Ihimaera Witi - Pūrākau: Māori myths retold by Māori writers

Gods and monsters are at the very beginning of all cultures.

Horus and Set battled each other for the rule of Egypt. Zeus and his fellow gods arbitrated over the world from the heights of Mount Olympus. In the Norse pantheon, Odin presided over Valhalla, riding his winged eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, over the land. Ahura Mazda was a god of light in Persia fighting against Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness, who controlled a three-headed demon known as Ai Dahka.

In New Zealand, where Earth and Sky were the first parents, one of their sons the mighty Tnemahuta did nothing less than raise the sky so that life and light could flood the world between. This act might have freed the sons, but it also led to aeons-long battles between them.

Such tales come from long-ago times when people saw divinity in everything. They worshipped the gods, and from their veneration developed entire belief systems which flourished long before Christianity.

Mazdayasna (or Zoroastrianism) was one of the worlds oldest extant religions. Hinduism was particularly polytheistic, with 33 million gods and goddesses. The Celts, who could count 1200 named deities, were, like Mori, animists. They believed that all aspects of the natural world were imbued with spirits and, therefore, gods were forces within nature. For instance, the sun was a god, the wind was a god, the ocean was a god and so on. Whenever thunder boomed, the gods were said to be walking overhead. If the crops failed, the gods must have been angry at some slight and therefore needed to be appeased.

Pity the poor human race. You negotiated your way through life very carefully.

One misstep and you could be zapped.

Scientists consider that Mori came from the last of the migrations out of Africa, making the final push from Asia into Polynesia and then down to Aotearoa. Thus Mori share our gods and monsters with other Polynesian cultures. However, it is astounding that from a people considered to be the youngest of all human populations has come one of the most magnificent and richest inventories of origin narratives. From our ancestral homeland, Hawaiki (Raitea, French Polynesia) around 700 AD, we carried our atua and taniwha with us and installed them in the new land.

Are the stories, myths and folklore imaginary? Not to Mori. The narratives that have come down as Mori say, i ng w o mua, from the times in front of us may be fabulous and fantastic but they are also real. They are so actual that today, although mostly Christianised now, Mori still ritually acknowledge sky and earth whenever in formal Mori settings:

Ko Ranginui kei runga The Sky Father is above.

Ko Papatnuku kei raro The Earth Mother is below.

In so doing, Mori affirm the first parents of most indigenous civilisations and our kinship with all native peoples.

Not only do Mori do this, but we still pay homage to our gods (for instance, the first fish of any catch is ritually returned to Tangaroa, the sea god). We are also still able to establish our mythology on the landscape. In 2002, Transit New Zealand modified its roading plans for State Highway One when local Mori protested that the upgrade would infringe on the habitat of taniwha, swamp-living monsters.

Our funeral services may begin within a Christian setting but, most often, they end with the farewelling of our dead back to Hawaiki.

The Mori inventory of gods and monsters is still, therefore, relevant today.

Nor is there any separation of the fanciful stories of our origin, i.e. mythology and folklore, from the believable or factual, the real from the imagined, rational from the irrational, or what can be believed in and what cannot. Mori do not make those distinctions. Its all history, fluid, holistic, inclusive not necessarily linear and it may be being told backwards, which is why, to orient ourselves, we always place our origin stories in front. The stories are actually the beginning of a whakapapa, a genealogy. And what they establish is the beginning of a distinctive world view.

First, there are the accounts of the origin and development of the universe. The stories provide a logical account of the coming of light, increasing by degrees and intensity until, lo, comes the dawning of the first day. Everything is happening all at once and over many aeons; Mori call this period of the making of the solar system the time when the world was shining. And it is during these first days that the Sky Father and Earth Mother appear in the genealogy, tightly wrapped in each other.