Maui

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In the house of Taranga there were four sons, all of them named Maui, and then one more. The last was born before his time, a thing too small to live, and his mother wrapped him in a coil of her topknot — her tikitiki — and gave him to the sea. The waves did not take him. Seaweed and the soft bodies of jellyfish held him together; the spirits of the sky-world took him in and reared him; and when he was grown he came back to his mother’s fire and counted himself among her sons. She named the others when she named him, and could not deny the fifth. So he took his place at the end of the row and was called Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, Maui wrapped in the topknot of Taranga — and the youngest, the smallest, the cleverest, the one always in trouble. He is the figure that more of Polynesia knows than any other, and almost everything that makes human life livable, in the telling, he took by trickery from someone who did not want to give it.

The last-born and his line

Maui is a demigod, which in this world is a precise station and not a vague honorific. He stands half in the line of people and half in the line of the elements, and the doubleness is the engine of his whole story. In the fullest Maori telling, recorded in the nineteenth century from Maori narrators, his father is Makeatutara, who has charge of the underworld, and his mother Taranga belongs among the living; the child cast to the sea and reared by sky-spirits returns carrying both inheritances at once. His name carries the manner of his coming: alongside Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga he is Maui-potiki, Maui the last-born, and — with the affection a people keeps for its sharpest child — Maui-te-whare-kino, Maui the house of trouble.

Being last-born is not, here, a misfortune to be overcome. In the order of these genealogies the senior line carries rank and the weight of tapu, the sacred restriction that hedges what is set apart; the junior, freed from some of that weight, is the one who can move, improvise, push at a limit. Maui is the youngest of the youngest, and so the freest of all. His brothers are steady and unremarkable — Maui-taha, Maui-roto, Maui-pae, Maui-waho, ranged by the parts of the canoe they sit in — and in story after story they are the foil: cautious where he is bold, and forever the ones who spoil the work at the last moment because they cannot wait. He has a sister, Hina, whose name travels with him across the ocean and who in some islands is his mother instead.

The genealogies that hold all this are not background to the religion; in the Polynesian world they are its spine. A person recites descent — whakapapa, the Maori call it — to know who they are and what mana, what realized sacred potency, runs in them. Maui’s mixed descent is the reason he can do what he does. He is close enough to the gods to handle their fire and wrestle their sun, and close enough to people to want, on their behalf, the things the gods keep back. The reciting of his deeds is itself a kind of genealogy: a list of the conditions of life and the moment each was won.

The wharenui Te Hau-ki-Turanga, the carved meeting house in which ancestors stand in worked wood; the deeds of Maui belong to the body of whakapapa such houses hold. Photo by Flickr user “111 Emergency,” CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What he won from the world

The shape of Maui’s significance is best read in the order his deeds usually take, because each is a limit on human life lifted by a single act, and together they amount to a charter for the world as it is.

He thought the days too short. The sun — Tama-nui-te-ra, the great son of light — crossed the sky so fast that nothing could be finished before dark, and food would not cook and cloth would not dry. So Maui and his brothers plaited ropes of flax, strong flat ropes of the kind used for snares, and traveled by night to the great pit in the east out of which the sun rises. There they set the net across the mouth of the pit, and when the sun came up into it they held him fast, and Maui beat him with an enchanted weapon — in the Maori telling the jawbone of his ancestress — until the sun, broken and exhausted, agreed to go slowly across the sky. The days have been long enough for work ever since. In Hawaiʻi the same deed is fixed to a place a traveler can stand in: the vast summit crater of Haleakala, the House of the Sun, on the island that itself bears Maui’s name, is where he caught the sun’s rays in cords; and there the motive is his mother Hina, whose bark-cloth would not dry in the short days.

He fished up the land. This is the deed the whole ocean shares, told of one archipelago after another. Maui, refused bait by his brothers, struck his own nose and baited his hook with his blood; and the hook itself, in the Maori version, was no ordinary hook but the jawbone of his grandmother Murirangawhenua, given to him for the purpose and charged with her power. He let it down to the floor of the sea and drew up a great fish — and the fish is land. In Aotearoa the North Island is to this day Te Ika-a-Maui, the Fish of Maui; the South Island is his canoe, Te Waka-a-Maui, the vessel he stood in to make the catch. He left his brothers to guard the fish while he went to find a tohunga, an expert in the proper karakia, the chants that would make the catch safe; but they could not wait, and fell to cutting the fish up among themselves, and it writhed under the knife — and that thrashing is why the land of the North Island is broken into mountains and gorges and valleys instead of lying flat. The same hook hauls up the Tongan islands in Tonga, where Maui drew Lofanga and the rest of the Haʻapai group and then Vavaʻu from the deep; it raises the Gambier Islands in Mangareva, where he is Maui-matavaru; and it makes the Hawaiian chain in Hawaiʻi, where the hook is named Manaiakalani and the brothers’ impatience again breaks the single land he meant to raise into a string of separate islands.

He won fire for people. When the fires of the world had gone out, Maui went down to his ancestress Mahuika, who keeps fire in her body, and asked her for some. She drew a flaming fingernail and gave it to him, and he carried it off and quenched it, and came back for another, and another, until every nail and toenail but one was gone and Mahuika, understanding at last that she was being robbed, threw her last fire after him and set the whole world burning. Maui fled, calling on the weather-powers, on rain and storm, to put it out — and they all but drowned Mahuika’s fire. But the last of it she had cast into certain trees, the kaikomako and the mahoe among them, and there it stayed; and that is why fire can still be drawn out of dry wood by friction to this day. In the Tahitian telling Maui is the one who teaches the friction-drill, and is honored as the discoverer of fire under another name.

