They imagine that their punctual performance of religious offices procures for them every temporal blessing. And as they believe, that the animating and powerful influence of the divine spirit is every where diffused, it is no wonder that they join to this many superstitious opinions about its operations. Accordingly, they believe that sudden deaths, and all other accidents, are effected by the immediate action of some divinity. If a man only stumble against a stone, and hurt his toe, they impute it to an _Eatooa_; so that they may be literally said, agreeable to their system, to tread enchanted ground. They are startled, in the night, on approaching a _toopapaoo_, where the dead are exposed, in the same manner that many of our ignorant and superstitious people are with the apprehensions of ghosts, and at the sight of a church-yard; and they have an equal confidence in dreams, which they suppose to be communications either from their god, or from the spirits of their departed friends, enabling those favoured with them to foretel future events; but this kind of knowledge is confined to particular people. Omai pretended to have this gift. He told us, that the soul of his father had intimated to him in a dream, on the 26th of July, 1776, that he should go on shore, at some place, within three days; but he was unfortunate in this first attempt to persuade us that he was a prophet; for it was the 1st of August before we got into Teneriffe. Amongst them, however, the dreamers possess a reputation little inferior to that of their inspired priests and priestesses, whose predictions they implicitly believe, and are determined by them in all undertakings of consequence. The priestess who persuaded Opoony to invade Ulietea, is much respected by him; and he never goes to war without consulting her. They also, in some degree, maintain our old doctrine of planetary influence; at least, they are sometimes regulated, in their public counsels, by certain appearances of the moon; particularly when lying horizontally, or much inclined on the convex part, on its first appearance after the change, they are encouraged to engage in war, with confidence of success.
They have traditions concerning the creation, which, as might be expected, are complex, and clouded with obscurity. They say, that a goddess, having a lump or mass of earth suspended in a cord, gave it a swing, and scattered about pieces of land, thus constituting Otaheite, and the neighbouring islands, which were all peopled by a man and a woman originally fixed at Otaheite. This, however, only respects their own immediate creation; for they have notions of an universal one before this; and of lands, of which they have now no other knowledge than what is mentioned in the tradition. Their most remote account reaches to Tatooma and Tapuppa, male and female stones or rocks, who support the congeries of land and water, or our globe underneath. These produced Totorro, who was killed, and divided into land; and, after him, Otaia and Oroo were begotten, who were afterward married, and produced, first land, and then a race of gods. Otai is killed, and Oroo marries a god, her son, called Teorraha, whom she orders to create more land, the animals, and all sorts of food upon the earth; as also the sky, which is supported by men called Teeferei. The spots observed in the moon, are supposed to be groves of a sort of trees which once grew in Otaheite, and being destroyed by some accident, their seeds were carried up thither by doves, where they now flourish.