores nuances in the process of Samoans’ Christian conversions. It is easy enough to identify the shared monolatry among early missionaries to Samoa, whether they were English, French, Tahitian, Rarotongan or Tongan: but attitudes towards, and understandings of, the ancestral Samoan gods were far more complex and variable. Missionary Christian lotu were not simply erected in the absence of spirits and gods in Samoa, but from within a deep and abiding commitment that Samoa was densely inhabited by supernatural entities. Early Christian workers – particularly Polynesians from outside of Samoa, but also Samoan converts, and Papālagi – were committed iconoclasts, who sought out images of Samoan gods, sacred places, sacred knowledge and sacred practices, in order to deliberately and publicly desecrate and destroy them.148 Most of the time this was done not to show that ancestral Samoan spirits or powers were fictitious or imaginary, but in order to demonstrate the omnipotence of the Christian God; the courage and singularity of his workers; and their exemption from the mana of Samoan spirits and ancestors. Precisely because ancestral Samoan divinities were seen as real, the assaults against them were seen by those who led them as triumphs. From a variety of Christian viewpoints, ancestral Samoan gods could be recognised or avowed, and it is clear, from particular examples, that they were recognised not solely and simply by casting them as ‘devils’.

Rallying around the new singular Atua, were new Christian lotu that sought to make Samoan beliefs and practices more uniform. Though Samoans had always shared some deities in common – particularly atua – a greater number of ancestral Samoan deities were either specific to certain locations or people, or had distinctive local careers.149 Tui Atua has, elsewhere, given us an insightful way to frame this tension between the diversity of Samoa on the one hand, and its commonalities on the other: agaifanua (the uniqueness or idiosyncrasies of a village) on the one hand, and agānu’u (“a common reference across villages”) on the other.150 Undoubtedly, the new lotu worked strongly towards the latter, not only by proselytising a universal deity, the Christian Atua, but in doing so through a set of institutions and practices that were not contained within the nu’u, which called into being ‘national’ committees, standards and institutions such as Piula (established 1859, moves to Lufilufi 1868) and Malua (established 1848). Of course, Samoans already shared a concept of their cultural, historical and genealogical ties, but the Christian lotu furnished new dimensions in which Samoa, and Samoans, could operate. The new lotu were not just connected to a new deity, or articulating a new concept of lotu, but doing so on a scale that was unusual, which transcended many of the ordinary, established frames of Samoan life.

After 1850, the aganu’u intrinsic to Christian lotu was significantly advanced by the introduction (in very small numbers) and then the production (in very considerable numbers) of a new class of spiritual specialists or experts. This was crucial for building a new complex of relationships, not just with the deities (and the Christian Atua, more particularly) but among Samoans themselves. Relationships with ancestral Samoan deities had previously been managed very differently.151 Samoa had its established spiritual specialists, to be sure: most strikingly taula aitu (anchors of the aitu),152 or va’a aitu (vessels of the aitu). As one missionary observer noted, in social life these people could have great influence over matters as different as the correctness of relationships to a particular deity, whether to go to war, receiving and distributing gifts, or communicating the wishes of their deity.153 Yet, over the course of the half-century or so after 1830, these figures became less common, and their role within Samoan families and communities shifted. Taula aitu and va’a aitu were not simply replaced, of course, and their importance shifted not only because of Christian lotu, but also due to a miscellany of cultural, social, ideological and technological changes. Not least, the position of these specialists changed because of a figure it is now very difficult to imagine Samoa without: the faife’au, the pastor or, more literally, the messenger.