Maui Snaring the Sun, pen and ink, c. 1927, by Arman Manookian (1904–1931); Honolulu Academy of Arts. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is a pattern under all of this. Each deed takes a fixed condition of the world — the speed of the sun, the absence of land, the lack of fire — and bends it, once and for all, in favor of the people who will live in it. Maui does not create; he wrests and rearranges, and he does it by cunning more than by force, getting the better of beings far older and stronger than himself. He is not, for the most part, a god to be prayed to. Across most of the islands he receives little or no cult; his place is in the chants and the tales rather than on the marae, the sacred ground, or in the offerings. He is the figure through whom the tradition thinks about ingenuity itself — the proposition that the world as found is not the world as it must remain, and that a clever last-born can change its terms.

The death of immortality

And then there is the deed he did not finish, which is the gravest thing in the cycle and, in its Maori form, the one that fixes the human condition for good.

Maui had taken so much from the elements that he conceived the ambition to take the last thing: death. The keeper of death is Hine-nui-te-po, the great woman of the night, who waits at the edge of the world where the sun goes down. Maui’s plan was to reverse the direction of birth — to enter her sleeping body and pass through it and be born again out of her, and in doing so to undo death not only for himself but for everyone; if he could do this, the tradition says, people would have lived forever. He gathered the small birds of the forest to go with him, and warned them above all not to laugh until he had come safely through, for laughter would wake her. He stripped, and he went in, head and shoulders disappearing into the sleeping goddess. And the little fantail — the piwakawaka, that flits and chatters and cannot keep still — was so delighted by the sight of him that it burst out laughing. Hine-nui-te-po woke. She closed her body upon him, and Maui was crushed and died there, the first of all to die. Because he failed, death stays in the world, and every person born is mortal.

It is worth marking how this differs from the bright triumphs that come before. The sun-snaring and the island-fishing and the fire-getting all end in a permanent gain; the last deed ends in a permanent loss, and the two together are the tradition’s whole account of the human lot. People have long days and dry land and warm fire — and they die, because the cleverest of them all reached past what even he could take and was undone by a bird’s laughter at the worst possible moment. The cycle does not present this as a punishment or a fall. It presents it as the way the line was drawn between what ingenuity can win and what it cannot, and it draws that line at the body of death itself. In the Maori frame there is a further turn: Maui’s mortality was sealed before this, when his father Makeatutara stumbled over the words of the birth-rite performed for him, and the gods marked him for death by that flaw. Either way the result holds. The demigod who beat the sun could not beat the night.

The cycle across the ocean and its life today

The most striking fact about Maui is not any single deed but the reach of the whole figure. Tellings of Maui are found across nearly the entire Polynesian triangle — in Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Tahiti and the wider Society Islands, the Marquesas, Mangareva, Tonga, Samoa, the Tuamotus — and his fame runs even past its western edge, with related traditions recorded as far as parts of Micronesia. The deeds shift from island to island: a feat told of one archipelago in detail may be only named in another, the names of his parents change, his rank as god or man or prophet changes, the local geography he fishes up is always the geography underfoot. In Tahiti he is remembered partly as a wise man and priest, later deified, who stayed the sun while his work at the marae was unfinished. In Hawaiʻi the snaring of the sun is anchored to Haleakala and the fishhook to the constellation that Western charts call the tail of Scorpius. Yet under all the variation the figure holds: the small clever last-born who takes the conditions of life from beings stronger than himself. Comparative scholars treat the cycle as one of the deepest-rooted narrative complexes in the Pacific, carried island to island over the long generations of the great migrations and adapted wherever it landed — though the exact relations among the regional versions, and which elements are oldest, remain matters of scholarly argument rather than settled fact.

What the tradition is needs to be kept clear, because the way it reaches us shapes what we can know. The religion of these islands is oral: the genealogies, the chants and karakia, the navigators’ star-knowledge were held in trained memory, not in books. The Maui cycle was written down only when outsiders arrived to write it — the explorers from the late eighteenth century onward, and then the missionaries, and the nineteenth-century ethnographers who collected from Maori and Hawaiian narrators. Sir George Grey, a colonial governor, compiled an influential Maori collection in 1855 from materials supplied by Maori narrators whose own authorship the published volume largely passed over; the Congregationalist W. D. Westervelt gathered the Hawaiian Maui legends into an English volume in 1910. These collectors did real preservation work, and they also brought their own frames — the missionary vocabulary of the heathen and the idol, the comparativist’s urge to slot Polynesia into a borrowed scheme — and a reader has to weigh the gloss against the matter it carries. The living tradition outlasted all of them. Among the Maori and the Hawaiians and across the islands the deeds of Maui are still told, taught, carved, and named into the land, and the late-twentieth-century cultural revivals that returned Christianity’s long ascendancy to one strand among several have given the old cycle new public life rather than ending it.

A modern sculpture of Maui hauling on the cords that snare the sun, on the island of Maui, Hawaiʻi. Photo by Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

He has become, in the present, the best-loved figure the tradition has — the one a child meets first, the demigod of human ingenuity who almost, but not quite, beat the gods at their own game. The land still carries his catch: a person standing on the North Island of New Zealand is standing on the back of his fish, and one standing on the South is standing in his canoe. The other great powers of this world hold their domains by right of being — the sea is Tangaroa, the forests and the light are Tane. Maui holds nothing by right. What he has, he took; and what he could not take — the one thing past every trick, the immortality he reached for in the body of the night and lost to a fantail’s laugh — is exactly the measure of how much a clever creature can change the terms of the world, and where the world says no.

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