goddess figure

Carving of a goddess- wooden; heavy; dark-brown; wide across the shoulders; fingers and toes are formed by notched incisions; many indentations on forehead and sides of head - may be result of beating; very similar to 32651 (ethnology specimen). The angular form imposed by carving in extremely hard wood became emphasized and developed as a positive sculptural quality. Only five wooden Tongan female figures such as this one are known to exist, three of them are in the ethnology collections of the Auckland Museum. It is generally accepted that this figure represents the primary Tongan god, Hikule’o, goddess of Pulotu, the spirit world that is to the north-west of Tonga and where many of the Tongan gods reside. In 1829 the Ha’apai chief, Taufa’ahau, an early Christian convert who would go on to become King George Tupou I, set about destroying the old religion of Tonga by demolishing the traditional temples, disbanding the old priesthood and defiling the images of their gods. In 1830 the missionaries John Thomas and John Williams were witness to the debasement of five god figures, of which this is almost certainly one, by Taufa’ahau. Rev. John Williams states Taufa’ahau “drove a large herd of pigs into the sacred enclosure… and suspended the gods by the neck to the rafters of the house in which they had been adored!… On observing five goddesses hanging by the neck, I requested this intrepid chief to give me one of them, which he immediately cut down and presented to me. I have brought it to England, with the very string around its neck by which it was hung…” Rev. John Thomas is said to have acquired four other god figures. W.O. Oldman, a London artefact dealer and collector, later acquired three of these goddess figures as part of his ethnographic collection. The Oldman collection is an important collection of Maori, Polynesian and Melanesian artefacts, and was purchased in 1948 by the New Zealand government. The collection was later distributed between the four main metropolitan museums in New Zealand, with some material going to regional museums.