Presenting spectacular photographs of astronomical objects of the southern sky, all taken by author Stephen Chadwick, this book explores what peoples of the South Pacific see when they look up at the heavens and what they have done with this knowledge. From wives killing brothers to emus rising out of the desert and great canoes in the sky, this book offers the perfect blend of science, tradition and mythology to bring to life the most famous sights in the heavens above the southern hemisphere. The authors place this starlore in the context of contemporary understandings of astronomy. The night sky of southern societies is as rich in culture as it is in stars. Stories, myths and legends based on constellations, heavenly bodies and other night sky phenomena have played a fundamental role in shaping the culture of pre-modern civilizations throughout the world. Such starlore continues to influence societies throughout the Pacific to this day, with cultures throughout the region – from Australia and New Zealand in the south to New Guinea and Micronesia in the north - using traditional cosmology as a means of interpreting various aspects of everyday life.
Most of the constellations, the patterns of stars found in the night sky, are connected with the ancient myths which people developed to give meaning to what they saw in the sky, based on the experience of their culture. The ideas of modern astronomy play a similar role for us today. They are stories which help us understand the phenomena we discover when we look deeper into the sky than is possible with eyes alone. In this book, the ancient sky stories and those of modern astronomy are woven together in a unique way. Coverage includes twenty-four important constellations as well as the sun and the moon and the sky as a whole. For each of these, one of the old stories is tied together with the astronomical understanding of a key feature in that part of the sky, allowing one story to serve as a reminder for the other.
When even the gods are dying, the hope of the world may lie in its most feared enemies. A new god proclaimed as the All-Holy has arisen in the west and leads an army eastward, devouring the gods and goddesses of the lands between, forcibly converting their folk and binding their souls to himself. The very fabric of the world appears threatened by forces beyond the understanding of scholars and wizards alike. Even the great city of Marakand, where the roads of east and west converge, seems powerless to resist the All-Holy, though the devils Moth and Yeh-Lin and the assassin Ahjvar, undead consort of the god of distant Nabban, have come to stand with it. That may avail Marakand little, for the shapeshifting Blackdog, once a champion of the gods, follows obediently at the All-Holy's heel and Lakkariss, the sword of the cold hells, is in his master's hand.
To be a missionary to Canadian Indians in the late 1800s meant you had to be brave and relentless. It meant nearly freezing when sleeping outside in 50-below-zero weather. It meant canoeing upstream for hundreds of miles to reach remote Indian villages. It meant eating wild cat and other stranger things, or eating nothing for days at a time. But it also meant you were privileged to present the good news of the true Great Spirit to those who were often misunderstood and mistreated. The adventures in this book are rivaled only by the incredible conversions of those who saw the Creator in nature and then worshipped Him too. You will be challenged and inspired by the results of one man who went where the Lord led, with little regard for himself.
For thousands of years before documented history chronicled the achievements of the great Asian and European seafaring explorers, the world’s largest geographical attribute, the Pacific Ocean, was being navigated, explored, and colonized by the intrepid and heroic peoples of the South Seas. For millennia, their migrations eastward and northward from their origins in Asia, allowed them to discover and populate most of the 20,000 islands considered to be one of the last and final frontiers of habitable earth. For reasons of famine, religion, overpopulation, war or just the overwhelming human desire for exploration, these passionate and resourceful people set out on perilous voyages in wooden canoes to find new homes and better lives. During this period in Polynesian history, countless adventures, myths and legends of tragedy, conquest, cataclysmic natural disasters and exploration were told and retold through oral tradition by the memory keepers down through the generations. In approximately 1000 AD, one such story details the spiritually guided unparalleled epic voyages of a double hulled deep sea sailing canoe and its crew of fourteen courageous loyal men. Lead by a young western Polynesian mariner/warrior who is inspired by his discovery of a piece of driftwood, a wooden tablet containing undecipherable but somewhat recognizable hieroglyphic script known to these primitive people as Rongo. In order to seek out and discover the meaning of the Rongo, the gods directed the creation of a great seagoing canoe appropriately named Malolo, (the Flying Fish). Built with great care and quality by expert craftsmen and artisans, this beautiful sleek craft was special in every way, built to withstand everything known and unknown that it could ultimately experience once it began its journey. With a crew of skilled, handpicked loyal men they set sail eastward on their momentous quest which takes them completely across the South Pacific to the seemingly endless land mass of South America then northward guided by their myths, legends and visions of those they encounter along the way. Their heroic adventures including their escape from sacrifice island, their survival of a Tsunami, the revenge of Pele (the fire goddess) and others, describe in historically based detail the wonders, experiences, tragedies, triumphs and discoveries by the men of Malolo during every phase of their voyage including their long and arduous time at sea. For this intrepid crew of ancient mariners the questions remain; will they ever discover the hidden meaning of the wooden tablet according to the will of their gods, will their journey return them once again to their tiny Western Pacific island, and will their epic adventure be worth all their suffering and loss?
This personal observation of Tanna, an island in the southern part of the Vanuatu archipelago, presents an extraordinary case study of cultural resistance. Based on interviews, myths and stories collected in the field, and archival research, The Tree and the Canoe analyzes the resilience of the people of Tanna, who, when faced with an intense form of cultural contact that threatened to engulf them, liberated themselves by re-creating, and sometimes reinventing, their own kastom. Following a lengthy history of Tanna from European contact, the author discusses in detail original creation myths and how Tanna people revived them in response to changes brought by missionaries and foreign governments. The final chapters of the book deal with the violent opposition of part of the island population to the newly established National Unity government.
