Equally radical and transformative, though less well appreciated, have been the changes in human social behavior. In the societies of our apelike forbearers, coordination was achieved relatively simply, through a strict hierarchy dominated by the alpha male. Hunter gatherer societies are organized on a very different principle - they are completely egalitarian. It was during the transition from male dominance to egalitarianism that religious behavior emerged.
Many other social innovations developed in the human lineage as this new species, driven by the increasing intellectual capacity of its individuals, experimented with one novel mechanism after another for communicating among members of a group and governing the interactions among them. The surprising gift of music appeared in the repertoire of human faculties. Even more remarkable was language, a wholly novel system for conveying precise thoughts from one individual's mind to that of another. Humans developed or enhanced a skill know to psychologists as theory of mind - the ability to infer what someone else knows or intends. Groups possessing these news skills in various strengths competed furiously with each other in the struggle to survive. All these new faculties were doubtless drawn upon as natural selection searched for an effective solution to the most pressing of all problems for a social species - how to make selfish individuals place society's needs above their own. This departure from self-interest required not just moral self-restraint and social cohesiveness, but an emotional commitment to the group so fierce and transcendent that men would quite readily sacrifice their lives in its defense.
The solution that evolved was religious behavior. It was those who learned to bond to each other through ritual song and dance who developed the most cohesive communities. It was those who believed that the gods or their dead ancestors were seeing into their hearts who hewed closest to their society's rules. It was those who most feared supernatural retribution who built the most moral societies with the strongest social fabric and the resilience to outlast others.
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved And Why It Endures. Wade, p. 38-39.
CAN YOU SEE HOW THIS POLYNESIAN CULTURE OF RELIGION IS STILL PRESENT AMONG POLYNESIANS TODAY AND HOW THE SELECTION PRESSURE IT PLACED ON THEM OVER HUNDREDS OF GENERATIONS LED TO THEIR HIGH RELIGIOSITY? I'LL HIGHLIGHT THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN POLYNESIAN RELIGIOUS RITUALS AND CUSTOMS OF PAST RELIGIONS AND THOSE OF TODAY. (READ BELOW. CAN YOU SEE THE SIMILARITIES?)
Beginning more than three millennia ago, the Polynesian islands were populated by a chain of migration that issued from Southeast Asia. Individual islands then carried their common cultural heritage in diverse directions. Polynesia is thus testament to the restlessness that cultural evolution shares with biological evolution, the persistent creation and selective retention of new traits. Just as Darwin noticed subtly different physiology among finches that lived on different Galapagos islands, anthropologists have been struck by the cultural variation among the Polynesian islands.
Consider the god Tangaroa - or Tangaloa, or Ta'aroa, depending on what island you were on. He was widely considered to have played a major role in creation, but what role exactly? In some places he was credited with having lifted up the skies, in others with having dredged up the islands. In Samoa it seemed that Tangaloa had created humanity, and perhaps even matter itself; he thus dwelt exaltedly in the skies, a preeminent deity. In the Marquesas islands, Tangaroa lived ignominiously under the feet of Atanua (goddess of the dawn), having lost a battle to her husband Atea (god of light).
But if the various Polynesian peoples disagreed about specific gods, they agreed about gods in general. For example, everyone believed there were lots of them. In the Society islands - the cluster anchored by Tahiti - there were gods of the sea (who used hurricanes and tempests). There were gods of fishermen, of navigators, of netmakers, and more than a dozen gods of agriculture. There was a god of carpenters (not to be confused with the gods of house thatchers), several doctor gods (some specializing in fractures and dislocations), gods of actors and singers, and a god of "hairdressers and combers."
Some anthropologists call these kinds of gods "departmental gods," and one reason there were so many of them in Polynesia is that there were so many departments. Whereas everyone in a hunter-gatherer society is a hunter and/or gatherer, the evolution of chiefdoms meant real division of labor, and gods multiplied to fill the new vocational niches.
The Polynesian gods closely supervised the economy, a fact much on the minds of their subjects. The anthropologist E.S. Craighill Handy wrote in his 1927 book Polynesian Religion, "All serious enterprise was regarded as consecrated activity by the Polynesians."
No business was more serious than fishing. A boat, maybe a double canoe holding twenty men, would shove off and disappear from view and then return with scads of bonito and other huge fish - or would return empty, or even fail to return. The stakes were high and success meant playing by the gods' rules from the beginning.
