Easter and a pagan spirit world

Easter Island 

The time...Easter Sunday 1772.

The place...A remote island in the surging wilderness of the Pacific.

Jacob Roggeveen

It is still a mystery what the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen was looking for in such a remote area when he stumbled upon this island in 1772. But find it he did, and perhaps, out of thanks to his religion, he called it Easter Island.

But he must have been shocked by the pagan cult that he found there, with its history going back 1000 years prior to his arrival. He found that the dead and the living were “physically” connected in a deep symbiosis where the dead provided good health, fertile harvests and fishing, and a general community good fortune, while the living provided comfort to the spirit world through a range of offerings including food. This spirit world was located in the far reaches beneath the Pacific so all the human settlements were on the coast of the island to enable closer communication between the two. In many ways it is very similar to Celtic paganism where death was just an automatic, not-to-be-feared part of the journey to the other world. Indeed, Easter Island is famous for its massive stone giants which represent the ancestors, called Moai. These were erected in antiquity by the spirits to protect their descendants.

Moai, Easter Island 

It doesn’t take too much of a leap in imagination to visualise the islanders’ daily life and religious ceremonies where the ghosts and the spirits of  times and people past actually presented themselves. Certainly history is filled with such beliefs and under the vastness of the Pacific night-skies and the isolation of the inhabitants, there can be no doubt that visions and spirits would have stalked the land. It is indeed an intriguing idea to mull over, but must have been deeply shocking to the early Europeans.

And as a final almost unrelated thought, the Juan Fernandez islands which are part of the same archipelago, came to fame through the pen of Daniel Defoe. These are called the “Robinson Crusoe Islands” with Defoe giving a very stylised idea of life in the remote reaches of the Pacific. Defoe had a most interesting life with all sorts of trials and tribulations; see my blog “The Sedgemoor Ghosts” to read about his luckiest escape.

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