Tumatauenga

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There is a turn in the Maori account of how the world began that no other version softens. The children of Sky and Earth are crushed in the dark between their parents’ bodies, and they argue what to do. One of them says: kill them. He is voted down — the milder counsel, to push the parents apart and leave them living, wins the day — but the one who spoke for death is remembered for it, and the name that clings to him says so. Tumatauenga, the tradition glosses, is “Tu of the angry face.” He is the atua of war. He is also, by the same logic, the ancestor of every person who has ever had to take a life to keep their own.

The brother who stood

The genealogy begins where all Maori genealogy begins, with Ranginui the sky father and Papatuanuku the earth mother locked in an embrace so close their offspring have no room and no light. The sons confer in the blackness. Tane — Tane-mahuta, who will become the forest — proposes that they part the parents rather than kill them; Tumatauenga argues for the harder course, to slay Rangi and Papa outright. Tane’s counsel prevails. It is Tane who at last braces his shoulders against the earth and his feet against the sky and forces them apart, and the world fills with the cold first light. So the separation is Tane’s deed. But the vote is the first division among the brothers, and Tu is on the losing, fiercer side of it.

The breaking of the family does not pass unprotested. One brother had refused to consent — Tawhirimatea, the wind and the weather, who could not bear to see his parents torn from each other. He rose with his father into the sky, gathered his children the winds and the squalls and the hurricanes, and came down on his brothers in a fury. The forest of Tane was flattened, its trees thrown broken to the ground. Tangaroa, the sea, was lashed until he fled to the safety of the deep, and his descendants scattered — some, the tradition holds, to the rivers and some to the open ocean, a falling-out that runs through the saltwater family still. The brothers of the cultivated and the wild food, Rongo of the kumara and Haumia of the fernroot, hid themselves in the body of their mother the earth, and Papatuanuku covered them over so that the storm could not find them.

Only one of the children Tawhirimatea could not drive down. Tumatauenga held his ground. The storm fought him, the accounts say, to a standstill and no further; of all the brothers, Tu alone the weather could not subdue. It is the founding fact of his character — not that he won, for he did not exactly win, but that he did not break and did not run. The cost is written into the world after the manner of the Maori cosmos, where every present condition has a mythic charter: Tawhirimatea’s anger was never fully answered, and so his storms still fall on the descendants of Tu, on people, to this day. The weather remains, in this telling, a grievance that was never settled.

The revenge that feeds us

What Tu did next is the heart of the matter, and it is not a clean victory tale. He was enraged — not at the storm, which had at least fought honestly, but at his other brothers. Tane, Tangaroa, Rongo, Haumia: every one of them had abandoned him. They had hidden, or fled, or been flattened, while he alone stood against Tawhirimatea. For that desertion he turned on them.

He could not reach the storm. He could reach the others, or rather their children. So Tumatauenga made the descendants of his brothers into his food and his materials. The children of Tane, the forest — the birds — he took by snaring them, plaiting cordage from the forest’s own leaves into snares and nets to do it. The children of Tangaroa, the sea — the fish — he took with nets woven and cast into the water. The children of Rongo and of Haumia, the kumara of the gardens and the fernroot of the uncultivated ground, he dug from the earth that had sheltered them. This is the Maori charter for the whole economy of human life. People hunt the forest, net the sea, and dig the field because their ancestor Tu first did so in revenge against his brothers — and because people are the descendants of Tu, the one brother who is reckoned the ancestor of humankind. To be human, in this account, is to be of the war-god’s line, and to live by taking.

There is a sting in it that the tradition does not hide. Each thing taken is the child of a god. The bird is Tane’s; the fish is Tangaroa’s; the root is Rongo’s or Haumia’s. To eat is to consume the offspring of a divine brother, an act of the same family violence that began with the counsel to kill the parents. This is why, in the Maori frame, the getting of food is hedged about with karakia — the incantations and rites that acknowledge the act, name the atua whose child is being taken, and keep the balance from tipping into pure depredation. The fowler said his karakia before he set his snares; the fisherman before he let down his net; the first fish of a catch and the first bird of a season could be returned to the god as an offering, an acknowledgment that the taking was permitted and not simply seized. Hunting, fishing, and cultivation are, in this light, not secular labors at all. They are the daily, low-grade warfare of staying alive, conducted under the patronage of the god of war and conducted, properly, with rite.

This is the distinctive teaching, and it is worth holding still to see how strange and how exact it is — and it is set down plainly in the tradition’s own modern encyclopedia, where Tu is named the atua of war and, in the same breath, of hunting, fishing, cultivation, and cooking. Tumatauenga is not only the god invoked when men march to kill men. He is the god of the violence inside ordinary survival — the snare, the hook, the digging-stick. The same atua governs the war-party and the cooking-fire. The Maori word for the cooked food eaten to lift a state of sacredness, and the general association of Tu with the things of common human use as against the things kept apart and tapu, sit inside this logic: Tu’s realm is the realm of human action upon the world, the world made usable, the sacred reduced to the edible. War and the harvest are one department, and he runs it.

A Maori war canoe (waka taua), drawn by Herman Diedrich Spöring on James Cook’s first voyage, 1770. The war-party that the canoe carried was placed under tapu and dedicated to Tu before it set out. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The making of a warrior, and the unmaking

Where Tumatauenga governs literal war, the rites are correspondingly grave. A war-party — a taua — did not simply assemble and depart. A tohunga, a ritual expert, said the appropriate karakia and placed the taua under tapu before it left; the men were, for the duration of the campaign, made over to Tu, set apart from the ordinary world of food and women and common use, sacred and dangerous. Boys could be dedicated to Tumatauenga in childhood, marked early for the god’s service. There were named kinds of war-party for named purposes — among them the taua intent on blood-vengeance, the avenging expedition that carries the same word, utu, that runs through the whole myth of Tu’s revenge on his brothers.

