Aitu

The pigs came out of the earth oven along with the birds and the fish, and the whole village stood around the steam waiting to eat its own gods. No one there had touched those creatures in living memory. A man knew from birth which animal carried his god, and to swallow a mouthful of it was to invite the thing to take up residence in his body and grow there until it killed him. Then the London Missionary Society arrived, the village council argued the question out over several days, and somebody lit the fire. John Williams, writing in his journal in 1832, understood exactly what he was watching. Once the creature had been cooked and eaten, the spirit inside it was spoiled past recovery and could never be worshipped again.

The spirits being disposed of were aitu. At his birth a Samoan was taken under the care of one of them, and since several were usually invoked in succession as the labour went on, the one being addressed at the moment the child arrived became that child’s god for life. The god then had to be visible. It showed itself in a particular species, and that species became, for that person, untouchable. One saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, the dog, the owl, the lizard. Some found theirs in shellfish. A man could eat his neighbour’s god at dinner without a flicker of concern, but his own was fatal, and the manner of the death was specific: the god was thought to move into the offender’s body and generate there the very creature that had been eaten.

These were the aitu fale, the gods of the house. The father of a family served as its priest, and at the evening meal he would ask, briefly and without ceremony, that everyone be kept from fines, sickness, war and death. On feast nights a cup of ava was poured out onto the ground for the household god, and the family sat in the dark of their own house believing the spirit was present with them. Sometimes it spoke, using the father’s mouth or another relative’s, and gave instructions. Build a canoe and keep it for me. They could sail in it themselves, but selling it carried a death sentence.

Above the household sat the village aitu, and every village had one. A child born there belonged to it, and a mother announcing a birth would say she had got a child for the village god by name. In the small temple, or in the great house where the chiefs met when there was no temple, something waited for the eye to settle on. In one place a conch shell hung from the roof in a basket of woven sinnet, and the god was thought to blow it when he wanted the people to go to war. In another there were two stones. In another a coconut-shell drinking cup hung above the offerings, and it was this cup that was fetched when something had been stolen. The suspects came forward one at a time, laid a hand on the shell, and invited the god to destroy them on the spot if they were lying. Confessions generally arrived before the cup did.

The birds carried the messages. A man who found a dead owl at the side of the road, and whose village god lived in owls, would sit down beside it and weep, and beat his forehead with stones until the blood came, which was thought to please the god. Then he would wrap the bird and bury it with the ceremony owed to a person. This was not a funeral for the god. The god was still alive, incarnate in every owl anywhere, and the flight of those owls decided battles: a bird crossing the path meant turn back, a bird flying ahead meant go on. Herons served the same office on Manono. So did rainbows, which were read by their angle, and shooting stars, which were read by their direction, and two sperm-whale teeth kept in a cave, watched by a priest while the fighting went on, good if they lay east and west and disastrous if they turned north and south.

Some aitu had names and histories. Nafanua came out of Pulotu, the Samoan underworld, at a time when the ruling power was making people climb coconut palms upside down and pick the nuts with their toes. She bound coconut leaflets across her chest so the enemy would not see she was a woman, routed them, and afterwards tied leaflets around the trees she claimed. Trees are still marked that way. Against her stands O Le Nifo Loa, the Long Tooth, a disease-making god said to have come over from Fiji and settled on the south coast of Savai’i, travelling in people, canoes and cargo. An old woman once saw the tooth and threw a pot of scalding greens at it, and it was bent ever after and never quite as lethal. In the 1870s a village dug up the bones of a man from the Long Tooth district and threw them out past the reef, hoping to get the thing off their land. People still get blamed for carrying it.

The word runs a great deal deeper than Samoa. It descends from Proto-Austronesian *qaNiCu, reconstructed as “ghost, spirit of the dead” and also, oddly and consistently, “owl”, with relatives as far off as the Bunun hanitu of Taiwan and the Malay hantu. Across Polynesia the meaning slides. In Tahitian and Marquesan an aitu is a god. In Tokelauan it is a ghost, usually an unpleasant one. In Tongan the ʻaitu are lesser gods attached to particular villages and families, taking the shape of plants and animals, reputed to be crueller than the great gods, and said to have come from Samoa in the first place; the Tongan phrase for weeping in grief still has the word buried in it. In Māori, aituā simply means disaster.

Even in Samoa the line between aitu and atua was never as clean as the dictionaries make it. The nineteenth-century missionaries who compiled the lists of Samoan gods were building a case as much as a record, and the tidy catalogue of village deities that survives is theirs, gathered by men who had a professional interest in the whole system being untenable. What the aitu could do is nevertheless consistent across every account: wear any body they chose, deliver sickness and lift it, speak through a possessed priest, and make an oath dangerous. What they could not do was survive being disregarded. An aitu needed its creature and needed the household to keep faith, which is precisely why eating the animal ended it, and why a bent tooth stayed bent. The endings were rarely as final as the missionaries hoped. Spirit sickness, ma’i aitu, is still diagnosed in Samoa and among Samoans overseas, still falls most often on young women, and is still handled by a healer rather than a physician.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an aitu?

An aitu is a spirit or ghost in Polynesian belief, most fully documented in Samoa, where it functioned as the guardian spirit of a household, village or district. Aitu had no bodies of their own and appeared instead through a chosen species such as an owl, shark, eel, turtle or lizard. The same word appears across the Pacific with meanings ranging from “god” in Tahitian to “disaster” in Māori.

What is the difference between an aitu and an atua?

Both words mean a divine or spiritual being, and the boundary between them is loose rather than fixed. Atua tends to be used for gods of non-human origin, while aitu more often covers ancestral and local spirits, but the nineteenth-century sources use aitu freely for full village and war gods as well. The two terms overlap heavily, and the sources do not agree on where one stops.

Why were Samoans forbidden to eat certain animals?

Because the animal was the visible form of that person’s aitu. Eating another person’s sacred creature was harmless, but eating your own was believed to be fatal, with the offended spirit taking up residence in the body and generating the eaten creature inside it. This is why conversion to Christianity was marked by a communal feast in which villagers cooked and ate their own aitu creatures, which desecrated the spirit permanently.

What is ma’i aitu?

Ma’i aitu means “spirit sickness” and is the Samoan term for possession by an aitu. It is still recognised today in Samoa and in Samoan communities abroad, and it falls disproportionately on young women. Treatment is sought from a taulasea, a traditional healer, rather than from conventional medicine.

Where does the word aitu come from?

Aitu descends from Proto-Austronesian *qaNiCu, reconstructed with the meanings “ghost, spirit of the dead” and “owl”. Its relatives stretch from the Bunun hanitu of Taiwan to the Malay hantu, and within Polynesia it appears as Tongan ʻaitu, Nukuoro eidu, Luangiua aiku and Māori aituā. The word is one of the oldest continuously used religious terms in the Austronesian world.

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