Ranginui and Papatūānuku

Before there was a sky to look up at, there was only the underside of one. Ranginui lay chest to chest with Papatūānuku, his arms around her and hers around him, and in the warm black seam between their bodies their children were born and grew and had nowhere to go. No horizon, no wind, no daylight. Only the pressure of a father overhead and a mother beneath, and the smell of soil and skin in a space too shallow to stand up in.

The oldest accounts trace the pair back to nothing at all. First came Te Kore, the void, a realm of pure potential in which not even darkness had taken shape. Out of it unfolded Te Pō, the long night, a fertile blackness where things could at last begin to stir. Ranginui the sky and Papatūānuku the land emerged from that night already entwined, and their embrace was so complete that no light could slip past them. Their sons lived their whole lives by touch.

There were dozens of them, all sons in the oldest tellings, and each would become an atua, a god of some part of a world that did not yet exist. Tangaroa, who would hold the sea. Rongo and Haumia-tiketike, who would keep the planted crop and the wild fern root. Tūmatauenga, hard and quick to anger, who would take war and mankind for his portion. Tāwhirimātea, who would command the winds. And Tāne of the forests and the birds, who had been lying in the dark long enough to start thinking about doing something.

They argued in whispers, because there was no room for anything louder. Tūmatauenga, true to what he would become, proposed the simplest thing: kill the parents and be free of them. Tāne would not have it. Better, he said, to force them apart, so the mother could stay near to feed them and the father could stand above as sky. One brother refused the whole plan outright. Tāwhirimātea could not bear the thought of the two of them torn open, and he said so, and was outvoted.

One after another the brothers tried and failed. Rongo strained and could not shift them. Tangaroa and the others set their backs to the work and the great bodies held. Then Tāne lay down flat on his mother, set his shoulders against her and his feet against his father, and instead of shoving with his arms he pushed with the whole length of his legs. Slowly, joint by joint, the sinews binding sky to earth began to tear. Ranginui was driven upward, crying out, and Papatūānuku sank away beneath, and for the first time a thin grey line of light ran between them and then widened into a world. Tāne earned a name for it, Tāne-te-toko-o-te-rangi, Tāne the prop of the heavens.

The father, once lifted, hung bare and dark, so Tāne went looking for something to comfort him. He set the sun on one side and the moon on the other and scattered the smaller lights, his star-children, across the vast dark of Ranginui’s chest. Only then did the sky become a thing to be looked at rather than a weight pressing down.

Tāwhirimātea kept his word. He rose with his father into the new height and there bred a brood of winds, the squall and the gale and the wheeling cloud, and loosed them on the brothers who had done the deed. He flattened Tāne’s forests and sent the trees down in splinters. He drove Tangaroa’s flat water up into walls and troughs, which is why the sea has never once been still since. Rongo and Haumia buried themselves in the body of their mother and only just escaped him. One brother alone stood his ground in the open and did not bend, and that was Tūmatauenga.

When the storm had spent itself, Tūmatauenga was still furious, not at the wind but at the brothers who had hidden while he faced it alone. So he turned on them in the only way left to him. He snared Tāne’s birds, netted Tangaroa’s fish, dug up Rongo’s kūmara and Haumia’s fern root, and ate them all. His descendants, who are people, have been doing the same ever since, which is why mortals hunt and fish and farm the children of the gods without asking leave. The right to eat the world was taken by force, in a family quarrel.

The parents were never reconciled to it. Ranginui hangs above and grieves for the wife he was pried away from, and his grief falls as rain, so that a wet day is only the old man weeping. Papatūānuku grieves back, and the mist that lifts off wet ground at first light is her breath rising toward him, a sigh that never arrives. In some tellings the children at last turned their mother to face down toward Rarohenga, the world below, so the two would be spared the sight of one another’s sorrow. It did not stop the weather.

Their power is not the power of a figure who acts. It is the power of being the ground and the ceiling of existence, the frame inside which every other story takes place. Papatūānuku holds and feeds all living things and receives the dead back into herself, and her name is still spoken as a way of naming the land itself and the duty owed to it. Ranginui gives rain and light and the ordered wheel of the stars by which voyagers crossed the Pacific in the dark. Their limitation is only the other face of that vastness. They cannot move. Having been parted, they cannot close the gap again, and everything that happens to them now happens through their children and their children’s children. The two greatest beings in the whole account are also the most helpless, held apart for good by the son who loved them enough to break them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Ranginui and Papatūānuku?

Ranginui and Papatūānuku are the sky father and earth mother of Māori mythology, the primordial couple from whom the gods and the natural world descend. They were once locked in a tight embrace, and their children were born and trapped in the darkness between their bodies. Their names are often shortened to Rangi and Papa.

Why were Ranginui and Papatūānuku separated?

Their children were crushed together in the cramped darkness between their parents’ bodies, with no light and no room to move. The sons decided to force Ranginui and Papatūānuku apart so that light and space could enter the world. Only Tāwhirimātea, god of the winds, opposed the plan.

Who separated Ranginui and Papatūānuku?

Tāne, the god of forests and birds, separated them. After his brothers failed, he lay on his back and pushed his father, Ranginui, upward with his legs while his shoulders held his mother, Papatūānuku, down. This act earned him the name Tāne-te-toko-o-te-rangi, meaning Tāne the prop of the heavens.

Why does it rain in Māori tradition?

In Māori tradition, rain is the tears of Ranginui, the sky father, weeping for Papatūānuku after their forced separation. The mist that rises from the ground at dawn is Papatūānuku sighing in return for her lost husband. The two remain apart but continue to grieve for each other.

Are Ranginui and Papatūānuku the parents of the Māori gods?

Yes. Ranginui and Papatūānuku are the parents of the major Māori atua, including Tāne, Tangaroa, Tūmatauenga, Rongo, Haumia-tiketike, and Tāwhirimātea. Humankind descends from their son Tūmatauenga, making the pair the ultimate ancestors of both gods and people.

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