The faife’au was at once both a new, unprecedented figure in Samoan villages, and a transformation and continuation of earlier spiritual traditions. Not unlike the shift from ‘o atua’ to ‘o le Atua’, the genealogy of the faife’au joined two different traditions: ancestral Samoan traditions, and those of the newly arrived lotu and Christian God. The lives of faife’au were filled with these complicated continuities. Faife’au were in one sense familiar – the taula aitu and others had customarily mediated with the heavenly and divine, instructing in propriety and conduct. But the faife’au’s connection to the new Atua had very practical differences, not least the orientation towards the agānu’u of the lotu: annual meetings, communicating with overseeing missionaries and the uniformities of architecture and worship sanctioned by the Christian lotu. The faife’au was only one of a much larger cast of people intimately connected with the new lotu – including the absolutely key personages of the pastor’s wife and the visiting white missionary. The reach of the new lotu depended on much more than faife’au alone.

The processes of conversion involved many kinds of complicated personal, communal, family and gendered transformations. Christianity brought new materials and ideas to Samoa, but these had to be integrated into an already living and ordered universe of Samoan meanings. The work of engaging non-Christians through the mediums of Samoa and Samoan culture was difficult, but doing so successfully was even more fraught. Particularly when in Samoa, as elsewhere in the Pacific, there were many reasons people decided to participate in lotu, and many of these were not only outside of missionaries’ control, but were not (to missionary eyes) properly ‘religious’. At work then, was the mana of the Christian God, but also a raft of other features: from alliances with the most influential ali’i (high chief); the ability to appeal to entire families; the mission’s claim to a special relationship with distant lands; and the ability to attract and mediate all the new kinds of technology and property that appeared to be associated with the new lotu. Missionaries utilised Samoan understandings of the new lotu, even though they made them uncomfortable. Just as YHWH, the Christian God, was clothed and remade as ‘o le Atua’, many other key figures and concepts were not simply directly translated, but clothed, wrapped (teu) in Samoan images and meanings, and transformed.154

So although the concept of a lotu was new in Samoa, most of the central concepts of the different lotu were in some senses established and familiar. Through much of Polynesia, as in Samoa, YHWH had become the Atua, a wielder of mana. Samoans understood the relationship between the Church and Him in one as the most sacred and profound of Samoan relationships: as feagaiga (a sacred covenant between brother and sister, a relationship that was and is gendered and politicised in the most telling of ways). The feagaiga came also to describe the connection between a faife’au and his congregation, and between the Testaments themselves. Samoans turned to Him (YHWH, le Atua) in tatalo (prayer), just as they had previously turned to atua and aitu, and words that described status and rank – such as pa’ia and sā – moved seamlessly from ancestral Samoan worship to that of the new Atua. Even the concept of Father, as it was reworked not just in relationship to the new Atua (o lo’u Tamā, my Father), but in concert with the seeing of faife’au also as Tamā, inscribed complicated new kinds of family and gender roles and meanings on these sacred relationships. Even that seemingly unmistakably non-Samoan of qualities about the new Christian lotu, that they were foreign, in fact had a Samoan dimension, as ancestral Samoan deities commonly had foreign origins and, just like the new Atua, had brought with them new abilities and mana. The higher value that Samoans placed on Papālagi missionaries over their Polynesian counterparts was similarly due to familiar Samoan precepts.155 On the one hand, Samoans recognised the superior utility white missionaries had in attracting other Papālagi and their things, and on the other hand, Samoans closely observed for the ancestral connection between Papālagi and their foreign, new and distant Atua. Predictions about the new lotu and the new Atua, arriving from over the sea, were entirely in keeping with the cosmologies of the ancestral Samoan gods and spirits who made them Samoan.

These complicated and gradated transformations, where elements of ancestral Samoan gods and sacred practices continued into Samoan Christianity, were characteristic of conversion. Nevertheless, the new lotu were in key ways unprecedented. This can be seen in the most radical change wrought by Christianity: the arrival of literacy. Although not directly religious, literacy would in Samoa always be understood in ways mediated by the lotu. This epochal change in Samoa, and in the Samoan language, was inextricably bound up in the new lotu.

