Rongo

The mound was still warm from the afternoon when the chanting started, and every person in the garden stopped moving until it finished. Kūmara went into the ground under words as much as under soil. The tubers were small things, yellow-skinned and barely longer than a finger, and coaxing them through a New Zealand winter had cost generations of patient adjustment by people who had carried them down out of the tropics. That work belonged to Rongo, and nobody planted without saying so aloud.

He is Rongo, or Rongo-mā-Tāne, and the older lists hand him further names: Rongo-hīrea, Rongo-marae-roa, Rongo-marae-roa-a-Rangi. Among Māori he is the atua of cultivated plants, which in practice meant kūmara. Taro, yam, gourd and tī had all come south from tropical Polynesia and all of them sulked in the new climate, so the sweet potato became the crop that decided whether a settlement ate through winter. He is also the god of peace, and the overlap is not a coincidence anyone has to strain for. The word rongo carries peace along with hearing and tidings. Gardens want long stretches of nobody fighting.

In the traditions of the Arawa canoe he is one of the sons of Ranginui the sky and Papatūānuku the earth, born into the crushing dark between his parents’ bodies. He agreed with Tū, Tāne, Tangaroa and Haumia-tiketike that the two had to be prised apart so light could get in. Tāwhirimātea, god of storms, refused, and once the separation was done he came after his brothers with everything he had. Tangaroa fled to the sea. The forests of Tāne were flattened. Rongo and Haumia went the only direction left to them and pressed themselves back into the body of their mother, and Papa hid them, and the wind went over the top and found nothing. Cultivated food and wild food have grown in the earth ever since.

How the kūmara itself reached human hands is told differently in different places. Ngāti Awa accounts make Rongo a son of Tāne and the father of the kūmara, then hand the actual theft to a man called Rongo-māui, who climbed to the star Whānui, the one reckoned as Vega, and came back down with the crop hidden on him. He gave it to his wife Pani-tinaku, and she bore it the way a woman bears a child. Whānui, robbed, sent his revenge down after it: Anuhe, Toronū and Moko, three names for the caterpillar of the kūmara moth, which is still eating the leaves.

What all this produced on the ground was one of the most heavily ritualised crops in Polynesia. Before the main planting came a smaller ceremonial one, the māra tautāne, set apart from the real garden with its tubers reserved for the atua. When the main crop went in, karakia were recited and an offering, usually a bird, was made to settle the gods. The tohunga laid tapu over the ground and it held until harvest, which kept people out of the gardens entirely. At harvest the tapu was lifted in a ceremony called the pure, the first tubers out of the soil were set aside for Rongo, and then a hākari was held and everybody ate. Small ones were scraped and dried in the sun into a sweet called kao.

He was present in those gardens physically, after a fashion. Taumata atua, stone figures standing for the atua and for Rongo in particular, were set among the mounds to hold the mauri, the life force, of the crop. So were atua kiato, wooden pegs with small carved heads driven into the soil. Sometimes a skull or a preserved head went up on a post to do the same job. No source gives Rongo a face of his own, no height, no bearing, nothing anyone could sketch. The nearest thing to a portrait is a worn stone the length of a forearm, standing in a field of earth mounds with chewed leaves around it, and as a likeness of what he was for, that will do.

Two thousand kilometres to the north, on Mangaia in the southern Cook Islands, the same name belonged to a considerably more frightening god.

There Rongo is not one atua among several but the pre-eminent one. He is a child of Vatea the sky father and Papa the earth mother, and his twin brother is Tangaroa of the sea. His sons Rangi, Mokoiro and Akatauira lifted Mangaia itself up out of the underworld and became its first settlers and the ancestors of the Ngāriki, with Rangi taking the first chieftainship. The island’s older name says plainly whose it was: A’u A’u Nui o Rongo ki te Ao Marama, the Great Terraced Land of Rongo in the Land of Daylight.

His worship ran out of two marae in the Keia district, ‘Aka’oro inland and ‘Orongo on the coast, the second of them arguably the most important on the island and built over an abandoned village of the same name. Two hereditary high priests presided, the inland ariki pā uta and the seaward ariki pā tai. In peacetime Rongo took parcels of cooked taro, the staple raised in the irrigated valley plantations that were the real wealth of Mangaia. After a war of conquest, when a new paramount was installed, he took a person. At ‘Orongo the body was laid on a smooth slab of stone in front of his image. Fragments of human bone are still in the ground there.

