he saw a tiki on a child's grave which the tapu made absolutely safe, although it would naturally be an object of envy and a prize easily to be secured by anyone who passed the spot.
It is agreed by all students of Maori art that tiki were not representations of deities. As early as 1830 Mr. Yate, the missionary, who was an industrious collector of native lore, had come to this conclusion; and Canon Stack, whose earliest recollections of New Zealand date from the year 1840, maintains that the tiki “did not represent a god, but the spirit of a deceased relative. It was worn,” he says, “to keep in memory some beloved one, for the same reason that our ladies wear lockets containing the likenesses of those who had passed into the other world.”
The same authority considers that all tiki, whether of wood or stone, were purposely made grotesque, because the artist wished to show that these objects of his skill were not representations of living human beings but symbolical memorials of the dead. The Maori never attempted to copy the human form and features exactly; perhaps they had not the requisite artistic skill to enable them to do so; nor did they ever make statues or other representations of living men. Their carved figures were made to preserve the memory of deceased relatives or in honour of some god; not that they worshipped the effigy, even if it were that of a god; it was merely a symbol of the unseen. They seem to have believed, however, that a spiritual being could, when rightly invoked, enter into the image made to represent it and in some way manifest its presence to the person invoking it.
The Maori themselves declare that these figures were deliberately made imperfect, and are not to be regarded as likenesses of ancestors. Any harm, therefore, which might happen