The Word could not be dissociated from the Book, in a land where the Book – O le Tusi Pa’ia – remains the singular major written work. Samoans displayed an astonishing interest in literacy, and an overpowering eagerness to learn to read and purchase biblical texts.156 Until well into the 20th century, not only was almost all the literature in written Samoan intertwined with the Lotu, almost all Samoans were taught literacy by church schools and teachers. The Samoan revolution in literacy was Christian: the Christian revolution in Samoa was literate. Though we still know far too little about literacy in Samoa (I am currently working on elements of this history too), its importance is obvious, as is the epochal nature of the translation of the Bible into Samoan.157 The desire to read and write was a driving force behind Samoan church participation, and the existence of the lotu as a community of far-flung believers was built on literacy, from the shared reading of the Bible to the writing of letters among the flock. Literacy opened up a new modality of Samoan being and expression: writing and, particularly, reading, constructed a new (though not entirely) sacred space, the realm of the written word.

An examination of the most distinctive of all the new lotu, Lotu Manava, brings these changes into clearer view. Lotu Manava was founded by Siovili and Teoneula in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Commonly called a cult, or ‘Siovilism’, this dismissal by contemporary Papālagi missionaries has unfortunately carried over into the scholarly literature.158 This dismissal hides many critical features, for not only did the Lotu Manava draw explicitly from both Christian and ancestral Samoan theology and practice, it was a lotu built explicitly on a relationship with the new Atua. Siovili and Teoneula were Samoans who had travelled overseas, working on whaleships in the 1820s. Siovili was himself probably a taula aitu before the revelations that led him to found his lotu, and had also probably been resident in Tahiti during the prophetic times of Mamaia.159 By 1830, Siovili and Teoneula had become leaders and prophets and the Lotu Manava was established in Eva: very quickly it attracted thousands of adherents through large parts of Samoa.160 The Lotu Manava, much like Mamaia, was distinctive from missionary Christianity in many ways, but most strikingly in missionary eyes for the central place it assigned to ‘spirit possession’ – equally important in the theologies of both ancestral Samoa and Tahiti.161 Practitioners of Lotu Manava worked in the familiar ways of taula aitu, as “men and women in whom the spirit dwells”162 – a centrality indicated in the naming of their lotu.163 Most offensively to missionaries, the spirit that dwelt within the taula aitu was that of the Christian God. Lotu Manava also undertook the standard forms of Samoan (and Polynesian) Christianity: building chapels, honouring the Sabbath (though on Saturday), hymn composition and singing, holding services that paralleled missionary ones, praying in the Christian fashion, and even delivering the sacraments.164 Samoans in the Lotu Manava considered themselves Christian, much to the dismay of the missionaries. Repeatedly excoriated and instructed to embrace Christianity, the people of Lotu Manava said, one missionary wrote, “that they are already Christians”.165

Recognising the power of the Word, Lotu Manava also had a privileged place for the Book. Siovili used the Bible in healing, proselytising, as part of the lotu’s iconography, and as an image and emanation of mana. In these ways, it mirrored both the traditional evangelical missionary use of the Bible, and the use in ancestral Samoan theology of ata (images) of divinity. However, where Siovili differed in the use of the Book, missionaries and other Papālagi mocked and criticised him, raising doubt about his literacy, his facility in the languages he claimed, and therefore challenged his access to God, not only as taula aitu, but as reader. One missionary scoffed at his holding “an English book before his face, pretend[ing] to be reading, mutter off some unintelligible jargon, talk a little on any subject, and pray, naming the ‘God of heaven’”.166 In missionary eyes, Lotu Manava was the most perverse of Samoan perversions, another “feature of [the] poor, corrupt, sin-loving humanity” they saw in Samoa.167 This was due, in no small part, to the Lotu Manava laying claim to Christianity, which missionaries saw as their monopoly. (Protestant missionaries used equally harsh words to refer to their other great competitors, the Roman Catholic Church).

