Tāne (also Tāne-mahuta, Tāne-nui-a-Rangi, Tāne-te-wānanga)

The world began in a crush of bodies and no light at all. Ranginui the sky lay chest to chest with Papatūānuku the earth, and their many sons were folded into the dark between them, packed shoulder to shoulder with no room to stand. Tāne grew up in that pressure, in the warmth and the closeness and the smell of his mother’s skin. Somewhere in the long blackness, he decided he wanted to see.

His brothers had ideas of their own. Tūmatauenga, the fiercest, wanted to kill the parents outright. The others argued for separation instead, and the traditions disagree on which of them first said it aloud, but it is Tāne whose name the deed belongs to. One by one the brothers braced and strained against the sky. Rongo tried. Tangaroa tried. Haumia-tiketike tried. None could break the embrace. Then Tāne turned himself around, set his shoulders against the earth and the soles of his feet against the sky, and pushed.

It was not quick. The sinews that joined his parents stretched and held and finally tore, and both of them cried out as the gap widened. Cold air poured into a space that had never known it. Light came next, thin and strange, spreading across a world that had only ever been skin and shadow. Rangi rose into the heights and stayed there. Papa settled below. Their children stood upright for the first time, blinking, in the grey new morning their brother had made.

What Tāne built afterward is the part of him that lasts. He looked at his father, bare and cold in the upper air, and went looking for clothing for him. He fixed the sun and the moon in place and scattered the stars across the dark, and wrapped his father in the red glow of dawn. His mother he covered differently. He planted her with forests, at first standing the trees with their heads in the soil and their roots in the air, until he saw the mistake and turned them the right way so the canopy could reach the light. Into those forests he put birds. The tūī, the kererū heavy and slow on a branch, and every other singer of the bush: each one shaped and set loose to fill the green with sound. A morning in Tāne’s forest is loud. That is the ordinary work of him, the thing he exists to do, repeated at every dawn since.

He is hard to picture as a single body. Carvers and storytellers tend to render him less as a man than as the forest itself, a presence clothed in trees and feathers and growing things. When he does take human shape, it is in the separation, the strong-legged son with his back to the ground. Both versions are true at once, which is the usual way with him.

For all that he had made, Tāne wanted offspring of his own kind, and here the stories turn strange and a little sad. He took partners among the things of the world and fathered only more world: trees, streams, insects, stone. None of it was human. At last he gathered the red earth of his mother and shaped it into the form of a woman. He pressed his nose to hers and breathed, and warmth moved through the clay, and Hine-ahu-one drew her first breath. From her the human line began. Tāne had become an ancestor.

Then he did the thing that broke the world a second time. He took his own daughter, Hine-tītama, the dawn maiden, as his wife, and she did not know he was her father. They had children together. One day she asked him plainly who her father was, and he would not answer, and she understood the silence. She did not rage. She went down. She fled to Rarohenga, the place below where the dead gather, and told Tāne to stay in the light and raise their children there while she remained to receive them at the end. She became Hine-nui-te-pō, the great woman of night. From that day every human life has run toward her. Death entered the world because of a marriage.

There is one more journey. Tāne climbed, through heaven after heaven, past every obstacle set in his way, until he reached the twelfth and highest and stood before Io, the supreme one. He came back down carrying three baskets of knowledge and two sacred stones, and he gave them to his descendants. Sacred ritual, harmful knowledge, and the ordinary useful wisdom of living: all of it came into human hands through him, and for it he earned the name Tāne-te-wānanga.

His power is generative. He makes light, forest, bird, and human, and he carries knowledge down from the top of the sky. But he cannot make life out of himself alone. He needed his mother’s earth to shape a woman, and his search for a partner of his own kind led him first to mate with the wrong things and then, in the end, with his own child. The light he won is not whole either. Rangi still grieves for Papa, and his tears fall as dew, and her sighs rise back to him as mist. The separation that Tāne forced is real, and it holds, and it has never stopped hurting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tāne in Māori mythology?

Tāne is the Māori god of forests and birds, one of the many sons of the sky father Ranginui and the earth mother Papatūānuku. He is best known for separating his parents to bring light into the world, and he is regarded as an ancestor of humanity.

How did Tāne separate the sky and the earth?

Tāne separated Ranginui and Papatūānuku by lying on his back, planting his shoulders against the earth and his feet against the sky, and forcing them apart. Several of his brothers had tried and failed before him, and his success allowed light to enter the world for the first time.

Did Tāne create the first human?

Tāne shaped the first woman, Hine-ahu-one, from the red earth of his mother Papatūānuku and breathed life into her. All of humankind descends from Hine-ahu-one, which is why Tāne is considered an ancestor of the human race.

How is Tāne connected to the origin of death?

Tāne married his own daughter, Hine-tītama, without her knowing he was her father. When she discovered the truth, she fled to the underworld and became Hine-nui-te-pō, the goddess of night and death, choosing to remain there to receive the spirits of her descendants. This is how death entered the Māori world.

What are the three baskets of knowledge that Tāne brought back?

The three baskets of knowledge, or ngā kete o te wānanga, are the kete tuauri, kete tuatea, and kete aronui, which hold sacred, harmful, and practical knowledge. Tāne ascended through the heavens to the supreme being Io to obtain them and bring them down for humankind, earning him the name Tāne-te-wānanga.

Related Entries

Ranginui and Papatuanuku, Tangaroa, Hākuturi, Nuku-mai-tore, Patupaiarehe, Turehu, Tipua, Taniwha, Ponaturi, Māui, Kāne, Kū, Lono, Makemake