Mahuika

At the far end of a broad path, well past the last place anyone had reason to walk, the ground held heat the way a stone holds it after a long afternoon in the sun. The air tasted of scorched earth. Inside the mountain an old woman sat with fire growing out of her fingers, and she had been sitting there so long that nobody in the villages below could remember fire coming from anywhere else.

Mahuika does not tend fire. She is the thing itself, worn in a body and handed out in pieces. She married Auahi-Turoa, the comet, the long burning smear that crosses the sky and comes back, and their five children were named after the five fingers of a human hand and known together as Nga Manawa. Her elder sister is Hine-nui-te-po, who takes people at the end. There is a neatness to that family arrangement which the stories never comment on and never need to.

The oldest written account of her gives her almost no face. It calls her the aged lady, the aged woman, and leaves it there, as though her appearance were beside the point when the important part of her was so obviously in her hands. Later tellings are less restrained and fill the silence in: fire coming from every pore, hair a mass of flame, black holes where the eyes should be, and a habit of lifting her head to sniff at a visitor rather than look at one. What survives in every version is the nails. They are not horn. Pull one loose and fire runs out of the finger the way sap runs from a cut branch.

When a grandchild came to her and gave his name properly, she was delighted. She had not spoken to anyone in a long time. She reached across, drew out a single fingernail, and the flame stood up in it as she passed it over, telling him to take it as a gift to his people and honour it as he honoured her.

He had earned that welcome by fraud. Maui had spent the previous night going from village to village putting out every cooking fire in the world, then gone home to his sleeping mat and waited for the shouting to start. It started at dawn. There was no way to cook, no way to keep warm, and no one willing to walk to the scorching mountain and ask. Maui volunteered, which was the entire point of the exercise, and his mother Taranga warned him on the way out that being a descendant of Mahuika would not protect him if he tried anything clever.

He tried something clever before he was out of sight of her cave. He threw the burning nail into a stream and went back to say he had tripped. She gave him another. He drowned that one too and blamed a fish. She gave him another. This went on all day, ten fingers and then the toes, each excuse thinner than the last, and each time the old woman handed over another piece of herself without asking a single question, because she liked the company.

There was one nail left when she worked it out. She tore it off and threw it at the ground, and the ground caught. Fire came up around Maui and chased him out of the mountain. He turned himself into a bird and climbed, and the flames climbed with him and singed the underside of his wings, which is why the kahu, the harrier, still carries that rust colour beneath. He dropped into a pool and found the water already boiling. The forest went up. The oldest telling has the earth and the sea burning too, and Maui screaming, and finally calling on Tawhiri-matea and on Whatitiri-matakataka for water. The rain that came down was heavy and did not stop. It killed the fire everywhere it touched, and it very nearly killed Mahuika, who could not reach shelter and whose shrieking, the story notes with some satisfaction, got as loud as Maui’s had been.

Before the last of her went out she saved a handful of sparks and threw them into the trees. The kaikomako took them, and the mahoe, the totara, the patete and the pukatea, and they have held onto them ever since. So Maui came home to the village without fire. He came home with dry sticks and showed everyone how to work one against another until the dust in the groove caught, which is more useful than a flame and considerably more annoying to obtain.

Her power was never conditional on anything. She did not need fuel, or a season, or a rite performed correctly. Fire was her tissue, which meant she could give it away indefinitely and could also be spent. That is the whole of her weakness, and it is an unusually literal one: what she handed over did not grow back, and by the end of a single afternoon of politeness she had nothing left but one toenail and a temper. Water finished the job. So did loneliness, which is what actually opened the door. She was not outfought. She was talked to.

Across the rest of the Pacific the name travels and keeps shifting shape. In the Marquesas and the Tuamotus, Mahuike is male, a fire god of the underworld and Maui’s grandfather, and in both places Maui kills him. In the Cook Islands he is Ma’uike, wrestled into surrendering the secret of the fire sticks. Samoa and its neighbours know Mafui’e. Even inside New Zealand some districts make Mahuika male. Hawai’i and Rapa Nui drop the figure entirely and tell a different story about where fire came from. What holds across almost all of it is the shape underneath: fire had to be taken out of somebody’s body, and the person it was taken from did not survive the transaction intact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mahuika in Maori mythology?

Mahuika is the Maori atua of fire and the ancestress of Maui, from whom he obtained fire for the world. She is married to Auahi-Turoa, the comet, and their five children are named for the five fingers of a human hand and called Nga Manawa. Her elder sister is Hine-nui-te-po, the goddess of death.

How did Maui steal fire from Mahuika?

Maui first extinguished every fire in the villages overnight so that someone would have to go and ask Mahuika for more, then volunteered himself. She gave him a burning fingernail, which he put out and returned to replace with an excuse. He repeated this until she had given up all her fingernails and all but one of her toenails, at which point she realised she was being tricked.

Why does the kaikomako tree make fire?

When Mahuika’s fire was being quenched by the rain Maui had called down, she saved a few sparks and threw them into the trees for safekeeping. The kaikomako held onto them, along with the mahoe, totara, patete and pukatea. Maui returned to his village not with a flame but with dry kaikomako wood and the method of rubbing sticks together to draw the fire back out.

Is Mahuika male or female?

In the main New Zealand tradition Mahuika is female, an aged woman, though some districts within New Zealand make the figure male. Elsewhere in Polynesia the same name is almost always male: Mahuike in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus, Ma’uike in the Cook Islands, and Mafui’e further west. The Maori female version is the exception rather than the rule across the Pacific.

What happened to Mahuika after Maui took her fire?

She threw her last toenail at the ground and set the world alight chasing Maui, who escaped as a bird. When Maui called on Tawhiri-matea for rain, the downpour quenched the fire and Mahuika, unable to reach shelter, was very nearly destroyed by it. She kept nothing of her fire except the sparks she had thrown into the trees.

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