Tangaroa

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The carvers of Rarotonga and Aitutaki gave him a body of heavy wood: a great squat figure, the head a third of the whole, the hands resting on a rounded belly, the procreative organ marked large, for he was the father of multitudes. These figures the ta’unga, the carving specialists, wedged into the prows of canoes when men went out past the reef, so that the maker of the fish would ride with those who came to take them. He is Tangaroa, and the sea is his.

The name moves across the ocean the way the swell does, changing its shape as it travels. In Aotearoa, the islands of the south that the Maori reached last, he is Tangaroa, one of the many sons of the sky and the earth. In Samoa and Tonga, in the west where the Polynesian world first cohered, he is Tagaloa, and he is not one god among brothers but the supreme one, the creator who dwelt in the empty heavens before there was anything to stand on. In Tahiti he is Ta’aroa, who made the world out of the inside of his own shell. In Hawai’i he is Kanaloa, walking beside the great god of life. One figure, then, holds two faces that scarcely seem to belong to the same head — and the distance between them is one of the oldest questions the tradition keeps about itself.

Carved god-sticks figuring the six sons of Rangi and Papa — Tumatauenga, Tawhirimatea, Tane, Tangaroa, Rongo, and Haumia — from John White, The Ancient History of the Maori (Wellington: Government Printer, 1887-1891). Public domain.

Genealogy: the child of the sky who took the sea

In the Maori telling, the world begins pressed close and dark. Ranginui the sky-father (Rangi) lay upon Papatuanuku the earth-mother (Papa) in a long embrace, and their children grew between them in the cramped night, in the airless dark of their parents’ bodies. The sons took counsel, and most of them resolved on a hard thing: to part the parents and let in the light. It was Tane who at last set his shoulders to the earth and his feet to the sky and forced them apart, so that day came into the world. Tangaroa was among the brothers who willed the separation — and when the great division of domains followed, when each son took a realm to rule, Tangaroa took the sea.

So the sea-god is, in the south, a departmental atua: a son who holds the ocean as his brothers hold the forest, the cultivated food, the wild food, and war. Tane is the forest and the birds and the trees and, in the end, the maker of the first woman and the ancestor of humankind. Rongo holds the kumara and the planted fields; Haumia the fern-root and the food that grows untended; Tumatauenga is the war-god and the ancestor of fighting men. And Tawhirimatea, the storm-god, alone among the brothers had refused the separation. He grieved for his father, and he climbed into the sky with Rangi and made his children — the winds, the squall lines, the cloud-banks — into an army of vengeance against the brothers who had torn the family in two.

This is the quarrel from which the sea takes its enmity. Tawhirimatea fell first on the forest, snapping Tane’s trees; then he turned on the ocean. His onslaught lashed Tangaroa’s domain into fury, and Tangaroa’s own descendants split in their terror. Punga, a son of Tangaroa, had two children: Ikatere, the ancestor of the fish, and Tu-te-wehiwehi (also given as Tu-te-wanawana), the ancestor of the reptiles. Driven by the storm, Ikatere and his brood fled deeper into the sea, while Tu-te-wehiwehi and his took to the land and hid in the forest. From that flight the two lines were sundered forever — the fish to the water, the lizards and the tuatara to the woods.

And here the grievance hardens into the shape of the world. Tangaroa never forgave Tane for sheltering the runaway reptiles in his forest. The two brothers, sea and land, have been at war ever since, and men are caught in the middle of it. Tane gives the descendants of Tumatauenga — the people — the timber for their canoes, the wood for their fishhooks, the fiber for their nets, so that they may go out and take the children of Tangaroa. Tangaroa answers in kind: he swamps the canoes, he tears at the coast, he sweeps houses and trees and whole stretches of land out into deep water when the floods come. The tide gnawing the shore and the axe ringing in the forest are, in this reading of the world, two halves of one ancient feud, and every fishing voyage is a raid across the front line.