And that meant the very beginning. "The building of a canoe was an affair of religion," wrote the nineteenth-century Hawaiian David Malo of his homeland's indigenous culture. When a man found a tree that seemed structurally suitable, he would tell the master canoe builder, who would sleep on the matter, lying before a shrine. If he dreamed of a naked man or woman, "covering their shame with the hand," it meant that the tree was unworthy, Malo reports. Attractive, well-dressed characters, in contrast, were a green light.
The night before felling the tree, artisans camped near it, prayed, and offered the gods coconuts, fish, and pig. The next morning, in an oven built near the tree's base, they cooked the pig and - the gods now having ingested its spiritual nutrients - ate the flesh. Next they prayed to six gods and two goddesses, including deities of the forest, of the canoe, and of the ax. Then they took their stone axes to the tree. After it fell, the master canoe builder donned ceremonial garb, stood over the tree near its bottom with an ax in hand, yelled, "Strike with the ax and hollow it! Grant us a canoe!" and then struck the wood. He repeated those words, struck again, repeated the words, struck again, and so on, moving from the bottom of the tree to the top. Then he wreathed the tree with a flowering vine, said a prayer about cutting off its top, and cut off its top. The completion of the canoe could have taken many days and involved repeated appeals to gods, not to mention another round of pig, fish, and coconuts. Making just the lashings for the outrigger was a matter of "utmost solemnity," Malo wrote.
Once finished, the canoe moved down the divine conveyor belt, to the supervision of new gods. The patron god of fishing, Kuula was worshipped at small stone shrines named after him. But there were other gods of fishing - "various and numerous," Malo wrote - and each fisherman adopted "the god of his choice." The choice had consequences. The god of one fisherman, for example, had strong opinions about the color black, so no family member wore black, and all black was banished from the house.
A ceremony marked the onset of the season for each kind of fishing. When it was tie to catch aku (bonito), a nobleman ate an aku's eye along with the eye of a sacrificed human. (This was good news for aku lovers, because it ended the period during which eating aku was punished by death.) The night before the season's inaugural expedition, fisherman gathered at a fishing shrine, where they would spend the night together, removed from the lure of sex with their wives, which could incur divine wrath. They brought sacrificial food, worshipped the fishing god, and before retiring for the evening did a responsive reading during which a priest said, "Save us from nightmare, from bad-luck dreams, from omens of ill."
From the standpoint of a modern boatbuilder or commercial fisherman, much of the above might seem like nonessential preparation for work. And it is indeed hard to argue that removing all black from the home is, in and of itself, time well spent for the ambitious angler. Still, the combined effect of all these rituals was to cloak the business of canoe building and fishing in an air of solemnity that presumably encouraged exacting and conscientious performance.
In any event, we'll return to the question of what good was done by the religious dimension of the Polynesian economy. For now the point is just that the religious dimension was considerable.
Undergirding the islands' economic life were two key religious principles, and they undergirded much of Polynesian life in general. One was tapu, from which comes the English word "taboo." Tapu referred to things set apart or forbidden. Thus, all the forbidden behaviors noted in the preceding paragraphs were tapu: eating aku before the aku season, wearing black if your god had forbidden it, having sex with your wife right before a key fishing expedition. These things weren't just frowned on and punished with social disapproval, the way wearing black to a regatta might be nowadays. Tapu violations were punished by the gods themselves, in the form of a fishless expedition, an illness, even death. Tapu put starch in the ritual fabric of Polynesia.
The second key concept was mana. Scholars disagree on what mana meant - in part, no doubt, because its meaning varied subtly from chiefdom to chiefdom. Some say mana was a magical or divine power, a kind of supernatural electricity. Others say mana was more mundane; it was basically just efficacy, success in getting what you want. Regardless of how mana is defined, it was a religious thing, for mana was delivered to Polynesian society by the gods. It was the carrot part of the Polynesian incentive structure. Just as violations of tapu would bring misfortune, respect for tapu could shore up mana.
Chiefs possessed mana in spectacular proportions. They were conduits through which mana entered society and then trickled down the social scale to lesser folk. This role of divine spigot was a natural extension of the logic of shamanism: elevate your importance by claiming special access to the supernatural. (That doesn't mean the chiefs didn't themselves believe in mana. One senses an air of authentic desperation in the way a newly installed chief on the Solomon Islands implored the soul of his dead predecessor to "crawl to the gods for some mana for me." Groveling before the departed former chief, he declared, "I eat ten times your excrement.")
