Te Tohunga/Mahuika
IX
MAHUIKA
Gods and the heroes of the Maori people are personifications of Nature and her elemental powers: through the forms and doings of these gods and heroes alone could they understand Nature—night and light, cloud and lightning, sun and ocean.
The personalities and deeds of these heroes were human translations of the unfathomable workings of Nature and the character of the elements: the winter became the mother of the summer, but the winter has to devour his child again; the night kills the evening, but the morning kills the night through its fire. The moon is slowly eaten by her enemies, and must descend to the dead that she may be born anew out of the world of death; the gods of the lower world devour the dead that they may be cleaned and come to life again in the Reinga. The sun alone is wandering daily through the heavens, and nightly through the world of darkness, with never diminished brilliancy; and this phantasy gave birth to the Sun-god Maui, the great hero of the Maori people.
Taranga, the goddess of the Night-sun, is his mother, but Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great Son of Heaven, lifts him as a child, Maui-potiki, out of the ocean upon which he is swimming, and rears him into manhood. With him Maui learns to use his great wisdom, given to him by the sea—his Sun-wisdom. He learns how to assume the form of birds, to throw spears, to cast fishing lines, for birds, spears, fishing-lines, are the wisdom of the sun-rays.
Grown into manhood, and in full possession of his Sun-wisdom, he wanders forth to find his brothers, the heroes of the Ascending Sun, the Sun at midday, the evening Sun, and his mother, the Night-Sun.
His mother recognises him as her son whom she had given birth, and had thrown into the sea, and she takes him into her house; through cunning he follows his mother—who only lives with her children during the night—as pigeon; bird—sunrays, through the caves of the lower world to Hawaiki. Here he throws his berries (sunrays) upon his father and
the people and is again recognised by his mother and received with songs of welcome by her and with incantations by his father to make him all-powerful, in the world into which he has now entered as the first Sun-rise.
But after a time he extinguishes all the fires of the world, and enters the Lower World to steal new fire from his ancestress Mahuika.
Mahuika is the mother of the fire, and her children, living in her fingers are the first rays of light which shoot over the sky in the mornings. In order to ask for one of her fingers he visits Mahuika, but be deceives her, and she, to punish him, sets fire to the world. Out of this fire—the second Sunrise—emerges the flying Maui, flying as sun-eagle over the heavens, and hurling himself at last into the ocean.
That was the first sunset.