Rangi and Papa

At a Glance

• Central figures: Rangi-nui (Sky-Father) and Papatuanuku (Earth-Mother), locked together in embrace; their sons Tane Mahuta (god of forests and birds), Tu (god of war), Tangaroa (god of the sea), Rongo (god of cultivated plants), Haumia-tiketike (god of uncultivated food), and Tawhirimatea (god of winds and storms).
• Setting: Aotearoa (New Zealand), in Maori tradition; the story is preserved in oral whakapapa and was recorded in 19th-century ethnographic collections, principally by Sir George Grey.
• The turn: Tane Mahuta braces his back against his mother and pushes his father skyward, separating Rangi and Papa against their will and against the opposition of his brother Tawhirimatea.
• The outcome: Light enters the world for the first time; the sons step into the open space between earth and sky and take dominion over their separate realms, but Tawhirimatea follows his father into the sky and wages war on his brothers.
• The legacy: The mist that rises from Papatuanuku each morning and the rain that falls from Rangi-nui are understood in Maori tradition as the grief of two parents separated but still reaching for each other.

There was no light. Rangi-nui lay upon Papatuanuku, chest to chest, and their children lived in the dark between them. The sons could not stand upright. They could not see one another’s faces. They knew each other by voice and by touch and by the slow crawl of limbs in a space that had no room for crawling.

They had names. They would become gods of separate domains - forest, sea, war, wind, root vegetables pulled from the earth - but in the dark they were only brothers pressed flat, arguing about what to do.

The Argument in the Dark

Tu spoke first. Tu always spoke first.

Kill them. Kill our parents. Then we can stand.

The brothers went quiet. Tangaroa, who would become the sea, shifted in the dark. Rongo, who would tend the kumara gardens, said nothing. Haumia-tiketike, god of the aruhe - the wild fernroot - said nothing either.

Tane Mahuta spoke.

We do not kill them. We push them apart. Let Rangi go up and let Papa stay beneath us. One will be the sky. One will be the earth. We will live in the space between.

Not all agreed. Tawhirimatea, who loved his father with a loyalty the others could not match, refused. He said that if they tore his parents apart he would follow his father into whatever space the separation made, and he would make his brothers pay.

They heard his voice in the dark and knew he meant it. They went ahead anyway.

The Failures

Rongo tried first. He pressed his shoulders against Rangi and pushed. The sky did not move. Tangaroa tried. He was strong - he held the weight of the ocean inside him already, though there was no ocean yet - but Rangi did not shift. Haumia tried. Tu tried. Nothing.

Each time, the father’s body settled back against the mother’s body, and the dark closed in a little tighter, as though it resented the attempt.

Then Tane Mahuta lay down on his back on Papatuanuku. He planted his shoulders against her body - her skin, which would become soil and stone and the crust of the earth - and he lifted his legs. He pressed his feet against the underside of Rangi-nui.

He pushed.

Tane’s Shoulders and Feet

It was slow. The separation did not happen like a crack or a tearing. It happened the way a tree grows - a pressure that does not stop, that takes what seems like forever, that nothing can reverse once it has begun. Tane pushed with his legs, bracing against his mother’s body, and Rangi began to lift.

Rangi cried out. Papa cried out. Their fingers, which had been locked together since before time had started moving, were pulled apart one by one.

Light came in at the edges. A thin line at first, grey and strange, and then wider - a band of light the brothers had never seen. They shielded their eyes. Some of them, born in total dark, had never used their eyes at all.

Tane kept pushing. His legs shook. The space between his parents widened. He could see Papa beneath him now, her surface rough and brown and green where things had been waiting to grow. He could see Rangi above him, dark blue, shot through with the white of clouds that were forming for the first time.

The separation held. Tane braced Rangi in place with poles - the toko, the props of heaven - and stood for the first time in his life. His brothers stood beside him. They looked at each other’s faces and saw what gods looked like.

Tawhirimatea’s War

Tawhirimatea did not stand with them. He rose - not into the light between earth and sky, but upward, past the clouds, into the body of his father. He pressed himself against Rangi’s chest where his mother had been. He gathered his children around him: the winds.

He had many. Winds from the north and south and east and west. Squalls. Gales. The small biting winds that strip leaves from branches and the enormous storms that flatten forests and pull the sea into walls of water.

He sent them all down.

Tangaroa fled into the ocean he was building, and his children split - some became fish, diving deep, and some became reptiles and fled inland toward the forests of Tane. Tangaroa never forgave Tane for sheltering his deserters. That is why the sea eats the land at the coastline, why Tangaroa sends waves against the roots of the trees, why fishermen take canoes carved from Tane’s trees out onto Tangaroa’s water. The war between forest and ocean started here.

Rongo and Haumia hid inside their mother. Papa pulled them into her body, sheltered them beneath soil and root. That is why the kumara and the aruhe must be dug from the ground - they are still hiding.

Tu alone stood in the open and fought. He faced Tawhirimatea’s winds and did not run. When the storm passed, Tu turned on his brothers - the ones who had hidden, the ones who had fled - and punished them. He ate Tangaroa’s fish. He pulled Rongo’s kumara from the earth. He dug up Haumia’s fernroot. He cut down Tane’s trees and built houses from them. He made nets and snares. Tu, the god of war, became the god of humanity’s dominion over the natural world, because he was the only one who stood his ground.

The Mist and the Rain

Rangi and Papa never stopped grieving. They could see each other now across the great distance Tane had opened, but they could not touch.

Papa’s warmth rises each morning as mist - her breath reaching upward toward her husband. Rangi’s tears fall as rain. When the fog sits heavy over the valleys of Aotearoa and the rain does not stop for days, it is because the distance between them has not lessened, and the ache has not dulled, and the separation Tane forced upon them holds.

The sons became the world. The world is the space between two parents who did not want to let go.