Whiro

Also Known As: Whiro-te-tipua, “Whiro the uncanny one”; also Whiro-taringa-waru, “Whiro of the eight ears”; the word whiro also names the tuatara and the first night of the lunar month
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He commands darkness, sickness and the downward pull that takes every living thing out of the world of light.
Role in Mythos: He is the elder brother who opposed the making of the lit world, lost the wars that followed, and went down into the underworld to become the source of death and disease.
Relation to Humans: Illness, decay and death were understood as his work reaching up into the world of the living, which is why the treatment of sickness belonged to the tohunga and to karakia rather than to medicine alone. His name still sits on the first night of the lunar month, a night for beginning nothing.

The first night of the moon belongs to him. When the new moon shows nothing at all and the sky above the pa is flat and starless, that night carries his name, and the old advice for it was blunt: plant nothing, set no nets, begin nothing you want to finish. Eeling was permitted. Eels move in the dark.

He was there before any of that, in the crush between Ranginui and Papatuanuku when their children lay packed in the black with their knees against their chins. Seventy of them, by the Wairarapa reckoning, and Whiro-te-tipua was sixth. That number is the whole of his grievance. He was senior, and what happened next was decided by juniors.

When Tane and Tupai argued for cutting the parents apart so light could come in, Whiro said no, and he kept saying no. He objected to the cold that came in with the light, the biting cold of space and of water. He objected to the axes Awhio-rangi and Whiro-nui going into his parents’ arms. Blood ran down onto Papatuanuku from those cuts, and the red ochre in the ground is still said to be it. Most of all he objected to being passed over. Had one of the seniors proposed the work, he would have agreed. A younger brother proposed it, and so the world was made wrong.

Afterwards the family divided their houses. Whiro took Tu-te-aniwaniwa, the place where the rainbow stands, and settled there with Uru-te-ngangana and the rest of his faction, keeping his own company in his own gloom while his brothers moved into the light and started naming things.

Then came the matter of the wananga, the whole of knowledge, held at the summit of the twelve heavens. Whiro announced that he would fetch it. He was asked which road he would take and said he would climb by the Taepatanga, the sheer edge where the sky comes down to meet the earth. The answer he got was a proverb and a refusal at once: the winds of the joined heavens are akaaka, they cannot be overcome, and you will not succeed. Tane went instead, consecrated for it, carried up on four whirlwinds. Whiro climbed anyway. He reached the two lowest heavens and learned Tane had already gone through. He followed to the tenth and could not close the gap. His own son-in-law told him to turn back.

So he sent the small things. The Tini o Poto went up after Tane with orders to strike his head, break his skin and drink the blood: mosquitoes, midges, sandflies, stick insects, centipedes, butterflies, the hopping things of the May season, and birds and bats with them. They got as far as the first heaven below the summit and could not reach him. The great gales took the whole army and spun it in circles until it was nothing but noise. On the way back down, at the fourth heaven from the top, Whiro tried again with beetles, four of them named for their faces and their dew, and lost again at Te Rangi-haupapa. Tane took the survivors home as prisoners. Hawks, parrots, night parrots, mosquitoes, sandflies, midges, moths, blowflies, grasshoppers, all of them brought down to live among the trees under the care of the brother they had been sent to kill. That is the explanation offered for why they are here at all. The sandfly on your ankle is a defeated soldier.

The wars did not stop there. They were fought on the land, in the heavens, in the space between, on the water, in every place the gods thought suitable, and the whole series carries one name, Te Pae-rangi. Tumatauenga and Tama-kaka finished it. Whiro went down by the road called Taheke-roa, the long descent, the eternal fall, into Te Muri-wai-hou and Rarohenga and the place called Te Reinga, and he did not come back up.

He never wins.

What he became down there is worse than what he was above. From the underworld he sends the things that hollow people out. Sickness, wasting, the fevers that empty a settlement, the slow subtraction that ends in a body being carried out. Illness was not treated as a mechanical failure but as an opening, a sign that tapu had been broken somewhere and something had got in, and the person who dealt with it was a tohunga with karakia, water and rongoa, working on the cause rather than the symptom. The bones of the argument are his: everything that dies is being pulled his way.

His powers are all downward. He cannot climb, and every account agrees on that; the winds will not carry him and the heights are closed. What he owns is the direction the rest of us eventually go, and the dark of the first night, and every small biting thing that ever failed to stop his brother. His weakness is the same fact seen from the other side. He is the elder who is always outrun, the strategist whose armies are made of insects, the god who lost the sky and took the cellar. Even his reptile is a slow one.

The detailed shape of all this comes from a particular place and a particular set of men. The great Whiro cycle, the twelve heavens, the ascent, the baskets and the war, was taught in the Wairarapa by Te Matorohanga and Nepia Pohuhu, written down by Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury, and published in English by S. Percy Smith in 1913. It is one of the richest bodies of Maori cosmological material in existence and it is also contested, particularly over the supreme being Io, who appears extensively there and barely at all in earlier manuscripts. Smith and his informants were regarded with suspicion by some, and other iwi tell the creation very differently or do not tell this part of it at all. What is common ground is smaller and harder: the name on the moonless night, the word that means tuatara, and the phrase ika a Whiro, the fish of Whiro, which is what people called a warrior who had been in enough fighting to be worth something.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Whiro in Maori mythology?

Whiro, fully Whiro-te-tipua, is a Maori atua of darkness, evil, sickness and death, and one of the children of the sky father Ranginui and the earth mother Papatuanuku. He opposed the separation of his parents, fought a long war against his brother Tane and lost it, and descended into the underworld. He is counted among the senior members of that family, which is the root of his quarrel with the younger brothers who reshaped the world.

Why did Whiro fight Tane?

Whiro fought Tane over seniority and over the making of the world of light. He objected to the separation of Ranginui and Papatuanuku, to the axes used to cut their arms, and above all to a younger brother being chosen to ascend the twelve heavens and fetch the baskets of knowledge, a task Whiro held should have fallen to him as the elder. When Tane was sent instead, Whiro attempted the climb himself and then attacked him with armies.

What happened to Whiro after he lost?

Whiro was defeated by Tumatauenga and Tama-kaka in the series of battles known as Te Pae-rangi, and descended into the underworld by a road called Taheke-roa, the eternal fall, reaching Rarohenga and Te Reinga. He did not return. From there he became the source of sickness and death reaching up into the living world.

Why are Whiro’s insect armies important?

Whiro sent mosquitoes, sandflies, midges, stick insects, centipedes, butterflies, beetles, birds and bats to kill Tane in the heavens, and every one of those attacks failed. Tane brought the survivors down to earth as prisoners, to live among the trees in his care. The story is told as the reason those creatures are found in the world at all.

Is Whiro connected to the Maori lunar calendar?

Yes. Whiro is the name of the first night of the lunar month, when no moon is visible, and it was treated as an unfavourable night for planting and fishing, though good for eeling. Some iwi place the night named Whiro differently in the cycle. The same word also names the tuatara.