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Pumpkin Worship
An article discovered by our informant
Taral Wayne
Anthropomorphologist from Toronto, Ontario.
"Pumpkin worship by the modern peoples of the Central Pacific islands
is commonly thought to be a distant memory of primeval head hunting
customs. Certainly it is true that the islanders of the Cook, Nimitz,
and Piccard Seas did engage in head hunting wars long before the
advent of European and Asian explorers in the 15th. and 16th.
centuries. Many intact skull shrines are still popular tourist stops,
particularly in the Spontoon Island Independencies, where they are
protected by law. (Elsewhere they have been largely vandalized by
unscrupulous relic hunters, and religious bigots.)
Another often heard theory is that the worship of pumpkins is a recent
import from Europe, and indeed the Hallowe'en pumpkin is conflated in
the popular imagination with the true Spontoon (or other Island)
pumpkin.
Nor is it to be confused with The Great Pumpkin, a spurious invention
dating from mid-20th. century America.
The true origin of Central Pacific pumpkin reverence lies elsewhere. To
understand it, we must look instead to the moon. Anyone who has seen
the great silvery orb of our sister planet, hanging over the dark
Pacific, must remark on its ghostly features! The early peoples of the
Central Pacific saw no "Man in the Moon" but a ghastly goblin. It
leered down at them, hungering for the souls of anyone on the water
after the sun had set. Often enough it's hunger was satisfied, as
fishers frequently failed to return as expected at nightfall. To mark
the home of a family whose son or father or brother had fed the
insatiable goblin moon that night, neighbors carved its likeness on the
Mocha-Moshe island fruit, and left its grinning presence by the hut
door.
In later centuries the island fruit was replaced almost universally in
cultivation by European crops. The great orange pumpkin, though the
colour of blood and therefore life, replaced the Mocha-Moshe's pale
skull like form. Similarly, the islanders grew to depend less on fish
as a livelihood, and loses to the hungry moon diminished to rare
occurrences. People began instead to place the image of the "living"
moon outside their huts only during the Harvest Festival, a quaint
remnant of the prior gloomy custom now celebrated by good cheer and
feasting."
-- from "The Bowl Under the Sky: Modern Pacific Rim
Folk Ways and Extinguished Customs of Past Ages", Prof. Roy
Hinkley, BS, MA, Ph.D., 1956, Castaway Press, Honolulu.
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