The southern traditions branch further. Among the Kai Tahu of the South Island the genealogy is told another way, with Tangaroa a son of Te Moretu; in some accounts he takes Te Anu-matao, the chilling cold, to wife and fathers the departmental fish-deities, Poutini among them. He carries epithets — Tangaroa-whakamau-tai, Tangaroa who controls the tides — and in the dialect of the south his name softens to Takaroa. These are not contradictions to be resolved but the ordinary condition of an oral cosmology, in which each lineage holds its own true line of descent.

The father of the fish, and the lord of the deep

What Tangaroa rules is not water in the abstract but a peopled realm. The fish are his offspring, his descendants in the literal genealogical sense, and this single fact governs how an islander may approach the sea. A catch is not a harvest from an indifferent element; it is a taking from the household of a god, and it carries the weight of tapu — the sacred restriction that hedges what is set apart and dangerous. Before men committed their canoes to his water, offerings were made to Tangaroa; the first fish of a catch was returned to him, given back to the deep from which it came, an acknowledgment that what was taken was his to give. The fisherman who failed in this owed a debt he could not see, and the sea collected its debts.

The same logic put a carved Tangaroa in the prow of the Cook Islands canoe. The figure was not decoration. It was the maker of the fish brought along to the taking of the fish, his presence the thing that made the venture lawful and the catch likely. In a world where the boundary between the living and the divine was thin and crossable, the god could be where his image was.

A carved Tangaroa figure, Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Photograph by dustinpsmith, 2008, CC BY 2.0.

But the deep was also the road. The Polynesians are the greatest open-ocean navigators the world has produced, a people who settled a triangle of water larger than any land empire, and the element they crossed was Tangaroa’s. To put a canoe to sea on a voyage of weeks, out of sight of any land, was to give oneself wholly into the keeping of the sea-god; the navigators who held the memorized star-paths and the swell-patterns in their heads went out across his domain on his sufferance. The god of the fish was therefore also the god of the passage, and the line between fishing the deep and crossing it was, for a maritime people, no line at all. The same offerings that asked for a catch asked for a safe water under the hull. (For the science of those crossings see the Polynesians; the star-knowledge by which a navigator read his position from the rising and setting of the lights belonged to the same order of trained, divinatory expertise as the priest’s reading of omens — a memorized divination of the sky and sea.)

The two faces: departmental god and supreme creator

Travel west, back toward the Tonga-Samoa region where ancestral Polynesian society first took shape, and the sea-child becomes something far larger. In Samoa, Tagaloa — Tagaloa-lagi, Tagaloa of the heavens, Tagaloa Fa’atupunu’u, the begetter — is not a brother among equals but the supreme being, the creator who existed alone in the empty Expanse before the world. There was no land. In his wandering to and fro he stood still, and a rock, papa, grew up under him for him to rest on; and out of the rock and his command the elements of creation were drawn one from another. He made the nine heavens. He made Manu’a the first island and set his earthly seat there, so that the Tuimanu’a, the kings of Manu’a, were reckoned his direct descendants. In a motif that runs through the whole ocean, he is also the fisher of islands: the lands are drawn up from beneath the sea on his hook, hauled into the daylight from the deep.

In Tahiti the supreme creator is Ta’aroa, and his cosmogony is the strangest and the most self-contained in Polynesia. In the long darkness, before sky, before earth, before moon or sun or stars, Ta’aroa existed alone inside a shell that turned like an egg in the void. He had no father and no mother; he was his own ancestor. When at last he wearied of the dark he cracked the shell with a shake of his body and slid out, and finding nothing — no ground, no air, only himself and the broken shell — he made the world from what he had. The shell he broke into the rocks and the sand and the foundations of the earth. His spine he made into the mountain ranges. His tears filled the seas and the lakes and the rivers; his fingernails and his feathers and his blood went into the things of the world. He raised up the great vault of the sky and propped it on the gods, and the cosmos was his own substance, distributed. The most extensive record of this Tahitian theology is Ancient Tahiti (1928), the compilation Teuira Henry assembled from the priestly chants her grandfather, the London Missionary Society missionary John Muggridge Orsmond, had gathered in the first half of the nineteenth century — a recovery filtered, like nearly all the early record, through missionary hands.

