Ceremony

The houses of Orongo overlook the sea at the western tip of Easter, from the lip of the volcano Rano Kao. A couple of kilometres off the land there is a small island called Motu Nui. By tradition, the sooty terns were brought to Motu Nui once a year by Makemake to nest and breed their young.

On a certain September day, probably the spring equinox, the matatoa of all the clans gathered with the priests on a beach north of the volcano for a great feast. There were chants, dances and readings from the rongorongo tablets thick wooden planks densely covered with a lovely script developed in the island and unique to it. These tablets have never been conclusively deciphered, but it seems that the script of 120 symbols records chants about the deeds of Easter ancestors in a combination of pictographic and ideographic characters.



 

When the feast was finished, a procession made its way to Orongo, up the slopes
of the volcano to cliffs which plunges 243 metres (800 feet) to the sea,
with the islet of Motu Nui roughly opposite

The matatoa and a crowd of ordinary people arrived at this place and passed the time with long chants while one servant of each climbed down the cliff and started the long swim to Motu Nui? in earlier times it seems likely that this was done by the warriors themselves. On the island, the servants searched among the rocks for the nests of the sooty terns and waited for the first egg to be laid. When an egg was found, the finder dived back into the sea with it and, while the matatoa on the cliff top tried to recognize the swimmer, laboured back through the breakers to the mainland.

Then the servant had to climb the cliff again and deliver the egg to his master, who then became the Birdman. The chanting began again and the successful matatoa, who was now imbued with the spirit of Makemake and so subject to tapu, was escorted by the crowds to Rano Raraku former quarry of the great statues and isolated in a special house for his year of sacred office. And another relief carving of a birdman with a bird's head on a human body was added to the rocks of Orongo to commemorate him. The servants, who brought the spirit of Makemake through the sea, were not remembered.


This spectacular ceremony, whose age is not known, took place against a background of increasing murder and destruction in the late period. After the statues had been toppled, the ahu too were allowed to deteriorate even though burials in small stone chambers were still placed in them. Apart from the defended caves which replaced the oval houses as the chief dwellings, large round towers of drystone masonry with corbelled chambers within were built along the coast. These tupa arc curiously reminiscent of the Scottish brochs and the Sardinian nuraghi built on the other side of the world 2000 years earlier, but the exact purpose of the Easter structures has not been proved.

Memorial
 

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