Tiurai's Mana

A Tahitian Who Worked Miracles

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Oct. 26.

IyOTWITHSTANDING the veneer of civilisation which overlays, Polynesia, ancestral' voices still echo in the deep recesses of the native mind. The old gods are not dead, but sleeping. Sometimes they awaken for a season because some man is moved by destiny to disturb their slumbers that they may endow him with mana to perform miracles.

Such is the secret native belief to ac count for men like Tiurai.

Tiurai’s powers were expended' in heal ing the sick. He was reputed to be gifted with prophecy and' to have made a num ber of extraordinary predictions—which came to pass. But his chief fame rested on his amazing powers to mend ailing bodies, and his renown spread throughout the Eastern Pacific.

People came to him from the most remote islands and, it is said, even from Australasia and the United States. Cer tain it is that many Europeans living in French Oceania—although they professed to doubt and even went so far as to ridicule—secretly went to Tiurai by night and were healed.

Tiurai was an elderly man when the writer knew him. His finely modelled features, snow white hair, and air of quiet dignity made him a very impressive personage. He lived on a jungly piece of land m Punaauia, adjacent to the most tapu spot on Tahiti—a place of strange and grisly history. One entered by a narrow, winding path which led pre sently to a clearing where was a huge cauldron—which seemed a fitting recep tacle for the witches broth of the Three Weird Sisters but probably never con “ anythln e more noxious than whale blubber—and, nearby, the thatched hut and outbuildings where Tiurai dwelt.

In his treatment of the sick, Tiurai did not use medicines, except such simple things as the milk of the wild cocohut, a gargle of brown sugar dissolved in water or the inhalation of the fragrance'of a flower. These were merely adjuvants to the extraordinary psychic power by which he achieved his miracles of cure, there is no question as to the reality of these cures by whatsoever means they may have been brought to pass. Maladies beyond the power of medical science to overcome—in its present state of know ledge—and so diagnosed by competent Phys,cians yielded to the mysterious viarm of Tiurai in the presence of our critical and even cynical observation Like many another we went to scoff, but remained to marvel. , T*^ rai di . ed in 1918 of exhaustion while battling with a great epidemic. He has had no successor. The gods slumber again and all efforts to re-a waken them by those ambitious to inherit Tiurai’s pow ers, have proven unavailing. The Islands are full of pretenders each of whom

gathers a following for a season and then returns to the obscurity whence he came.

There are legends of great wonder workers who preceded Tiurai, but in his day and generation he had no peer in all Polynesia. He was the last of the great Tahua.