“Myth is
an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which
the purpose is too deep, going too deep in
the blood and soul, for
mental explanation or description.”
D. H. Lawrence
And
the Myth of Origin gave way to the Myth of the Ancestor Cult. Geography
determines climate; climate determines culture.
The sixty square miles of Easter Island arose from
three coalesced volcanoes, as extinct as the culture that had erupted on them.
Terevaka is the largest, the youngest, the highest, the most northerly, and the
least culturally significant, lava field and wind. The far eastern stoneless
headland is Poike, the oldest, most weathered and once separate volcano, the
site of the ‘Poike Ditch’ and the Battle of Poike, between the Long Ears and the
Short Ears, that changed the course of Rapa Nui history. The last large
volcano, Ranu Kau, in the southwest, has high sea cliffs that have eroded back
from the blue ocean, chewing into the wall of the mile wide crater filled by an
eerie freshwater lake, speckled with totara reed islands and its own
microclimate. Sheltered from the wind, figs and oranges and vines and bananas
flourish inside the caldera. The last native toromiro tree was cut down on the
inner slope in 1960, for firewood. Here is the abandoned ceremonial village of
Orongo, on the cusp of where the sea cliff and the inner crater wall, and the
Ancestor Cult and Birdman Cult histories, converge. Robyn and I would come here
last.
Before the descendents were the ancestors, and I was
anxious to see where their birth and descent had occurred. We had negotiated
the red and gunmetal Suzuki SUV in town the day before, from a Chilean
mainlander who had given us a deal, because I had negotiated in Spanish. I
asked him why the petrol was cheaper than on the mainland, almost four thousand
kilometers away.
“No hay impuestos.” He said. No tax. For which we were grateful.
In the early morning, we headed east along the
southern coast road, through the Polynesian vowels and glottal stops of all the
bays we passed. Ahu Hanga Te’e, Ahu Ura
Uranga Te Mahina, Ahu Akahanga, Ahu Oroi, Ahu Runga Va’e, Ahu Hanga Tetanga.
The sun shot fibrous streams and shafts of quicksilver through the smoky clouds
above us, onto rivers of twin tire track light on the mud road ahead, and broad
pewter patches of the following sea, off to our right. Wild wet horses galloped
across our path, and we rolled down our windows to smell them. When the sun
pushed through the black sky blanket above, it turned the ocean the bluest of
blue, just for a moment, before it was overwhelmed and enveloped again. We
drove the grey line between wide expanses of coarse straw tussock spattered
with cold chunks of coal-colored lava rock, past random red stone topknots, out
of the quarry at Puna Pau, and an immense solitary broken dead prone moai I lay
beside, out of empathy. And as we turned left, climbing away from the Southern
Sea, the sun pushed through in a final burst of determination, and illuminated
a convoluted crested crater cone at the top of the road. Here was where the
ancestors lived. Here is where their descendents descended with them, and the
nursery we ascended to. Rano Raraku.
On the most remote island in the world, Robyn and I
found ourselves at the most famous mystery in the world, alone except for the
forest of a hundred stone faces, looking right through us. It wasn’t anything
like we had imagined it would be. It was like finding your own remains, and
those of everyone who ever looked like you, in an attic- strange, spooky,
surreal, ghostly, unearthly, hair-raising. The Rapanui believed that the akuaku spirits of their ancestors
provided for all the needs of their living- fitness, fertility, and fortune. In
turn, their descendents made offerings that provided the dead with a better
place in the spirit world. It was a symbiosis. The aringa ora living faces were made to watch over the settlements
before them, with their backs toward the spirit world in the sea. No one dares
to go near them at night.
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