He was god of war and god of taro irrigation at once, and on Mangaia those were the same job. Rongo guaranteed victory and he guaranteed the fertility of the land, and both had to be fed, continually, in bodies and in cooked root. He was said to feast on the spirits of men killed in battle. Then, with the new paramount in place, the weapons were put away, and the closing incantation asked for peace to begin and for anger to be cleared out, and the same god who had eaten the dead presided over the dance festivals, the poetry and the kite flying. The god of peace ate people. Both halves sit in the record and neither one cancels the other.

A Mangaian dance verse puts him just out of reach: the platform of Rongo cannot be ascended, a platform open to thousands and to myriads, and only one thing ever gets up onto it, which is wisdom and learning. Another line is quieter and more domestic. When the rain is heard on the leaves, Rongo enters into his house.

His powers are all of one kind. He makes things grow that would not grow unaided, he holds off the fighting that would stop them growing, and on Mangaia he decides who wins when the fighting happens anyway. None of it is spontaneous, and that is his limit as much as his method. The chant has to be said, the bird has to be offered, the first tubers have to go back before anyone eats, the taro has to be cooked and carried to the marae, and on Mangaia the cycle never closed, because success in war and fertility in the valleys both had to be bought again the following season. His reach is geographical too. Kūmara would not grow south of Banks Peninsula, and where the crop stopped, so did he.

The name travelled further than any of his stories. Hawaiian Lono, Tahitian Ro’o and Marquesan Ono are the same word worn down by distance, each of them fixed to a god of rain and growing things and each with a quarrel of some kind with the god of war. The marae on Mangaia were pulled down in the early nineteenth century when the missionaries came, and the taumata atua came out of the New Zealand gardens around the same time. The kūmara stayed. There is a whakataukī holding that the kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness, which was offered as advice about modesty, and which also describes rather well a god whose whole visible career was other people’s food coming up out of the dirt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Rongo in Māori mythology?

Rongo, also called Rongo-mā-Tāne, is the Māori atua of cultivated plants and of peace. In the Arawa creation account he is one of the sons of Ranginui and Papatūānuku who separated their parents to let light into the world. When his brother Tāwhirimātea attacked in revenge, Rongo and Haumia-tiketike hid inside the body of their mother the earth, which is why cultivated and wild foods grow underground.

What is Rongo the god of?

Rongo governs cultivated food and peace. In New Zealand that meant the kūmara above all, since the other crops brought from tropical Polynesia struggled in the colder climate. On Mangaia in the Cook Islands his portfolio was different and harsher: irrigated taro, and war.

Is Rongo the same god as Lono?

They are the same name carried to different islands rather than the same body of story. Rongo, Hawaiian Lono, Tahitian Ro’o and Marquesan Ono all descend from one Polynesian original and are all gods of rain, growth and agriculture. Each tradition then developed its own myths, rituals and festivals around the figure, so the Hawaiian Lono of the Makahiki season and the Mangaian Rongo of the sacrificial marae are not interchangeable.

Why did Rongo receive human sacrifice on Mangaia?

On Mangaia Rongo was the pre-eminent god and the guarantor of both victory in war and the fertility of the taro land, and the two were treated as one exchange. When a new paramount chief was installed after a war of conquest, a human sacrifice was made to Rongo, laid on a stone slab before his image at the coastal marae of ‘Orongo. His ordinary peacetime offering was much simpler, parcels of cooked taro.

How did the kūmara come to Māori according to the myths?

The tellings vary. Ngāti Awa tradition makes Rongo a son of Tāne and the father of the kūmara, and credits the theft to Rongo-māui, who went up to the star Whānui, took the crop and brought it back to his wife Pani-tinaku, who gave birth to it. Whānui retaliated by sending down the caterpillars of the kūmara moth, known as Anuhe, Toronū and Moko, which attack the plant’s leaves to this day.

Related Entries

Tane, Tangaroa, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, Māui, Hine-nui-te-pō (Hine-tītama), Taniwha, Tapairu, Aitu, Lono, Kāne, Kū, Kanaloa, Pele, Makemake