In missionary eyes, Siovili was “an ignorant and wicked man, his system was folly and deceit, and he was contemptible and unworthy of regard”. John Williams dismissed him as “a deceiver, [whose] object is nothing but to get women and property”.168 Samoan converts to the Lotu Toga and Lotu Taiti echoed these sentiments, and indeed Samoan and Polynesian Christians acted harshly against Lotu Manava. The patron of the Lotu Taiti, Malietoa Vaiinupo, was personally dismissive of Siovili. The Lotu Manava responded in strong terms, too, forbidding the mission and the missionaries, and forming a crucial alliance with one of the political groups then best positioned to contest Malietoa’s mālō (government), Mata’afa. For all kinds of reasons, Lotu Manava proved durable, with large numbers of adherents well into the 1860s. Lotu Manava was neither a passing fancy nor a delusion, but instructive as to how Samoans continued to find different ways, in the era of Mālamalama, to live not just with God, but with gods.

Even among the missionaries, from whom puritanical and singular dismissals of ancestral Samoan deities might be expected, understandings of Samoan ancestral deities were varied, subtle, complex and often accommodating. This was particularly true among Samoan and other Polynesian missionaries for whom the actuality of ancestral Samoan deities was usually self-evident. Samoan members of the lotu, too, walked and managed complicated and idiosyncratic paths, incorporating le Atua, atua and aitu into their lives and their understandings of the cosmos. To be sure, many Papālagi missionaries believed that atua and aitu were either imaginary or devils. But even among Papālagi missionaries there was a great deal of variation. In a few dramatic instances, Papālagi missionaries confessed an intimacy with aitu that was remarkable. This reveals the diversity of Christianity then living in Samoa, but also highlights the complexities around emergent monotheism and strict monolatry.

The most extraordinary accounts of living with ancestral Samoan gods belong to John B Stair, a well-known missionary who lived in Samoa for decades and who is taken as one of the chief authorities on ancestral Samoan deities and practices. His knowledge of aitu, however, was not simply second-hand, and his writings offer insights into the ways in which Christians in Samoa lived spiritual lives that accommodated both ancestral Samoan deities and the Christian God. Stair’s accounts (though published years later) were unusually matter-of-fact and intimate; he was apparently untroubled by his avowal of non-Christian Samoan deities.

Stair outlined in great detail the ordinary presence of aitu in his life and that of his mission family. He explained how sometimes the presence of aitu was made known through annoyances – sounds and unexplainable movements, for instance – and other times through direct actions, such as the ringing of the village bell, or being showered with stones.169 Stair was a respectable member of the mission, and far from credulous. He frequently discounted or explained – in secular, scientific terms – what Samoans insisted to him was the work of aitu. The scepticism directing modern readers to material explanations for the phenomena Stair observed, were all explanations he considered and investigated. We should remember that English missionaries in the 19th century were often not just ‘men of the Word’, but were aspiring men of science, compelled to find earthly explanations. This Stair did often by dismissing reference to Samoan superstitions, and in a particular case by diagnosing a severe beating – that some Samoans insisted had been administered by an aitu – as self-inflicted due to ‘epilepsy’. Stair was not kindly disposed to Polynesian spiritual beliefs, and repeatedly criticised the ‘ignorant credulity’ of Samoans. Historians have had no problems accepting Stair as a witness on all other matters, though none (as far as I’m aware) has made anything of his experiences with aitu.

Stair came to accept the presence of aitu in his life, and his devout Christianity was sufficiently capacious that aitu could also inhabit it. He dealt regularly with a presence in his house that frequently made itself known by a noise that Samoans concurred was the bowling of moli (oranges) up and down Stair’s passageway. It kept Stair, his family and various visitors up at night, and was often accompanied by knocks, banging and other noises. Despite strenuous and ongoing efforts to find a source, or catch a perpetrator, no-one was ever even glimpsed. Stair wondered, with his Samoan neighbours, if it was due to the proximity of a burial ground, or an old mālumālu (temple). This went on for months and months. Stair came to learn to live with aitu literally; he became accustomed to their activities and presence, despite being unnerved by them. Others, including the “hard-headed matter-of-fact” Thomas Heath experienced these matters as well.170 Still, these “extraordinary visitations” came to have a deeper effect on others, producing “very real” and “very trying” circumstances, in which his “wife’s health began to be affected”. “My wife was a brave woman”, Stair remembered, yet she “at length felt the constant strain too heavy to bear, and gave way under it”.171 The aitu and his wife’s condition eventually led Stair to move away.

