The monography deals with the problem of Polynesian culture hero – in local mythology named Māui. The purpose of this work is to summarise, analyse and compare individual motifs in the mythological cycle of this culture hero – who appears not only in Polynesia, but also in the mythology of Melanesia and Micronesia. I concentrated especially on searching the like and unlike motifs in eastern Polynesian and western Polynesian myths. The focus lays in comparing the mythological motifs from Māui cycle which relate to his most important actions – fishing up islands from the bottom of the sea, lifting the skies from the earth, restraining the movement of the sun in the sky, bringing the gift of fire and attempt at gaining immortality for mankind. Based on information acquired the purpose was to build a typology and overview of differences in the selected individual myths about this culture hero.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

Vols. for 1892-1941 contain the transactions and proceedings of the society.