Maui seeking immortality

At a Glance

• Central figures: Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, the trickster-hero who had already slowed the sun and fished up islands; and Hine-nui-te-pō, the great goddess of death and darkness, whose body was the gateway between the living world and the dead.
• Setting: Aotearoa (New Zealand), in Māori tradition; the story belongs to the Maui cycle preserved in oral whakapapa and recorded by early ethnographers including Sir George Grey.
• The turn: Maui entered the body of Hine-nui-te-pō while she slept, intending to pass through her and emerge from her mouth, reversing death for all humankind.
• The outcome: A small bird laughed at the sight of Maui crawling inside the goddess. She woke, closed her thighs, and crushed him. Death remained permanent for human beings.
• The legacy: Maui’s failure fixed mortality in the world. No god, no hero, no priest could undo what was sealed in that moment. Humans die because Maui did not make it through.

Maui had done everything. He had hauled Te Ika-a-Māui - the great fish that became the North Island - up from the ocean floor on a hook baited with his own blood. He had beaten the sun with his grandmother’s jawbone until it limped slowly enough for women to cook and men to fish. He had stolen fire from the nails of Mahuika. He had done all of this, and he was not satisfied.

His father, Makeatutara, told him there was one thing left. One feat that would crown every other. If Maui could pass through the body of Hine-nui-te-pō, the goddess of death, and come out alive through her mouth, then death would be reversed. Not for Maui alone. For everyone. Every person born after that would live and never die.

Maui listened. He did not hesitate.

Makeatutara’s Warning

His father told him plainly. Hine-nui-te-pō lived at the edge of the world where the sky meets the horizon, in the place called Te Muriwaihou, the last waters. She lay sleeping there, and when she slept, her body was open. The path was through her - in at one end, out through the mouth. If Maui could do this without waking her, death would end.

But Makeatutara also said this: he had made errors in the karakia - the sacred incantations - when Maui was born. The rites of baptism had not been completed properly. Because of this, Maui’s mana was not whole. Against a mortal enemy, against the sun, against the ocean, the flaw did not matter. Against death itself, it might.

Maui heard the warning. He did not change his mind.

The Birds at the Edge of the World

Maui gathered companions for the journey. Not his brothers this time - they had complained through every previous adventure and would have been useless here. He took the small birds: the tīwakawaka, the fantail, with its twitching tail and nervous laugh; the hihi, the stitchbird; the miromiro, the tomtit; and the pīwakawaka. They were his friends from the forest, and he trusted them more than his brothers.

He told the birds what he was going to do. He said he would change his shape - become small, become a worm or a lizard, something that could slide inside the sleeping goddess. He told them the one thing they must not do.

Do not laugh. Do not make a sound. If she wakes, I am dead, and death stays in the world forever.

The birds agreed. They were quiet, serious. They followed Maui to the place where Hine-nui-te-pō lay.

The Sleeping Goddess

She was enormous. She lay on her side at the edge of the world with her legs parted, and her eyes were made of greenstone - pounamu - that flashed like light under dark water. Her teeth were sharp as obsidian. Her hair spread around her like the roots of trees. Where she breathed, the air itself turned cold.

The sky above her was red, the way it is before dawn. The horizon line ran through her body as if she were the boundary between everything that lived and everything that did not.

Maui stripped off his clothes. He stood before his companions, naked, and began the transformation. His body shrank. His skin darkened, grew sleek. He became something between a lizard and a caterpillar - a thing that could crawl, grip, push through tight spaces. He was still Maui inside, still the one who had beaten the sun, but the shape of him was small and strange.

He began to enter Hine-nui-te-pō.

The Tīwakawaka’s Laugh

The birds watched. The hihi pressed its beak shut. The miromiro closed its eyes. But the tīwakawaka - the fantail - could not hold still. It watched Maui’s legs disappear into the goddess, then his waist, and the sight was so absurd, so grotesque, this little creature wriggling into the enormous sleeping body, that the tīwakawaka let out a sharp, chattering laugh.

The sound was small. A flick of noise in the red air.

Hine-nui-te-pō opened her greenstone eyes.

She felt him inside her. She knew what he was trying to do. She closed her thighs. The obsidian teeth that lined her body’s interior passage clamped shut. Maui was caught. He could not move forward and could not pull back. The goddess crushed him there, inside her own body, in the space between the living world and the dead one.

Maui died.

What Remained

The birds scattered, screaming. The tīwakawaka flew back to the forests of Aotearoa with its tail still flicking, and it has been nervous ever since. The other birds followed. None of them spoke of what they had seen for a long time.

Hine-nui-te-pō closed her eyes and slept again. She had not needed to fight. She had only needed to wake.

Maui’s body did not come back. His brothers did not find him. His mother, Taranga, who had thrown him into the sea as an infant and who had watched him grow into the greatest of her sons, did not see him again. He stayed inside death because death would not let him through.

The sun still moves slowly across the sky because Maui beat it. The islands still sit in the ocean because Maui fished them up. Fire still burns in the world because Maui stole it. But people still die. They die because a fantail laughed, because a father’s karakia was incomplete, because Hine-nui-te-pō was stronger than the strongest trick.

The last thing Maui tried was the one thing Maui could not do. And so death is the condition of the world. Not a punishment. Not a curse. The door was there. He almost got through. He did not get through.