God of Forests and Birds, Separator of Sky and Earth
Tane is a son of the sky father Rangi and the earth mother Papa; forests, trees and birds are his offspring, and Maori call the birds of the bush "the children of Tane." When the brothers lay cramped in darkness between their embracing parents, each god tried in turn to part them and failed. Tane set his back against the earth mother and his feet against the sky father and slowly straightened, forcing them apart, and light entered the world for the first time. Afterwards he dressed his naked father with stars and clothed his mother in forests.
Tane is also the source of humankind. The gods had made a world without people, so Tane shaped the first woman, Hine-ahu-one, from the red earth at Kurawaka and breathed life into her nostrils; the Maori greeting of pressed noses recalls the act. With Hine-titama, the dawn maiden he fathered and then married, he had children, until she learned her husband was her father and fled below in shame, becoming Hine-nui-te-po, the great goddess of night who receives the dead. The whare wananga traditions collected in S. Percy Smith's The Lore of the Whare-wananga (1913) add his ascent through the heavens to fetch the three baskets of knowledge, holding ritual, incantation and the crafts of daily life, which he carried back for humankind.
To fell a tree for a canoe was to enter Tane's domain, and proper chants had to be recited first. The largest living kauri tree in the Waipoua Forest of New Zealand's North Island bears his name, Tane Mahuta, and is still greeted by iwi and visitors alike.