Many Samoans, mostly Christians, offered to help Stair with his aitu problems. Stair was perfectly happy to consult with these Samoan experts, and appears to have done so at length. One of Stair’s workers was a well-known expert who had personally rid Palauli of an aitu many years earlier.172 Another friend of Stair’s, Sepetaio, a Christian who had memorised large tracts of the Bible, also knew the ways of the ancestral Samoan deities, and repeatedly offered to help, assuring Stair that under the right conditions he could solve the problem permanently. Stair turned down Sepetaio’s heroic offer of intervention, and not because he thought it would be ineffectual. Rather, he thought Sepetaio’s offer to catch the aitu a “startling proposition”, and declined, “not wishing to have any closer contact with [his and his family’s] tormentor”.173

Though Stair walked a fine line in his description of aitu, it was clear he needed no convincing of their actuality. He was willing to discuss aitu with disbelieving peers and write about them in print. Likewise he needed no persuading that certain Samoans wielded special powers or knowledge. Nor did he think that this understanding disqualified his Christian beliefs and commitments, or the legitimacy of any of his other knowledge. Stair approvingly cited the comments of Percy Smith, famous founder and leader of the Polynesian Society, who had visited Samoa and who had a long history of encounter with Māori and their spiritual experts – tohunga (traditional healers). “I have often thought”, wrote Percy Smith, “that the old Polynesian priests were possessed of some knowledge of powers over nature which we have not got hold of, at any rate they had the power of making their hearers believe so. They are very perplexing, and as yet not understood. We can hardly discredit some of the things the Maori tohungas [sic], or priests, were able to do, and yet cannot explain them”.174 Stair agreed with Smith’s observations, and was “satisfied that in Samoa also in the early days the same supernatural power, or mana, was claimed and exercised, and is thus found so often intertwined”.175 It broadens historical horizons to observe that one of the carriers of Christianity to Samoa could recognise the persistence of mana in both Samoan divinities and in YHWH.

Such continuations of ancestral Samoan deities into the era of Christianity were characteristic of the epoch, not exceptional. Though some attempts to prevent Samoans from publicly acknowledging ancestral Samoan spirituality were sustained – both by Samoans and foreign missionaries – it is clear that such acknowledgements were not, for most Samoans, a contradiction. In many other ways, these two streams of spirituality were complementary. There was room within ancestral Samoan theologies for new gods, even an omnipotent new Atua. There was room within Christian theologies, too, for the ancestral Samoan deities. Indeed, as the Tusi Pa’ia reminded Samoans, “E tele mea e nonofo ai i le maota o lo’u Tamā”.176 These complementarities were a standard feature in the experiences and lives of Samoans. This was true in the 1800s, and remains true for many Samoans still.177

Samoans became Christian, and Christianity became Samoan, much like a confluence of rivers, a meeting of the waters. Not only did Christian Samoans find it possible to live with God and with gods, Samoans transformed themselves into Christians by actually building on and with the concepts and practices that sustained ancestral Samoan deities. The core concepts and language of Samoan Christianity remained remarkably intertwined with those of ancestral Samoan spirituality – from atua to feagaiga and Tamā. This intimacy between Christian and ancestral Samoan deities and divinity is evocative of the whispering that Tui Atua describes. In the tala tu’umumusu of Tui Atua and Sister Vitolia Mo’a, there is a nurturing intimacy that has sustained relationships between Samoans and ancestral Samoan deities during Christian times, for nearly 200 years. The endurance of these relationships, through times often inhospitable to them, is a sign of the depth of power that inheres in such intimate exchanges. Yet these matters are at once durable and fragile. Understandings of the presence or meaning of these different ‘waters’ remain different, are strongly held and, because they are important, hotly contested. From these different understandings of the present stem values that shape the history that can be recognised and retold: and they do so profoundly. I hope that these values allow us horizons wide enough to appreciate the ways in which the waters met. But for this to be seen, it must begin with an understanding that, in so many ways, these waters flow together still.

