Hine-nui-te-pō

Also Known As: Great Woman of the Night; earlier Hine-tītama, the Dawn Girl or Shining Girl; occasionally Hine-nui-i-te-pō
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds the threshold every human being crosses once, and nothing that passes her comes back out.
Role in Mythos: She rules Rarohenga, the underworld, and receives the spirits of the dead as their ancestress rather than their jailer.
Relation to Humans: Every person alive descends from her, and every person alive will end up in her house. The tradition holds both of those facts at once and refuses to soften either.

Somewhere past the point where the sea stops being any recognisable colour, a red light on the horizon opens and shuts like a slow eye. Māui asked his father what it was. That flashing, the old man said, is your ancestress. Those are her thighs parting. The red comes from inside her, and the glitter along that opening is obsidian, worked to an edge.

The description survives because one man wrote it down. In 1849 Te Rangikāheke of Ngāti Rangiwewehi, of the Te Arawa confederation around Rotorua, filled a manuscript he titled Tama a Rangi and handed it to George Grey. Four images sit in that paragraph and they have never left: her body is a person’s, her eyes are greenstone, her hair is sea-kelp, her mouth is a barracouta’s. Almost every account since, in Māori and in English, in scholarship and in poetry and in books read to children at bedtime, is walking in the footprints of that one sheet of paper.

She did not begin as any of this. Tāne shaped the first woman out of the soil at Kurawaka and called her Hine-ahu-one, the girl heaped up from earth. Their daughter was Hine-tītama, the Dawn Girl, the light on the edge of morning, and Tāne took her as a wife too. For a while she did not know who her father was. Then she asked, and the answer came, and something in her closed. Tāne followed her and argued and could not move her. In most tellings she sends him back up into the world of light to raise the children they made, and tells him she will stay below to receive those children when their time comes. She put down the name Hine-tītama on the way down the stairs. What arrived at the bottom was Hine-nui-te-pō.

Rarohenga is not a punishment. The spirits of the dead go down there, and she gathers them in, settles them, and readies them for whatever comes next. The 19th-century ethnographic record has her doing more than housekeeping: her work is to hold her descendants safe from Whiro, who wants them destroyed outright. So the ordinary business of the underworld looks less like a prison muster than a woman meeting relatives at the door. The air is cold and still down there. The wairua arrive in a slow unhurried procession, and she knows every one of them by name, because they are all hers.

Māui could not leave that alone. He had already slowed the sun and hauled up an island and stolen fire, and death struck him as one more thing that could be beaten with sufficient cheek. His plan was to crawl into Hine-nui-te-pō while she slept, climb up through her body, and come out of her mouth, running the road of birth backwards. If he managed it, humankind would stop dying. He took birds with him and gave them one instruction, which was to keep quiet.

He got as far as her thighs. The accounts differ on which bird broke first, the fantail dancing about with delight or the whitehead simply losing it, but the laughter did what laughter does, and she woke. She closed. Māui lost. The obsidian did the rest, and with him died the only serious attempt anybody ever made to undo mortality, which is why a person born today will bear children and then stop.

Her power is not really the crushing. It is position. She stands at the one door every living thing has to use, and she is on the far side of it, and there is no version of the story in which someone talks their way past. Māui was a demigod with the strength to fish up land and he still only got halfway in. Her one recorded weakness is the same as everybody’s, which is that she sleeps, and that is exactly the opening Māui found and exactly the reason he brought birds who could not hold their nerve.

Whether she is a monster is a live argument and always has been. Grey certainly thought she needed managing. When he printed Te Rangikāheke’s Māori in 1854 and his English translation the following year, he quietly moved the obsidian out of her genitals and into her actual mouth, invented a red glow in her eyes to replace the one he had deleted, and left her with pupils of jade. Later editions of his own book could not even keep the fish straight, printing mangō, shark, where Te Rangikāheke had written mangā, barracouta, until a corrected edition put it back. Elsdon Best objected to the whole drift of it. Alexander Reed, writing in 1963, put the counterweight plainly: she is dreaded as the goddess of death, but she is also the young woman who fled in shame and who loves her descendants, and where Tāne protects people in life, she guards their souls in death. Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa gave her the line herself in 1984, that her vagina is set with teeth of obsidian and is a gateway only the already dead may pass freely.

Both readings come out of the same sentence, and the sentence has a green-eyed woman lying on the edge of the world with kelp in her hair, waiting for her children to come home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hine-nui-te-pō?

Hine-nui-te-pō is the Māori goddess of death and of night, who rules Rarohenga, the underworld, and receives the spirits of the dead. She was born Hine-tītama, the Dawn Girl, daughter of the god Tāne and Hine-ahu-one, the first woman. She took her second name when she left the world of light for good.

Why did Hine-tītama become Hine-nui-te-pō?

Tāne, who had made Hine-ahu-one out of soil, fathered Hine-tītama and later took her as his wife. When she discovered that her husband was also her father she fled to the underworld and refused to be persuaded back, telling Tāne to raise their children above while she waited below to receive them. She abandoned the name Hine-tītama at that point.

How did Māui die?

Māui tried to kill Hine-nui-te-pō by crawling into her body while she slept and emerging from her mouth, reversing the passage of birth in order to abolish death. The birds he brought with him were told not to laugh and could not manage it. Their noise woke her, she closed her thighs, and the obsidian set in her killed him, fixing human mortality permanently.

What does Hine-nui-te-pō look like?

The oldest detailed description comes from Te Rangikāheke’s 1849 manuscript Tama a Rangi and gives her four attributes: eyes of greenstone, hair of sea-kelp, a mouth like a barracouta’s, and a vulva set with sharp obsidian that flashes red on the horizon as it opens and closes. Her body is otherwise human in form. Later English versions, beginning with George Grey’s, moved the obsidian into her mouth and gave her greenstone pupils instead.

Is Hine-nui-te-pō evil?

No. The tradition holds her as both fearsome and protective, and Māori and Pākehā commentators alike have pushed back on reading her purely as a monster. She is the ancestress of all humanity, she shelters the spirits of her descendants in Rarohenga from Whiro, and her role is to receive the dead rather than to hunt the living.