If mana made the chief special, tapu formalized his specialness. One of the things most consistently tabooed in Polynesia was casual contact with the chief. When a Tongan chief walked around, Captain Cook noticed, people not only cleared a path for him, but sat down until he passed. The one allowed encounter was to bow down and gingerly touch his foot. On some islands, commoners couldn't even hear a chief speak; a spokesman - a "talking chief" - conveyed his pronouncements. There was no chance for familiarity to breed contempt.
As if all this weren't enough, chiefs were often descended from gods - and upon death might well become gods themselves, assuming they weren't already considered divine. On some islands the chief was also the head priest, and on islands where he wasn't, chief and priest typically worked hand in glove. This meant the chief could help decide what was and wasn't tapu - no trivial power in a society where breaches of tapu were intensely eschewed.
In sum, Polynesian political leaders were drenched in authority that emanated from the divine. Thus were a Tongan chief's not-infrequent harangues absorbed as Captain Cook described: "The most profound silence and attention is observed during the harangue, even to a much greater degree than is practised amongst us, on the most interesting and serious deliberations of our most respectable assemblies."
...
In Polynesia the chief used his divine authority for typical chiefly endeavors: organizing feasts, organizing armies, maintaining roads and irrigation systems - and amassing the requisite resources. Of course, modern politicians manage to do the same thing - spend and tax - without being thought even remotely sacred. But they have an advantage over chiefs: written laws, often resting on a hallowed constitution, and backed by courts that not only enforce compliance but lend legitimacy. Chiefs, lacking the secular sanctity these things confer, relied on the old-fashioned kind of sanctity.
In Hawaii, when it was time to collect foods for the annual makahiki festival, the chief (or "king" as westerners sometimes called him, so large and elaborate were the Hawaiian polities) would place all the land under tapu, confining everyone to their homesteads. Priests, bearing a figure of the god Lono, then joined tax collectors in touring the chiefdom, lifting the tapu in their wake, liberating the people district by district. If unhappy with the contribution made by a district, they would curse its people in Lono's name.
Gods weren't the only coercive force. Chiefs had armed retainers who could administer beatings and enforce banishment. But for any ruler, the less of what you have to do, the better. And when force must be exercised, the less mundane it seems, the better; belief that the laws were being broken were gods' commands, not just chiefs' whims, may help explain why beatings, by some accounts, were absorbed without protest.
Moreover, in chiefdoms, there are limits on the scope of government coercion, and here arose an opportunity for religion to play a second role in ordering society. One difference between a chiefdom and a state is that a state government typically has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force: no matter what your neighbor does to you or your family - robbery, assault, even murder - you can't retaliate; the government handles punishment. But in chiefdoms, as in hunter-gatherer societies, grievances can be vented by violent retaliation. This doesn't mean these societies are lawless; the punishment for a given crime may be a matter of consensus, and may have the chief's blessing. It's just that inflicting the punishment is the job of the victims or their kin.
This sort of laissez-faire law enforcement is a shakier source of social order in chiefdoms than in hunter-gatherer societies. In a small hunter-gatherer village, you know everyone and see them often and may someday need their help. So the costs of getting on someone's bad side are high and the temptation to offend them commensurately. In a chiefdom, containing thousands or even tens of thousands of people, some of your neighbors are more remote, hence more inviting targets of exploitation.
And there's more to exploit. Whereas in hunter-gatherer society there is little private property, in chiefdoms families own things like fruit trees and gardens, an open invitation to theft. And as crime grows more tempting, it grows more explosive. So long as its punishment is left to the victims, the prospect of family-versus-family feuds loom. And since in chiefdoms these "families" may be big clans that amount to a small village, "feud" may be an understatement.
In this phase of cultural evolution - with personal policing having lost its charm but with government not yet taking up the slack - a supplementary force of social control was called for. Religion seems to have responded to the call. Whereas religion in hunter-gatherer societies didn't have much of a moral dimension, religion in the Polynesian chiefdoms did: it systematically discouraged antisocial behavior.
You might not notice this on casual inspection of Polynesian gods. In many ways they are reminiscent of hunter-gatherer gods, complete with a lack of consistent virtue. Robert Williamson, who in the early twentieth century heroically compressed centuries of reports on central Polynesia into a few classic volumes on its religion, wrote that the Society Islands gods "ate and drank, married and indulged in sexual gratifications, and quarreled and fought among themselves." In other words, "people imagined them to be such as they were themselves, only endowed with greater powers." So the key was to give them things, such as food and respect. Prayers and sacrifices sent to gods of the air could stave off storms - or bring them on, in the event that a fleet of invaders was approaching. And if you were the aggressor, and your enemy had retreated to a fortress, you could buy off the enemy's gods, placing offerings near the fort to encourage divine desertion.