140 This chapter was written while at the University of Michigan.

141 Aiono-Le Tagaloa, F. (2003). Tapua’i: Samoan worship. Apia, Samoa: Malua Printing Press; Kamu, L. (1996). The Samoan culture and the Christian gospel. Apia, Western Samoa: Donna Lou Kamu; Liuaana, B. (2004). Samoa tula’i: Ecclesiastical and political face of Samoa’s independence, 1900–1962. Apia, Samoa: Malua Printing Press.

142 Pratt, G. (1893). Pratt’s grammar and dictionary Samoan–English, English–Samoan: A grammar and dictionary of the Samoan language with English and Samoan vocabulary (3rd edition). London, England: London Missionary Society, p.191.

143 Tcherkezoff, S. (2002). L’humain et le divin: Quand les Polynésiens ont découvert les explorateurs européens au XVIIIe siècle. Ethnologies comparées, 5. Retrieved from http://www.alor.univmontp3.fr/cerce/revue.htm.

145 Consider, for instance: 1 Chronicles 16:25: “The Lord … is to be feared above all gods”; Psalms 82:1: “God stands in the Council of El, he judges among the gods”; Psalms 86:8: “Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord”; Psalms 96:4: “For the Lord … is to be feared above all gods”; Psalms 97:7: “Worship him, all you gods”; Psalms 135:5: “Our Lord is above all gods”; Psalms 136:2: “O give thanks to the God of gods”; Jeremiah 10:11: “The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens”.

146 After the Babylonian Exile, the local god YHWH becomes a universal being who now rules the whole earth, is separated from the land and territory, and is superior to Babylonian gods such as Marduk. In accordance with the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’, which forms the basis of most contemporary historical–textual work, the ‘Priestly Writers’ composed the last elements of the Pentateuch. The Priestly Writers transform the text through texts like Genesis 1:1–2,4a, into a matured monotheism that negates the existence of other gods completely. However, as the lived history continues, Judaism continues to encounter other deities. Personal communication, Dr Anselm Hagedorn.

147 Personal communication, Dr Anselm Hagedorn.

148 Williams, J., and Moyle, M. (1984). The Samoan Journals of John Williams, 1830 and 1832. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press; Ta’unga. (1968). The Works of Ta’unga: Records of a Polynesian Traveller in the South Seas, 1833–1896 (R. G. Crocombe and M.T. Crocombe, Trans.). Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press.

149 Turner, G. (1884). Samoa, a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before: Together with Notes on the Cults and Customs of Twenty-Three Other Islands in the Pacific. London, England: Macmillan.

150 Tui Atua, T.T.T.E. (2009). Samoan jurisprudence and the Samoan Lands and Titles Court: The perspective of a litigant. In T. Suaalii-Sauni, I. Tuagalu, N. Kirifi-Alai, N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su’esu’e Manogi: In search of fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan indigenous reference (p.153–172, p.159). Le Papaigalagala, Samoa: The Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa. See also, Salesa, T.D.I. (2009). Remembering Samoan History. In T. Suaalii-Sauni, I. Tuagalu, N. Kirifi-Alai, N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su’esu’e Manogi: In search of fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan indigenous reference (p.215–228). Le Papaigalagala, Samoa: The Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa.

151 See Fraser, J. (1896). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 5 (3), 171–183; Fraser, J. (1897a). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 6 (3), 107–122; Fraser, J. (1897b). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 6, (1), 19–36; Fraser, J. (1897c). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 6 (2), 67–76; Fraser, J. (1898). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 7, (1), 15–29; Fraser, J. (1900). Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 9 (3), 125–134. See also, Stair, J.B. (1897). Old Samoa: Or, Flotsam and Jetsam from the Pacific Ocean. London, England: The Religious Tract Society; and Turner, G. (1884).

