Tane

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In the Waipoua forest of the far north of Aotearoa stands a kauri tree some fifty meters tall and nearly fourteen around the trunk, old enough to have been a sapling before the first canoes made landfall. It has a name. The name is Tane-mahuta, lord of the forest, and the tree is not merely named for the atua but understood as his standing body, one of the kinolau, the many forms in which a god is present in the visible world. To walk beneath it is to stand inside the work of the one who made the world livable. He is the reason there is room to stand at all.

The son who parted the parents

Tane is a son of Ranginui the sky-father and Papatuanuku the earth-mother, in the genealogies of the Maori the chiefly children of the first pair. In the beginning Rangi and Papa lay locked in a tight embrace, and their many sons were crushed in the close darkness between them, unable to stand, unable to see, the world a single black room with no light in it. The account that survives in fullest form comes from the writings of the Te Arawa chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke, whose Maori-language manuscript the colonial governor George Grey compiled and translated, publishing it in 1855 as Polynesian Mythology — a text that must be read for what it is, a Maori narrative passed through a settler-administrator’s editorial hand, with the informant’s authorship long unmarked.

In that account the brothers debate what to do. The fiercest of them, Tumatauenga, counsels the shortest path: kill the parents and be done. It is Tane who argues against killing, and for parting them — to thrust Rangi up to be a stranger in the sky above and leave Papa below to nurture her children. The brothers try in turn. Tangaroa of the sea strains and fails; Rongo of the cultivated foods fails; Haumia-tiketike of the wild foods fails. Each pushes upward with his hands and cannot move the weight of the sky. Then Tane lies on his back. He sets his head and shoulders against his mother and his feet against his father, and instead of pushing with his arms he straightens his great legs. Slowly, with a long groaning of the sundered pair, Rangi is forced up and away, and the light comes in.

This is the central act of the Maori cosmos, the hinge on which everything after it turns. The black room becomes Te Ao Marama, the world of light, the realm of the living and the seen — set against Te Po, the night, the dark from which all things came and to which the dead return. Tane himself is known under many names that record his deeds: Tane-mahuta, Tane of the forest; Tane-nui-a-Rangi, great Tane the son of the sky; and others that attach to particular tribes and chants. The multiplicity is not confusion but a feature of a god approached from many directions at once, each name a doorway into a different aspect of him.

Not every tribe tells it with Tane as the one who succeeds. In some Taranaki traditions it is Tangaroa who effects the separation, and the variant names and orderings matter, because the religion is oral. Its authority is the whakapapa, the genealogical line that carries the chant, recited and guarded by the tohunga — not a single fixed book against which the others can be measured and corrected. Each canoe and tribe descends through its own remembered line back to the first parents, and a teller’s version is true within the line that holds it. But across the broad sweep of the tradition it is Tane who stands as the separator, and the separation that defines him.

It did not end the conflict. One brother, Tawhirimatea of the winds, never consented to the parting and would not stay below; he followed his father up into the sky and from there makes war on his siblings still, driving his storms down upon the forests and the sea in grief at the broken embrace. The rain that falls is Rangi weeping for Papa below him; the mist that rises from the earth at dawn is Papa’s longing rising toward him. The cosmos retains the wound of its own making.

Tane-mahuta, the great kauri of Waipoua. Photograph by Sids1, New Zealand, 2008. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Lord of the woods, climber of the heavens, maker of the first woman

With his father raised, Tane became the maker who furnished the parted world. He clothed Rangi: he sought out the lights and set them in the sky, fixing the stars across his father’s body and placing the sun and the moon, so that the sky-father, naked and cold above, was adorned. And he clothed his mother. The forests are Tane’s making and Tane’s domain — Te Wao-nui-a-Tane, the great forest of Tane — and the trees and the birds within it descend from him, so that he is lord of everything that grows from the ground and everything that flies above it. The timber of a house, the bird snared for the pot, the great trunk hollowed into a canoe: all of these are taken from the body of Tane, and the taking is never casual.

He is also the seeker. In a strand of the tradition carried with special care, Tane climbed the heavens to fetch knowledge for the world below. He had to pass through eleven heavens, reconnoitering and negotiating each, opposed at every stage by his brother Whiro, who would have kept the knowledge dark; the winds beat back the birds and insects Whiro sent against him. At the twelfth and highest heaven, Te Toi-o-nga-rangi, he was ushered into the presence of the supreme being, Io-matua-kore, and there received the three baskets — nga kete o te wananga. They are most often named te kete-tuauri, the basket of sacred ritual and prayer and the things behind sight; te kete-tuatea, the basket holding the harmful knowledge, the makutu; and te kete-aronui, the basket of the knowledge useful to humankind, the world before the eyes. (The names and their assignments vary by tribe and teacher — some give the baskets as light, darkness, and pursuit — and the variation is itself a feature of a knowledge held in living minds.) Tane carried the baskets down. Knowledge, in this telling, is not native to the human world; it was brought, from the highest place, by the one who first opened the world to light.

Then Tane made the first woman. There was as yet no human female, and Tane went to a place called Kurawaka and shaped a body from the red earth — the one, the soil, mixed and formed into a woman — and breathed into her, warming the clay into breath and life. Her name is Hine-ahu-one, the earth-formed maiden, the first woman and the mother of the human line. Tane took her, and their daughter was Hine-titama, the dawn-maiden. Tane took his daughter too; and when in time Hine-titama asked who her father was and learned that her husband was the same Tane who had made her mother from the earth, she fled in shame down into the dark. She would not return. She passed into Te Po and became Hine-nui-te-po, the great woman of the night, the goddess at the threshold of death, who waits to receive her descendants when they come down to her. So the line of humankind runs from Tane through the earth-formed woman, and the same myth that gives people their origin gives them their mortality: the dawn-maiden who became the night is the reason the living must die.