Similarly, anticipation of the afterlife, which today is a moral carrot or stick for so many people, retained in the Polynesian chiefdoms the heavily amoral flavor it had in hunter-gatherer societies; your life in the hereafter was shaped mainly by things other than how you treated people here. In the Society Islands, if you died at sea, your spirit would enter a shark, and if you died in battle, you would haunt the battlefield. In the long run most Polynesian souls migrated to a distant place sometimes described as a dark underworld, sometimes a faraway island. There might be a more luxurious alternative in the sky - an "abode of light and joy," as a westerner described one island's version - but if you were an ordinary Joe, living an upright life wouldn't get you there; this paradise was reserved for the ruling class and perhaps a few other elites. (In the Society Islands it was open to showpeople - singers, actors, dancers - though not for free; they had to have any babies born to them killed, or else face expulsion from the entertainers' guild that was the gateway to paradise.) In general, Handy observed, "Prestige, rites, and circumstances affecting death determine destiny in after-life."
Yet if Polynesian religion lacked the moral incentives of some modern religions - a role-model god who hands out afterlife assignments according to your conduct grade - it had other moral guidance built into it.
For starters, though Polynesians didn't fret about punishment that might await them in the afterlife, there was an edifying fear of punishment that could originate there, via ghosts that frowned on their behavior. In a Hawaiian legend, the spirit of a dead man haunts his murderer until the murderer makes amends by building three houses, one for the dead man's kin, one for their servants, and one for the dead man's bones.
Believing that anyone you mistreat might haunt you from the grave could turn you into a pretty nice person. The incentive - fear of ghosts - is also found in some hunter-gatherer or horticultural religions, but in the Polynesian chiefdoms it had acquired the added power of divine supervision: the same gods who wouldn't punish you in the next life punished you in this one. Tongan gods, for example, punished theft with shark attack. ("In consequence," the anthropologist H. Ian Hogbin observed, "thieves hesitated to swim during the season when sharks were at their worst.") And these Tongan gods gave out rewards as well as punishment; mana was granted not just for ritual correctness but for moral goodness - eschewing theft and other antisocial acts. A boost in mana was no mere abstraction; it meant more pigs and yams, here and now.
Still, the standard divine sanction in Polynesia was a stick, not a carrot. In Samoa, a nineteenth-century missionary reported, "calamities are traced to sins of the individual or his parents, or some other near relative." Theft, for example, might bring "ulcerous sores, dropsy, and inflammation of the abdomen."
Even family life was subject to supernatural sanction. In the Society Islands, a fisherman who argued with his wife before an expedition would have bad luck. A woman who cheated on her husband while he was out at sea could bring worse luck, including his drowning. And on many Polynesian islands, hostility toward kin could be punished with illness. In a society where extended families live together and form the basic unit of society, this alone could do wonders for social harmony.
When you add up all the little ways Polynesian religion encouraged self-restraint, you wind up with a fair amount of encouragement - enough, perhaps, to compensate for the absence of a centralized legal system. And religion in chiefdoms was doing more than fill in for the not-yet-invented secular laws; its was paving the way for secular laws.
For example, the Polynesian chiefdoms featured land ownership, something generally lacking in hunter-gatherer societies. In this modern world, poverty markers are secular things; you may respect fenceposts or surveyors' pins, but you don't revere them. To judge by Polynesian chiefdoms, property markers started out as something more awe-inspiring. On many islands, a family could (sometimes with a priest's help) place a taboo on its fruit trees and vegetable gardens, leaving it for the gods to prosecute thieves or trespassers via illness or death. These property taboos were advertised with signs made of leaves, sticks, and other handy materials. In Samoa, the signs conveniently signaled the kind of misfortune awaiting the thief. Coconut fiber molded in the shape of a shark meant shark attack; a spear stuck in the ground foretold facial neuralgia. (The system wasn't perfect. If Tongan natives could get some visiting westerner to remove the sign, and hence the taboo, they would happily eat fruit from a previously forbidden tree.)
Samoa, unlike most Polynesian chiefdoms, had the rudiments of a jury system. If a grievance wasn't settled by retaliation, a body of locals called a fono would hear testimony. And here, too, law was intertwined with the supernatural. Sometimes the accused had to drink a substance that, if it caused illness or death, signified guilt. And always the accused had to swear their innocence to some god. Of course, even today a defendant may swear by God to tell the truth, but in Samoa the oath was less perfunctory: fear of the god's vengeance could bring a dramatic confession.
