"Oceania and Australia" gathers two vast and quite distinct religious worlds, each of enormous internal diversity. Aboriginal Australia holds the oldest continuous religious cultures on earth, sustained for tens of thousands of years by hundreds of distinct peoples and languages, and unified loosely by the concept usually translated as the Dreaming (or the Dreamtime), the enduring, sacred order in which ancestral beings shaped the land, its features, its laws, and its living things in a creative time that is not merely past but eternally present, accessible through ceremony, song, and story. The land itself is a sacred text: particular sites, rocks, and waterholes are the traces and bodies of ancestral beings, and the "songlines" that cross the continent map both country and cosmology at once.
Across the Pacific, the Polynesian peoples, from Hawaii to New Zealand to Rapa Nui, carried a shared religious inheritance as they settled the "sea of islands": a pantheon of great gods (Tangaroa of the sea, Tane of the forest, Tu of war, and the trickster-hero Maui), and the pervasive, linked concepts of mana (spiritual power or potency, held by gods, chiefs, and objects) and tapu (the sacred-forbidden, source of the word "taboo"), which structured the whole social and religious order. The region thus compresses the very oldest of human religious traditions and one of the most far-flung, the fruit of the greatest maritime expansion in the pre-modern world.