152 Aitu is translated by George Pratt (1863, p.58) as a spirit or god. Pratt also spells taula aitu as one word ‘taulāitu’ (1863, p.285).

153 Stair, J.B. (1897), pp.220–225.

154 Gell, A. (1993). Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Tcherkézoff, S. (2008). ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia: The Samoan case (1722–1848): Western misunderstandings about sexuality and divinity. Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press.

155 Ta’unga (1968), pp.121, 126–127.

156 Mills, W. Letter to LMS Directors dated November 3, 1842. London Missionary Society South Sea Letters. Box 15, folder 5. Held on Microfilm, University of Auckland Library.

157 Murray, A.W. (1888). The Bible in the Pacific. London, England: James Nisbet & Co.

158 Freeman, J.D. (1959). The Joe Gimlet or Siovili Cult. In J.D. Freeman and W. Geddes (Eds.), Anthropology in the South Seas (pp.185–200). New Plymouth, New Zealand: Thomas Avery & Sons.

159 Eddowes, M. (2001). Transformation Des Pratiques Religieuses De La Fin Du Culte Hui Arii: Les Cultes Tutae Auri Et Mamaia Et Leur Présence Dans La Haute Vallée De La Papenoo De 1815–1840. Bulletin de la Société des études océaniennes, 289 (91), 37–75; Gunson, N. (1962). An Account of the Mamaia or Visionary Heresy of Tahiti, 1826–1841. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 71 (2), 208–243.

160 Slatyer, T. Letter to LMS Directors dated January 15, 1845. London Missionary Society South Sea Letters. Box 18, folder 5. Held on Microfilm, University of Auckland Library.

161 Slatyer, T. Letter to LMS Directors dated March 1, 1844. London Missionary Society South Sea Letters. Box 17, folder 6. Held on Microfilm, University of Auckland Library.

162 Freeman, J.D. (1959), p.192; Turner, G. (1861). Nineteen Years in Polynesia: Missionary life, travels, and researches in the islands of the Pacific (pp.106–107). London, England: John Snow, Paternoster Row.

163 This is true whether mānava, or manāva, or manava, is meant. Freeman, J.D. (1959), rather strangely translates manava (presumably in his reading, mānava), as meaning ‘ventriloquist’. Mānava seems plausible, though I think it likely that the name had play across the different resonances: each has potential spiritual relevance.

164 Freeman, J.D. (1959); Williams, J., and Moyle, M. (1984), p.145.

165 Buzacott, A. Rarotonga to Navigators Islands. London Missionary Society, South Seas Journals: 30 May 1836–10 March 1837. Held on Microform, University of Auckland Library.

166 Turner (1861), p.106.

167 Turner (1861), p.109.

168 Williams, J., and Moyle, M. (1984) p.113.

169 Stair, J.B. (1897), p.234.

172 Stair, J.B. (1896). Jottings on the Mythology and Spirt-Lore of Old Samoa. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 5 (1), 33–57, pp.52–53; Stair, J.B. (1897), pp.231–232.

173 Stair, J.B. (1897), pp. 265–266; though see the differing public account given earlier in Stair, J.B. (1896), p.52, where he suggests he found Sepetaio’s offer amusing. Stair’s 1897 volume was privately published, but his 1896 article was published for the general public.

174 Ibid, pp.266–7.

176 English versions are crucially different – “In my Father’s house are many Mansions” in the King James, or in others, “many rooms”. In Samoan this was complicated, not least because many Samoans were unfamiliar with an architecture of rooms, and the choice of translators to emphasise the links between ‘tele mea’ and early missionary Christianity. Ioane 14:2 (1866 edition); John 14:2 (King James Version).

177 Goodman, R.A. (1971). Some aitu beliefs of modern Samoans. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 80 (4), 463–479; Moyle, R.M. (1974). Samoan Medical Incantations. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 83 (2), 155–179; Macpherson, C. & Macpherson, L. (1990). Samoan Medical Belief and Practice. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press.