Utu is the hinge concept, and it is easily mistranslated. The common English is “revenge,” and revenge is in it; but the deeper sense is the restoration of balance, the requital that returns a relationship to equilibrium after it has been disturbed. Tawhirimatea’s assault was utu for the breaking of the family. Tu’s seizure of his brothers’ children was utu for their desertion of him. A war of vengeance among people is utu for an injury given. The principle is symmetrical and, in its own terms, conservative: it does not seek excess but settlement.

What a man is made by going to war he cannot simply carry home. The state of tapu that fitted him for killing makes him perilous to the ordinary world he returns to. So the taua, coming back, underwent whakanoa — the rite of being made noa, of having the sacredness and the heaviness of the war lifted off, so that the warriors could re-enter common life and not bring its danger with them. The cycle is complete and humane in its way: a man is given over to Tu, does the god’s work, and is then deliberately given back to himself. The cleansing matters as much as the consecration. War in this frame is not a condition a person stays in; it is a state one enters under rite and leaves under rite, with the war-god’s tapu put on and taken off like the armor it is.

Tu across the sea: the Hawaiian Ku

The atua did not stay in Aotearoa. The peoples we call Polynesian carried a common stock of gods across the largest ocean on earth, and the names changed with the islands by regular sound-shifts — the Maori Tane is the Hawaiian Kane, the Maori Tangaroa the Hawaiian Kanaloa, and the Maori Tu the Hawaiian Ku. In Hawai’i (the okina marks a glottal stop) Ku is no minor figure. He is one of the four great gods — with Kane, Kanaloa, and Lono — and where the Maori Tu is one of many brothers, the Hawaiian Ku is raised to the first rank of the pantheon, encountered through innumerable named forms. His name carries the sense of standing upright, and his domains gather under that: the upright man, the forest of tall trees, the deep-sea fishing, and above all war.

It is in war that Ku grew most terrible, and most political. The war-form Kukailimoku — the name is glossed “the snatcher of land” — became the guardian god of ruling chiefs on the island of Hawai’i, and in the late eighteenth century the patron of Kamehameha I, the chief who conquered and unified the whole archipelago. Kamehameha’s god was carried into his campaigns as a feathered image: a wickerwork head crested and clothed in red and yellow feathers, the mouth a row of dog’s teeth, the eyes of mother-of-pearl — an akua hulu manu, a feather-god, the visible body of Ku borne to the wars. The most famous of these is held to have been Kamehameha’s own. The conquest that made one kingdom of the islands was, in its own self-understanding, the work of Ku.

A feathered image (akua hulu manu) of Kukaʻilimoku, the war-form of Ku, of the kind carried by Kamehameha I to his conquests. Photographed for the Bishop Museum’s Memoirs, 1899. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Ku of war was served at the luakini heiau — the great walled temple-platforms that were the prerogative of the highest chiefs and the only temples at which human lives were offered. The institution belongs to the tradition’s own reckoning of what war costs and what it requires, and it is set down here as the Hawaiians set it down: a grave and central rite, conducted by the ruling chief through his priesthood, in which the building or rededication of the war-temple and the launching of a campaign were sealed with sacrifice. It was not a curiosity. It was the most serious thing the kingdom did, the point at which its cosmology and its violence met. The European-language scholarship has read the luakini cycle as the keystone of the whole Hawaiian system, the place where the hierarchy of gods and the hierarchy of chiefs were fused; the reading is contested in its details, but the centrality of the war-god’s temple is not.

An idol on the wall of a heiau at Kailua, sketched by the missionary William Ellis, c. 1822–23, and published in his Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii. The image dates from the years just after the temples were abandoned. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

That abandonment came suddenly. In 1819, within months of Kamehameha I’s death, the chiefly women and the new king set aside the eating-tabu that had structured Hawaiian society, the act called the ‘ai noa, the free eating; the temple images were thrown down and the heiau burned, and the keeper of Kamehameha’s war-god — his cousin Kekuaokalani, who held Kukailimoku — rose in defense of the old order and was killed in battle. The Christian missionaries landed the following year, in 1820, into a religious world that had already, at its own hands, pulled its temples down. The documentary record here is exact, and it is a record of an internal upheaval that the missionary arrival followed rather than caused.

What survives

The Maori Tu was never abolished by an ‘ai noa, and his afterlife took a different shape. The old rites of the taua belong to the world before the muskets and the missionaries and the land confiscations of the nineteenth century; the written record of them comes overwhelmingly from explorers, missionaries, and colonial-era ethnographers — Cook’s people from 1769, the missionaries who followed, and compilers such as Sir George Grey, whose mid-nineteenth-century collection of the chants and traditions remains a principal source even as its missionary-era framing has to be read with care. The genealogies and karakia themselves were oral, held in memory and recitation, never originally written; what reaches the page reaches it through that colonial filter, and the filter is part of the evidence.

Yet the god’s name is alive in a way that has nothing antique about it. The New Zealand Army is known in Maori as Ngati Tumatauenga — “the tribe of Tumatauenga” — under which every soldier, of whatever ancestry, is reckoned of one iwi under the war-god’s patronage. The naming is not decorative. It places the modern armed forces of a Pacific nation explicitly under the atua who stood against the storm, and it treats the soldier’s calling as a continuation of his. The brother who counselled death, who alone did not run, and who turned the wreck of his family into the means by which his descendants eat and live, is still the god a soldier becomes when sent to fight — and, in the older and stranger teaching, still the god of the snare and the net and the digging-stick, of every quiet daily act by which a person takes a life to keep their own.

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