Rangi and Papa

The Maori creation narrative opens in Te Po, the long night: the sky father Ranginui and the earth mother Papatuanuku lay locked together, and their sons were cramped in the lightless crevice between the parental bodies. The brothers debated a way out. Tumatauenga, god of war, proposed killing the parents; Tane, god of forests, argued for parting them instead, so the sky would stand high above and the earth lie below as a mother. Rongo of the cultivated food, Tangaroa of the sea, Haumia of the wild food, and Tumatauenga himself each strained against the parents and failed, until Tane set his back to the earth and his feet against the sky and slowly forced them apart. Light flooded in, and the offspring who had lain flattened between their parents stood upright for the first time.

The separation brought retribution. Tawhirimatea, god of storms, who had opposed it throughout, rose with his father and hurled hurricanes, rain and hail at his brothers. Tangaroa fled into the sea; Rongo and Haumia were hidden in the soil by their mother; only Tumatauenga stood unmoved. Because his brothers had abandoned him in the fight, he preys on their descendants ever after, which is why people may fish, snare birds, and dig fern-root and kumara.

The grief of the parents never ended: Rangi's tears still fall as rain, and the mists that rise at dawn are Papa's sighs toward the sky. The narrative was written down in Maori by Te Rangikaheke of Rotorua and published in George Grey's Polynesian Mythology (1855), one of the most fully recorded creation texts in Polynesian oral literature.