Oceania and Australia

"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.

The written record for this region begins with outsiders and begins late. European voyagers from the eighteenth century, then missionaries who stayed, produced the first sustained descriptions of Pacific and Australian religious life, and the missionary accounts are frequently the fullest because their authors lived alongside the people they described for decades. They were also there to change what they described, and they wrote for supporters at home.

Two words in general use came out of these encounters. Taboo entered English from Polynesian tapu, and mana from the same region, and both were then generalised into anthropological theory in ways their original speakers would not recognise.

Australia raises a distinct issue that governs how this atlas handles the region. A great deal of Aboriginal religious knowledge is restricted by the traditions themselves: held by particular people, disclosed at particular stages, and in many cases not to be seen or spoken of by the uninitiated or by the other sex. Much of it was nevertheless recorded and published by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Australian institutions now hold substantial archives under access conditions set by the relevant communities, and republishing restricted material is neither lawful nor decent.

So the atlas names closed knowledge as closed. Where a tradition has itself put something into the public record, that is what is used.