This was decidedly a well-got-up affair for a colonial place. The
Maori oracles are precisely like those of Delphi. In one case a
chief was absent, was inquired for, and the Voice came, 'He will
return, yet not return'. Six months later the chiefs friends went
to implore him to come home. They brought him back a corpse; they
had found him dying, and carried away the body. In another case,
when the Maori oracle was consulted as to the issue of a proposed
war, it said: 'A desolate country, a desolate country, a desolate
country!' The chiefs, of course, thought the _other_ country was
meant, but they were deceived, as Croesus was by Delphi, when he was
told that he 'would ruin a great empire'. In yet another case, the
Maoris were anxious for the spirits to bring back a European ship,
on which a girl had fled with the captain. The Pakeha Maori was
present at this seance, and heard the 'hollow, mysterious whistling
Voice, "The ship's nose I will batter out on the great sea"'. Even
the priest was puzzled, this, he said, was clearly a deceitful
spirit, or atua, like those of which Porphyry complains, like most
of them in fact. But, ten days later, the ship came back to port;
she had met a gale, and sprung a leak in the bow, called, in Maori,
'the nose' (ihu). It is hardly surprising that some Europeans used
to consult the oracle.
Possibly some spiritualists may take comfort in these anecdotes, and
allege that the Maori mediums were 'very powerful'. This is said to
have been the view taken by some American believers, in a very
curious case, reported by Kohl, but the tale, as he tells it, cannot
possibly be accurate. However, it illustrates and strangely
coincides with some stories related by the Jesuit, Pere Lejeune, in
the Canadian Mission, about 1637. The instances bear both on
clairvoyance and on the force which is said to shake houses as well
as to lift tables, in the legends of the modern thaumaturgists. We
shall take Kohl's tale before those of the old Jesuit. Kohl first
describes the 'Medicine Lodge,' already alluded to in the account of
Dene Hareskin magic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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