Tāwhaki

Also Known As: also written Tawhaki; cognate with the Tahitian Tafaʻi, the Tuamotuan Tahaki and the Hawaiian Kahaʻi
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology, Polynesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Lightning breaks from beneath his arms when the great prayers are completed, and his incantations can raise a flood, restore a blind woman’s sight, disguise him as a beggar and hold him steady on a vine between earth and sky.
Role in Mythos: He is the ancestor who avenges his father on the Ponaturi and climbs to the tenth heaven, bringing back the incantations that human beings afterwards use.
Relation to Humans: He is counted as a direct ancestor in the genealogies of many iwi rather than a distant power, so his descendants can trace themselves to him by name. Karakia are said to descend from what he carried back down the vine, which makes him less an object of worship than a source of working knowledge.

The bones were hung high under the roof of a house on the shore, wrapped in the smoke of nobody’s fire, and one evening they began to knock against each other in the dark. Nobody had touched them. Their owner had been dead for years. Somewhere out along the coast a voice was coming closer, working through an incantation, and the bones of Hemā rattled in the thatch because they knew what the words meant.

The voice belonged to his son. Tāwhaki stands near the front of the great Māori genealogies, close enough to the sky to command weather and close enough to the ground that his descendants can be counted down to living people. His grandmother was Whaitiri, thunder in the shape of a woman, who came down out of the sky to marry a man called Kaitangata on the strength of his name. She took it to mean that he shared her appetite for human flesh. It meant only that he was formidable in war, and the disappointment ran through everything that followed like a crack in a bowl. She went on killing on her own account, ate kin of her husband’s by accident, and lost her sight after eating fish pulled up on hooks he had carved from their bones. Then she climbed back into the sky, leaving word that her son could not follow her but that her grandchildren might.

The first attempt on his life came on a fishing trip. He had married a woman named Hinepiripiri, and her brothers took him out to a reef that ran far into the sea, and on the walk home two of them beat him down and buried him and carried on to the village with their faces arranged. His wife asked where he was, got two different answers from two sets of brothers, and went out to look. She found the ground and found him under it, still breathing. She got him onto her back, carried him home, washed the wounds and stopped the bleeding, and when he asked her for firewood he told her to bring a tall tree whole. She dropped one, shouldered it, and laid the entire trunk across the fire without cutting it. Their son was named Wahieroa, long log of firewood, so that the debt would be recited every time anyone said the boy’s name.

Then Tāwhaki moved his people onto a high ridge, built a fortified village on top of it, and called down to his ancestors for the rest of it. The floods of heaven came. Everyone below drowned.

The Ponaturi were a longer job. They were sea people who slept on dry land, and they had killed Hemā, kept his bones, and kept his wife Urutonga alive as a doorkeeper, posting her at the entrance of their great house to lie to them about the dawn. Tāwhaki and his younger brother Karihi found her sitting there and hid themselves in the reed thatch above the door while the whole tribe came up out of the water at dusk. A scout walked ahead of the rest and stopped in the doorway with his nose up, turning, working the smell of the house, and he was two breaths from finding them when the crowd behind shoved past him in their thousands and buried the scent of strangers under their own. All night the old ones called out to ask whether it was light yet, and all night Urutonga answered that it was deep night, lasting night, sleep on. At sunrise her sons pulled the packing out of the window and the door. What came in was not a weapon. The Ponaturi withered where they lay.

The sky-woman arrived afterwards, drawn by the reports of him. She came down at night, lay beside him, and was gone before dawn, night after night, until she was carrying his child and stayed. Some tellings call her Tangotango, some Hāpai, some Maikuku-makaka. The daughter was Arahuta. The marriage ended over a single sentence: Tāwhaki carried the newborn to a spring to wash her, held her out at arm’s length, said she smelled bad, and her mother heard him say it. She rose with the child, paused with one foot on the carved figure at the end of the ridgepole, refused to come back, and left him one instruction on her way up. When you climb, take hold of the vine that has come down from above and struck root in the earth. Never take the one that hangs loose and swings.