A wharenui (carved ancestral meeting house) at Otamarakau marae, Bay of Plenty. The carving is worked from Tane’s forest. Photograph by Matsujima, 2018. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The forest under tapu and the gods across the sea

Because the forest is the body of the atua, entering it to take from it is a transaction with a god, governed by tapu — the sacred restriction that marks a thing as set apart and not to be touched without the proper words. To fell a tree for a canoe was no small undertaking. A tohunga, a ritual expert, would select the tree and recite the karakia, the incantations that acknowledged the mauri, the life-force, of the tree, that lifted the tapu so the wood could be cut, and that propitiated Tane for the taking; once the trunk was down, the tapu was set back in place. The snaring of birds was hedged about the same way, with a karakia said over the catch and over the tree that drew them. The principle is exact: the timber and the birds are not raw material but kin and property of a god, and the relationship is one of permission asked and given.

What followed a failure to ask is told in the story of Rata. Rata went into the forest and felled a great tree to carve a canoe, and worked it through the day; when he returned the next morning the tree stood whole again in its place, unfelled. He cut it down a second time, and again it rose overnight. At last he hid and watched, and saw the hakuturi, the multitude of forest creatures and guardian spirits of Tane, gathering up the chips and the splinters and singing the tree back into standing. They told him plainly what he had done wrong: he had taken from Tane’s forest without the rites, without leave. Only when Rata had made his peace with the proper observances was the canoe allowed to be built. The story is a charter for the whole etiquette of the bush — that the forest belongs to Tane and answers to him, and that human use of it is conditional on remembering whose it is.

The same atua, under a cognate name, stands at the head of the Hawaiian pantheon far to the north. There he is Kane, the foremost of the four great akua — Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa — and in Hawaiian reckoning seemingly the highest of them, the god of creation and procreation, of fresh water and sunlight and the light of life itself, ancestor of chiefs and commoners alike. The springs and pools that Kane and Kanaloa opened across the islands are still called by names that mark them as water given by a god. And the making of the first human recurs in his story too: the gods gathered red earth and formed it into a body in the likeness of Kane and breathed life into it. The kinship of Kane and Tane — the name itself, the red-earth making, the light and the life — is one of the clearest threads tying the scattered descendants of the Polynesian voyaging into a single ancestral religion, carried east and north across thousands of miles of open ocean and remembered, with local variation, on every island where the canoes landed.

The threads run in both directions through the family of gods. Tane’s brothers map the world among themselves as he maps the forest: Tangaroa takes the sea and its teeming life, Tumatauenga takes war and, as the ancestor of humankind in his fierce aspect, stands as the god to whom the others must be propitiated when their domains are entered for human use. The demigod Maui, later in the line, fishes up the land and snares the sun and at last dies in the attempt to defeat death itself at the threshold guarded by Hine-nui-te-po — the same goddess Tane’s own daughter became. The cosmos is a single genealogy, and Tane’s separation is the event that makes all the rest of it possible: without the parting there is no light, no sky for the stars, no ground for the forest, no room for the brothers to take up their departments at all.

A living lord of the forest

The written record of Tane begins with outsiders. James Cook reached New Zealand in 1769; the first sustained accounts of Maori cosmology were set down by explorers, then by missionaries who arrived from 1814 and who often recorded the old religion in the act of trying to displace it, and then by nineteenth-century ethnographers and colonial officials such as Grey, whose 1855 compilation became the standard source precisely because it preserved Maori narrators’ words even as it absorbed their authorship into a governor’s book. The result is that much of what is known of Tane comes filtered through a frame hostile or indifferent to it — a source-distance that any reading has to keep in view, and that later Maori scholarship and the living tradition have worked to correct.

For the religion did not end. The arrival of Christianity, the New Zealand land wars, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi — whose Maori and English texts diverge sharply on whether sovereignty was ceded — and the confiscations that followed pressed hard on Maori life and on the transmission of the old knowledge. But Tane was never displaced from the forest. Through the twentieth-century Maori renaissance, the revival of te reo Maori and of the marae and the carving and the karakia, the framework in which the forest is the body of an atua has remained a living one, increasingly woven into conservation language as kaitiakitanga, guardianship — the duty owed to Tane’s domain reframed as the duty owed to a threatened ecology.

There is, too, the matter of the dead. Hine-nui-te-po, who began as Tane’s daughter and fled into the night, receives the spirits of the descendants Tane fathered, and in the wider tradition the dead travel north and leap from the cape at the top of the island to begin the road back toward Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland from which the canoes first came. The same line that gave humankind its origin in Tane’s red-earth woman gives it its end in his daughter’s keeping — a closed circuit of light and dark, day and night, the world above and the world below, with Tane standing at the moment the two were first prised apart. The afterlife is not an escape from the genealogy but a continuation of it in the other direction, back down toward Te Po and out across the sea toward the home of the ancestors.

The clearest living sign of the atua is the tree. Identified and named in 1924 when surveyors cut the road through Waipoua, Tane-mahuta is the largest kauri known to stand, and it is treated as what its name says it is. When the kauri dieback disease reached the northern forests, threatening the great trees with a fungal rot spread on the soil that clings to a walker’s boots, the response carried the old grammar into the present: footwear-cleaning stations and rahui, ritual closures, to protect the lord of the forest. The felling of such a giant is unthinkable now for reasons that are at once ecological and sacred and not finally separable — the science of the pathogen and the tapu of the god pointing, as it happens, the same way. The atua who lay on his back and forced the sky from the earth so that his children could stand in the light is, in the oldest of his bodies, a tree that was already ancient when the first karakia was said beneath it, and that the people who descend from him are now bending every effort to keep alive.

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