White and Brown Tohungas

New Zealand Tablet, 25 October 1906, Page 9

White and Brown Tohungas

m Bridge is apt to snub, pak-a-poo, and the" Caucasian fortune-teller and quack would scorn to brush skirts with the brown tohunga (witch-doctor and seer). But, me-

thods apart, the difference between them is pretty much like the difference between tweedle-dum and' tweedle-dee. Dr. Pomare (Native health-officer/ said some .days ago to a- Lyttelton Times 1 interviewer : ' The only difference is that with the tohunga there is a certain amount of incantation, and in . this way the follower might get a little more for his money. You -had the same, thing yourselves in England 200 years ago,' he added, ' until they commenced to burn the witches.' Dr. Porhafc might have also added that the officialdom that roasted supposed witches, also issued licenses to fortune-tellers.' It was like the old days in Alexandria, where astrologers were likewise licensed, and paid the State a tribute which went by the- highly appropriate name of '.fool's pence '—the fools being, of course, the gullible innocents upon whom the fortune-telling birds of prey waxed fat. There never was, perhaps, in history a period in which such vast sums were filched from the pockets' of gobemouches by hordes of arrant quacks and white tohungas, who - • '

' Make fools believe in their foreseeing Of things before they arc- in being, To swallow gudgeons ere they .re catched, , And count their chickens ere they're hatched. . . But still the best for him that gives ' The best price fort, or' best- believes '. v 'Twas ever thus (as the rationalist Lecky admits) in ages that were marked by a decline of religious faith. " It's dredful easy to be a phool ', says Billings ; ' a mac kan be one and not know it '. And in the matter of tohungaism, gudgeon-swallowing, and such-like follies, the ' superior race ' and the ' higher civilisation ' in New Zealand 1 cannot afford to throw stones at our brown brother, the Maori.