Polynesian Mythology

Polynesian mythology is spread across the largest expanse of water on earth, a triangle cornered by Hawaii, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa New Zealand, with Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, the Marquesas and the Cook Islands scattered between. Voyagers steering double-hulled canoes by stars and swells carried one set of divine names in every direction, and the same god grew a different shape on each archipelago: Tangaroa is the sea god in New Zealand and, as Taaroa, the shell-cracking creator in Tahiti; Maui fished up islands and snared the sun wherever the canoes landed. Gods and people share a single genealogy — a chief's line could be recited generation by generation back to the sky father and earth mother, and the recitation was itself a rite.

The tradition produced no ancient native texts; it lived in chant, genealogy and the priestly schools until the great transcriptions of the nineteenth century. George Grey's Polynesian Mythology (1855) preserves the creation cycle and the Maui saga from the pen of the Maori scholar Te Rangikaheke; the Hawaiian creation chant Kumulipo, over two thousand lines long, was printed by King Kalakaua in 1889 and translated by Queen Liliuokalani in 1897; Teuira Henry's Ancient Tahiti (1928) assembled the chants and rituals collected by the missionary John Orsmond; David Malo, Abraham Fornander and Martha Beckwith did the same for Hawaii. Two ideas govern the whole world: mana, the potency that flows through persons and things, and tapu, the sacred prohibition — together they framed temples, chiefs, fishing grounds and any tree about to be felled.

Its temper is a navigator's. The world is something fished from the sea or chiselled out of a shell, and the ancestral homeland Hawaiki lies both on the route the canoes came by and on the road the dead travel back. It is also a tradition still breathing: flowers are laid for Pele at the rim of Kilauea, a New Zealand highway was rerouted around a taniwha, and the voyaging canoe Hokulea still crosses the Pacific by the hook-shaped stars of Maui.