...But how thankful should the Polynesians have been? Was their social system a just one? Did religion, in upholding it, uphold the public good? Or were gods just a tool of oppression, devoutly sustained by a ruling class that wanted to keep living in the manner to which it had become accustomed?
Polynesia certainly gives support to the latter view. Chiefs, for example, got lots of wives, as befits the quasi-divine. And the ruling class in general got lots of good food. In Hawaii, precious sources of protein - pigs, chickens, fish - wound up disproportionately on elite dining tables, whereas vegetables were more widely accessible. In the Society Islands, commoners couldn't enter the temple grounds, site of big sacrifices to the gods, but priests could, and they ate the part of the food the gods left behind - the physical part. Polynesian priests also profited from that hallowed shamanic service, fee-based communion with the supernatural. One of their jobs was to cure illness by diving what offense had caused it. A nineteenth-century Methodist missionary described a Samoan priest entering a diagnostic trance via "preliminary yawnings and coughings," then passing through contortions and convulsions, until finally the god possessing him prescribed the restorative atonement, such as for "gifts to be given to the priest."
Elites also got lavish medical care. When a Tongan commoner was sick, priests might prescribe a curative sacrifice: cutting off the finger joint of a relative even lower in the social hierarchy. But for a chief's illness, sometimes the only cure was to strangle a child.
Equality before the law wasn't a bedrock Polynesian principle. In Tonga, murder was usually punished one way or another, but not if it was the murder of a commoner by a chief. In Samoa, adultery could bring a broad range of informal punishments unless committed with a chief's wife, in which case the punishment was formal and ranged only from death by drowning to death by beating. Human sacrifice seems also to have had an upper-class bias. In the Society Islands, one anthropologist noted, candidates for sacrifice fell into several categories, including prisoner of war, blasphemer, and "person obnoxious to the chief or priest."
In the face of facts like this, what could a functionalist possibly say in defense of the claim that religion benefits society a whole? More than you think.
Consider human sacrifice, as appraised in the clinical terms of functionalism. Even Captain Cook, who deemed it a "waste of the human race," noted that many of the adults sacrificed were criminals. And many others were "common low fellows, who stroll about from place to place and from island to island, without having any fixed abode, or any visible way of getting an honest livelihood."
Now, we might today consider death excessive punishment for many crimes, and certainly for transience and indigence. But well after cook wrote, his native England would be locking up poor people in debtors' prison. And, in any event, the removal from society of people who take from it less than they give isn't, in cold economic terms, a "waste." It may well have made the chiefdom stronger and more efficient, and thus have been socially "functional," whatever you think of its morality. (Supernatural belief has other ways of weeding out poor performers. In various societies, including some hunter-gatherer ones, people accused of sorcery or witchcraft and punished by banishment or death tend to be notoriously uncooperative or otherwise antisocial characters.) More generally, Polynesian religion seems to have kept the machine humming. Under the severe gaze of gods, canoes got made, fish got caught, pigs and yams got raised.
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Indeed, maybe we should marvel not at the chief's exploitation of his power, but at the limits of the exploitation - at the social services he performed and the sacrifices he made. You would think that someone of divine lineage, shrouded in a haze of ritual sanctity, could have gotten away with less of both. Why didn't he?
One reason is that people aren't dupes. Our brains were designed by natural selection to guard us against danger, including exploitation. They are, owing to quirks of evolutionary history, susceptible to religious ideas and feelings, but they aren't easily blinded by them. Tahitians had a phrase for chiefs who "eat the power of the government too much." And avoiding this appellation was in the interests of chiefs; In Polynesia broadly, as the archaeologist Patrick Kirch noted in The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms," an overly bloated chieftainship might raise the spectre of rebellion." Or the specter of a bloodless coup. In Tahiti, priests and other elites would approach a persistently despotic chief and offer this guidance: "Go and eat the leg of pork seasoned with dung! Thy royalty is taken from thee, thou art put down to tread the sand, to walk like common men."
Another thing that kept chiefs honest is competition with other chiefdoms. War was common in Polynesia, and among chiefdoms generally. War puts a premium on social efficiency. Ruling classes that are egregiously parasitic, so thoroughly monopolizing the fruits of common labor as to leave little incentive for it, tend to wind up in the dustbin of history. In contrast, a religion that boosts social cohesion and productivity may not only survive but prevail, spreading to weaker societies via conquest. For that matter, it may replicate peacefully. Just as people emulate successful peers, societies emulate potent societies.