A Tangaroa figure, Aitutaki, Cook Islands. Photograph by RDPixelShop, 2007, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In Hawai’i the cognate is Kanaloa, and here the god is neither solitary creator nor quarrelsome sea-brother but one of a complementary pair. Kanaloa is the deep ocean, the god of the long voyage and of healing, figured in the squid and the octopus; and he is named almost always beside Kane, the god of fresh water and sunlight and the living things. The two are read as halves of a single power. Kane was called over the building of the canoe, Kanaloa over its sailing; Kane governed the northern edge of the sun’s track and Kanaloa the southern; the fresh spring belonged to Kane and the salt deep to Kanaloa. Together Kane and Kanaloa wandered the islands opening springs of sweet water in the rock, the bright god and the dark companion working as one. (That Kanaloa was originally an underworld or adversary figure is sometimes asserted but is not securely established — it belongs among the contested claims about him, not the settled ones.)

How one name came to hold both the departmental sea-son of the south and the supreme creator of the west is the standing puzzle of comparative Polynesian study. One reading takes the western supreme-creator form as the older, the high god demoted in the east into a member of a pantheon as new generations of gods crowded in above him; another takes the departmental form as primary and the western elevation as a local development. The tradition itself does not adjudicate, and neither does the scholarship with any finality. What is certain is the breadth of the name’s reach: beyond the four great forms it runs out to the Marquesan Tana’oa, the Tangaroa of the Tuamotus, the Tangaloa of Rennell and Bellona, and on into the Tagaro of Vanuatu in Melanesia — one of the most widely distributed divine names in the Pacific.

Reception: the missionary recasting, and the road made a road again

The written record of Tangaroa is, like the whole Polynesian religious record, a record made by outsiders and by converts. The religion was oral — the whakapapa genealogies recited to fix a lineage to the beginning of the world, the karakia chants that opened a voyage or sanctified a catch, the navigators’ memorized star-lore. It entered writing through the explorers from Cook’s voyages forward, through the missionaries who came after them, and through the nineteenth-century ethnographers, the colonial governor and amateur scholar Sir George Grey among them, whose Polynesian Mythology (1855) was assembled from the dictation of named and unnamed Maori informants. None of these were neutral hands. The early missionaries in particular came to displace the gods they recorded, and their hostility marks the texts they left.

Nowhere is the mediation plainer than in the fate of Kanaloa. In the missionary century, as Christian categories were laid over the Hawaiian pantheon, the dark companion of Kane was pressed into a foreign mold and equated with the Christian devil — the squid that had been his sacred body increasingly looked on with suspicion. This was a recasting from outside, not a development from within: the older sources show Kanaloa as Kane’s complement, not his adversary, the salt deep to the fresh spring, and the satanic reading is a colonial overlay that should be read as such rather than mistaken for the tradition’s own theology.

Against that long pressure the gods of the sea have proved unexpectedly durable. The sea-rites outlived the formal conversions; fishermen across Polynesia have gone on giving the first fish back and asking the deep for its protection long after the temples came down. And in the last half-century the ocean itself — Tangaroa’s road, the deep the ancestors crossed — has been recrossed in earnest. The revival of long-distance voyaging, carried by double-hulled canoes sailed without instruments by navigators who relearned the old star-knowledge, has put waka and va’a back on the open water between the island groups, committing their crews once more to the keeping of the sea. The element that the early modern world treated as the boundary of the Polynesian world has been reclaimed as what it always was inside the tradition: not an edge but a highway, the domain of the god the ancestors trusted to carry them. Among living Maori the name carries the same weight it always did. The sea is Tangaroa; to enter it is to enter his house; and the courtesies owed to a host whose children one has come to eat are owed to him still.

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