Tapairu

The drums on Mangaia ran until the sky went the colour of ash, and by then nobody was certain who they had been dancing beside. Torches of dried coconut frond guttered low over the cleared ground. In the line were women whose faces belonged to no household on the island, who moved a half-beat cleaner than anyone trained on human instruction, and who carried the cold smell of wet stone. When the first grey light came over the coral terraces they were gone. The dance was held in the name of Tau-Titi, and his sisters had come to it.

The Mangaians called such women tapairu. William Wyatt Gill, who spent twenty years on the island and put the word into English in 1876, glossed it as “peerless,” and the sense holds. A tapairu was not a species of goblin but a rank, the highest a woman could hold. In the language, the same word marks the first-born daughter of a chiefly house, the one whose birth reorders a family’s standing, and Māori across the sea use it identically: ariki tapairu, a woman owed the deference of a queen. The spirit-women carried the title because nothing born on the island could match them. Their beauty was said to run past the daughters of mortals entirely, which in a small society is less a compliment than a warning.

They came from underneath. Mangaia sits inside a wall of raised fossil coral shot through with caves, and what fresh water reaches the sea does it through passages in the rock. The tapairu used those. Where the water came out, they could come out, climbing up from Avaiki, the world below, into the ordinary evening air of a village that was about to start dancing.

Avaiki belonged to Miru. She is the ugliest figure in the Mangaian record, a she-demon who kept an earth oven and fed it with the dead, and her household is where the tapairu are best documented. Four daughters are counted to her, and the accounts pull in two directions about what that means. Read one way, those four are the tapairu proper and every later fairy woman is named after them. Read the other, and tapairu is simply the rank they held, one category of spirit among several. The nineteenth-century English retellings favour the first. The Mangaian-language manuscript behind them, written out by the island scholar Mamae of Ngāti Vara for Gill to work from, favours the second.

Two of the daughters have names that survive: Kumutonga-i-te-pō, Kumutonga-of-the-night, and Karaia-i-te-ata, Karaia-the-shadowy. Both are night words. Both belong to the story that shows exactly what a tapairu was for.

Miru wanted the hero Ngaru in her oven and was not going to get him by force, so she sent the two of them up with instructions to marry him and talk him down the passage. They came to the house of Moko, the lizard ancestor who looked after him, and found Ngaru apparently asleep on the mat. He was not. He lay there and listened while Moko questioned them and they lied, sweetly, about having come only to escort him home.

What followed is the strangest courtship in Polynesian myth. They wound him in rolls of the finest tapa until he could barely feel the air move, slung the bundle from a long pole, and carried him down chanting, one sister at each end, the way a body is lowered into a burial cave. They set him under a grove of Tahitian chestnut and unwrapped him. Then they went off to prepare kava, breaking and chewing the root of a plant called Tevo’o, which was one of the two things Miru’s power rested on. The oven was the other. A voice came out of the dark calling both women by name and telling them the oven had waited long enough. Ngaru drank the cup they brought him and stayed awake, which no previous guest had managed, and put his loincloth back on.

The end of it is water. A flood came through Miru’s country and took her and her whole household with it. Ngaru saved himself on the tough roots of a nono tree, and the two tapairu saved themselves by holding on to his legs. Everyone else in that family drowned. Afterwards the sisters taught him to throw balls, and in time he tired of them and went out through a dark winding passage into another country full of fruit and nose-flute music, where he married someone else.

They were not only creatures of the underworld. The sky held tapairu too, and the two named up there, Ina and Matonga, were the ones Ngaru beat at their own game. Before he went, Moko sent a party of lizards ahead to look. The lizards came back and reported women keeping seven or eight balls in the air at once, and a chisel, and a mallet, and a great quantity of human bone. Ngaru went anyway, won, and brought the ball game down to earth, which is how the islanders accounted for a pastime their women played at festivals.

Nobody wrote down what a tapairu looked like. That is not quite an oversight. The sources describe an effect rather than a face, a beauty measured only against the human women standing next to it, and the moment anyone tries to fix the features the figure stops doing its work. What they were given instead was capability. A tapairu could pass for human long enough to be married. She could move between Avaiki and the surface through water-cut rock whenever she liked. She could dance beside mortals in the dark without being caught at it, and she could carry a grown man down into the country of the dead while he thanked her for the trouble.

The limits are just as plain. Daylight ended it every time, and when the dance broke at dawn the tapairu went back down the way they had come. Their hold on a man ran entirely through his own consent, so a guest who kept his wits through the kava was a guest they could not deliver. And they were instruments. The plan was Miru’s, the oven was Miru’s, and when the flood came the two daughters lived only because they were holding on to somebody else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Tapairu in Cook Islands mythology?

The Tapairu are a class of spirit women in the mythology of Mangaia in the Cook Islands, whose name means roughly “peerless ones.” Their beauty was said to surpass that of any woman born to mortal parents. They lived in Avaiki, the world beneath the island, and came up to the surface through the underground water passages in the coral rock.

Are the Tapairu the daughters of Miru?

Four daughters of Miru, the underworld goddess of Mangaia, are the best-known Tapairu, and some accounts treat those four as the original beings the whole class is named for. Other readings treat tapairu as a rank rather than a lineage, one category of spirit being that Miru’s daughters happened to hold. Two of the four are named in the myths: Kumutonga-i-te-pō and Karaia-i-te-ata.

What did the Tapairu do to humans?

They joined the living at the nocturnal dance held in honour of their brother Tau-Titi, mixing with mortal dancers until dawn, when they returned to Avaiki. They were also sent to seduce living men into marriage in order to bring them down to Miru’s earth oven, which is what happened to the hero Ngaru. Being married to a Tapairu was a death sentence carried out politely.

How did Ngaru escape the Tapairu?

Ngaru was carried to Miru’s domain wrapped in fine tapa cloth and slung from a pole by Kumutonga and Karaia, but he drank the kava they prepared without becoming stupefied, which no earlier victim had managed. A flood then swept Miru and her household away while Ngaru held on to the roots of a nono tree. The two Tapairu survived only by clinging to his legs.

Is tapairu a real word outside mythology?

Yes. In Cook Islands Māori and in New Zealand Māori, tapairu denotes a woman of the highest rank, particularly the first-born daughter in a chiefly family, often in the phrase ariki tapairu. The mythological beings carry the word as a title of status rather than as the name of a species.

Related Entries

Tāne, Tangaroa, Māui, Mareikura, Ponaturi, Patupairehe, Nuku-mai-tore, Hākuturi, Menehune, Aitu, Tipua, Kupua, Nymph, Apsaras, Samodiva