The climb is the part everyone remembers. At the place where the vines touch down the brothers found a blind old woman counting taro, ten roots in a heap, and Tāwhaki stole them away one at a time while she counted until she stood up and swept a weapon over their heads. When they let her find them she turned out to be Whaitiri. He touched her eyes and gave her back her sight, and she pointed the two of them at the sky. Karihi jumped first, caught the swinging vine, and the winds of heaven threw him from one edge of the world to the other and back. Some versions land him alive at his brother’s feet; in others he falls and that is the end of him. Tāwhaki took the parent vine, said the words the whole way up, and came out in the highest of the ten heavens, where a being called Tama-i-waho gave him the great incantations to bring back down for the use of anyone who could learn them. One old telling swaps the vine for a spider’s thread, which is a harder climb and a better picture.

He found his wife by doing manual labour. Disguised as an ugly old slave, he carried the axes for a party of canoe builders, dawdled behind them at the end of the day, went back alone and ran an adze the length of one side of the hull in a single pass, then the other, and did it again the following night until they hid in the bushes to catch whoever it was. When his daughter’s rites were finally performed, the wall of the house was broken open so that she could be carried out through it rather than through the ordinary door, and as the prayers ended, lightning came out from under his arms.

That flash is what he keeps. The thunder is his grandmother’s, and the lightning is still said to come off him when he moves about up there. His real weapon was never the taiaha. It was accurate speech: words that raise a flood, open an eye, dress a chief as a beggar, and hold a man on a rope of vegetation at the height where looking down would finish him. The limits sit in the same place. Nothing about him prevented four ordinary brothers-in-law from putting him in a hole in the ground, and he came out of it only because his wife went looking. Grief moved him more reliably than any enemy managed to. And the ascent turns on one act of discrimination that no amount of power assists with, because from underneath the two vines look identical, and the wrong one is beautiful and it is moving.

Under his own name and under others he travelled a very long way. Tahiti tells him as Tafaʻi, the Tuamotus as Tahaki, Hawaii as Kahaʻi. His son Wahieroa was killed in a distant country by a giant called Matuku, and Wahieroa’s son Rātā went to fetch his father’s bones home, which is where the next long story begins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tāwhaki in Māori mythology?

Tāwhaki is an ancestor-hero associated with lightning, the son of Hemā and Urutonga and the grandson of the thunder-woman Whaitiri. He appears near the top of many iwi genealogies, so he is treated as a forebear rather than a remote deity. His two most famous deeds are the destruction of the Ponaturi and his climb to the tenth heaven.

How did Tāwhaki climb to the heavens?

Tāwhaki climbed a vine that hung down from the sky and had struck root in the earth, reciting incantations the entire way up. His brother Karihi took the wrong vine, the one hanging loose, and was flung about by the winds of heaven. The advice about which vine to choose came from Tāwhaki’s departing sky-wife, and it is the hinge the whole ascent turns on.

Why is Tāwhaki associated with lightning?

Lightning is said to have flashed from beneath Tāwhaki’s arms as the prayers over his infant daughter were completed, and the flash has been attributed to him ever since. Thunder belongs to his grandmother Whaitiri, whose name means thunder, while the lightning is his. In tellings where he stays in the sky permanently, the flash is explained as his movement up there.

What happened to the Ponaturi?

The Ponaturi were sea people who slept in a house on land, and Tāwhaki and Karihi destroyed the entire tribe with daylight rather than with weapons. The brothers hid in the thatch, then sealed every chink in the house so that the Ponaturi kept sleeping past dawn, and pulled the coverings out when the sun was high. The Ponaturi had killed Tāwhaki’s father Hemā and held his mother Urutonga captive as a doorkeeper.

Is Tāwhaki known outside New Zealand?

Yes. The same hero appears across Polynesia under cognate names, including Tafaʻi in Tahiti, Tahaki in the Tuamotus and Kahaʻi in Hawaii. The associated figures travel with him, so Karihi, Wahieroa and Rātā turn up in island traditions far from New Zealand.