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Chapter 5 The Religion of Kosrae Early Accounts of the Religion Sometimes anthropology depends on luck, as when the anthropologist happens to be on the scene at the right time with the right people. Such was the case with Ernst Sarfert when the German South Seas Expedition arrived on Kosrae in 1909.1 All members of the expedition were on board the steamship Peiho in order to work on the island for the planned stay of little more than a week; expedition members thought the old culture was wiped out and little evidence of it remained. Contrary to expectations, Ernst Sarfert came upon some remarkable informants and needed more time on Kosrae. He had found three very knowledgeable informants, including the reigning king (tokosra), who had been raised in the court at Lelu when that village was still the political and religious center of Kosraean life. The old tokosra as a youth had served on a Hawaiian steamer, so he knew English; he had been called back to Kosrae when there was no acceptable replacement for the deceased tokosra. By the time of his return and reign (1890–1910), the religious and political center at Lelu had been abandoned and the gods, stories, and rituals of the old religion forgotten. Most of the Kosraeans in 1910 were Christians, having been converted by the Boston-based Protestant missionaries who arrived on island in 1852. In addition to the old tokosra, Sarfert found two other key informants who spoke English. Later he was to find a notebook with the handwritten descriptions of the old gods, written or copied, ironically enough, by a Christian teacher. Sarfert knew he had hit on incomparable resources, so he stayed behind in Kosrae for three months while the other expedition members returned to Hong Kong on the Peiho at the end of the their two-year ethnographic mission in Micronesia. What is known about the pre-Christian religion of Kosrae today is mostly owing to Sarfert’s work. There had been earlier expeditions and forays by naturalists to the island, but they produced little on the religion, compared with the detail and depth of Sarfert’s findings. Louis-Isidore Duperrey’s 1824 visit of ten days was recorded by the ship’s surgeon, René Lesson. For observations and reports on the religion, The Religion of Kosrae 105 Lesson would write that “We know absolutely nothing of their religious rites, we did not see any houses in appearance destined for cult purposes.”2 Yet Lesson was so fascinated by the authority of the tokosra and the respect for the royal burial mausoleums that he was led to wonder, “Does religion play a part in this and are the chiefs the high priests of some cult?” (Ritter and Ritter 1982, 62) What Lesson only intimated, Captain Frederic Lütke of the Russian naval expedition found three years later. Since he and his crew could not speak Kosraean and did not have a translator, “we could only obtain very obscure notions on their religion,” Lütke wrote (1835, as translated in Ritter and Ritter 1982, 129). At least he did find the name of one of the gods and his “family”; he also located house shrines and witnessed two rituals. The god was Sitel Nazuenziap [Sitel Nosrunsrap],3 who had “neither temples, morals, nor idols,” but in the corner of each house was a four- or five-foot-long wand representing the house god, where offerings of seka (sakau) leaves and branches were left, along with the “marine trumpet” (conch shell).4 Lütke also observed strings of flowers between two trees, “one of the little homages to Sitel Nosrunsrap” (Ritter and Ritter 1982, 129). The first ritual he saw was the drinking of seka as an “oblation” in honor of Nosrunsrap. The prayer the Kosraeans recited during seka drinking was in reality a ritual toast to the gods and to the tokosra: Talaelen seka mai . . . Sitel Nazuenziap Rin seka Naitouolen seka Seouapin seka Chiechou seka Mananzioua seka Kajoua-sin-liaga seka Olpat seka Togoja [tokosra] seka. The meaning of the first line of the toast is not recorded, but the ritual appears to conclude with a toast to the “king” (tokosra). Following the name of leading deity Sitel Nazuenziap (Nosrunsrap) are the names of three of his children: Rin, Naitouolen, and Seouap. Kajoua-sin-liaga is the wife of Nosrunsrap, Sinlanka the breadfruit goddess (here with the honorific female title for the “queen”). Olpat appears to be a cognate...

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