This dynamic - the fundamentalist drift of competition among societies - offers at least speculative explanations for otherwise puzzling facts. Why would chiefs sacrifice their own children to the gods? (Because religions that called for no vivid sacrifices by elites had trouble preserving the allegiance of commoners, and thus couldn't sustain the social vigor necessary to prevail in intersocietal competition?) Why were those Society Islands showpeople, the ones destined for a paradise that commoners could only dream of, allowed to mock the chief in public performances? (Because satiric social commentary can help check chiefs self-aggrandizing tendencies before they render a society self-destructively top-heavy?)
The pattern on display in the Polynesian chiefdoms extends beyond them, to other chiefdoms and even to other kinds of societies. On the one hand, the ruling class, consisting as it does of human beings, will try, consciously or unconsciously, to steer culture, including religious belief, toward its selfish ends. But this effort will meet two countervailing forces, one internal and one external. The internal check is popular resistance to exploitation; less powerful but more numerous common folk will, consciously or unconsciously, defend their interests. This may mean rebellion, and it may just mean resisting uncongenial religious ideas. (In Tonga, elites felt sure that commoners have no afterlife; some commoners begged to differ.) The external check on the ruling class's power grab is competition with alternative social systems - that is, neighboring societies.
Hence an ongoing dialectic: elites use their power to gather more power, but this self-aggrandizement will meet ongoing grassroots resistance and occasionally encounter negative feedback in the form of revolution, military defeat, or economic eclipse. Societies forged by these forces provide plenty of supporting anecdotes for both "Marxists" and functionalists, and so fully vindicate neither.
This evolutionary process doesn't pay much attention to the mythic or cosmological details of a religion. Whether you call a god Tangaloa or Tangaroa doesn't greatly affect societal efficiency, nor does your view on whether this god aided creation by raising the sky or fishing up the islands. But the kinds of behaviors your gods punish and reward does matter. Productivity and social harmony are assets in intersocietal competition, and so are favored by the endless winnowing of cultural evolution. It's no surprise that, while the biographies of gods differ greatly from one Polynesian chiefdom to the next, a product of essentially random drift, more pragmatic themes are more stable. Across Polynesia broadly, religion encouraged exacting work and discouraged theft and other antisocial acts.
Of course, by our standards, the Polynesian religions may seem far from optimally efficient. So much pointless superstition, so much emphasis on sheer ritual correctness! Wouldn't a more potent religion have reallocated time from making sacrifices to building canoes? Wouldn't it have focused more intensely on encouraging honesty, generosity, and other aids to social harmony? Wouldn't its carrots and sticks have been more potent? Sure, the threat of illness or death packs a punch. But why not throw in more ammunition - like heaven and hell?
One answer is that cultural evolution takes time. You can't expect a blind, blundering process to work magic overnight, especially during the age of chiefdoms. Back then cultural innovation didn't arise and spread in a sea of millions electronically interlinked brains. There were just thousands of brains in a society, and communication among them depended on Stone Age technology: walking and talking. And contact among societies was even more arduous.
Even so, Polynesian religion developed some pretty sophisticated features. Mana, the very principle that rendered chiefs so powerful and helped justify their sanctity, could also usher in their demise. Just as a chief's naturally massive mana allowed effective governance, manifestly bad governance signified waning mana. So if a chief lost a few battles, he might be usurped by some noble warrior whose battlefield triumphs were thought to evince high mana. This feedback mechanism, a way of dumping inept chiefs before their missteps reached disastrous proportions, may have been favored by cultural evolution, as chiefdoms lacking such a mechanism tended to be overrun by those possessing it.
At the same time, this doctrine also gets a boost from simple logic. If indeed chiefs favored by the gods succeeded, then a chief's consistent failure suggests that he's lost the favor of the gods. Indeed failure just about has to mean that, if belief in religion is to endure the ups and downs of life. Every religion, to survive elementary logical scrutiny, has to have its explanatory loopholes. With Polynesian chiefs...one loophole is the assumption that waning earthly powers signify a loss of the divine touch. And this loophole laces a limit on how much exploitation even a divinely ordained leader can get away with.
The Evolution of God. Wright, p. 49-66.
https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/PacificStudies/article/viewFile/9338/8987
