Tāwhirimātea

Also Known As: Tāwhiri-mā-tea; printed as Tawhiri-ma-tea in the nineteenth century editions; Matariki preserves the longer phrase Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Every wind, cloud, squall, hailstorm and drowning rain is his own begotten offspring, sent out from the sky at his order.
Role in Mythos: He is the one child of Ranginui and Papatūānuku who refused to let his parents be parted, and he has made war on his brothers ever since.
Relation to Humans: He is the only brother humankind never subdued, never caught and never turned into food, so he remains a standing enemy who attacks by sea and by land. People deal with him the way they deal with any power they cannot beat, by asking, and the old prayers include incantations for a favourable wind.

The forests went first. Great trees snapped clean through at the middle, boughs torn loose and flung down, whole stands left lying on the ground for the grub and the rot to finish. Then the sea, where waves stood up like cliffs so high that looking down from a crest would turn a man giddy, and the god of the ocean fled through his own water. All of it was one brother’s answer to a family decision he had voted against.

Before any of that there was no room to stand. Ranginui the sky and Papatūānuku the earth lay pressed together in the dark, and their children were crushed into the narrow warm space between them, arguing. Tūmatauenga wanted to kill the parents outright. Tāne argued for separation instead, for letting the sky stand off at a distance and leaving the earth close underfoot as a nursing mother. Five brothers agreed. One did not. Tāwhirimātea, whose portion was the wind, could see that a world with a gap in it would be a world he no longer filled by default, and he grieved at the thought of his parents pulled apart.

He was outvoted. Tāne set his head against the ground, braced his feet on the sky and pushed until Rangi and Papa came away from one another with a cry their children never forgot. Light came in. And Tāwhirimātea, alone of the brothers, went up with his father rather than staying below with his mother.

What he did next was breed an army. Up in the sheltered hollows of the sky the two of them took counsel, and the winds were born out of that conversation: one sent to the north, one to the south, one to the east, one to the west, each carrying a name that is simply the name of the quarter it comes from. Tūāraki blows out of the north. Tonga comes off the south. Marangai runs in from the east and hauāuru from the west. After them came the rest of the brood, which the old accounts list with obvious relish: squalls, whirlwinds, dense cloud, massy cloud, dark cloud, gloomy thick cloud, fiery cloud, the cloud that runs ahead of a hurricane, cloud of a fiery black, cloud lit red from inside. He came down in the middle of all of them.

Tāne’s forests were still standing unsuspecting when the breath of his mouth hit them, and afterwards there was nothing there worth the name of a forest. He went from that wreckage straight out over the water. Tangaroa ran, and while he ran his own descendants fell out about where to hide. Ikatere called for the open sea. Tū-te-wehiwehi called for the land. Neither would follow the other, so the fish went one way and the reptiles the other, parting with threats about exactly how each of them would one day be cooked. Rongo and Haumia, gods of the cultivated food and the wild food, survived only because Papa reached up and hid them inside her own body, and their brother hunted for them and could not find them.

That left Tūmatauenga. He did not run, did not hide and could not be moved. The storm threw everything it had at him while he stood on his mother’s chest, and after a time the fury went out of the sky. Tūmatauenga then turned on the brothers who had deserted him, and he beat them by the straightforward method of eating them: nooses twisted from whanake leaf for the birds of Tāne, nets netted from flax for the children of Tangaroa, a scraped wooden hoe and a plaited basket for the roots of Rongo and Haumia. Four brothers were made common, which is to say made into food. One was not. Nobody has ever eaten the weather.

So the war is still running. The last born of Heaven and Earth was left over as an enemy for humankind, and he still comes at people across the sea and over the land, and people still have to go out in it.

The old texts give him no body at all. There is no face anywhere in them, no height, no colour, because what is being described is not a figure but a condition, and the wind and the cloud and the rain are the description. One later account, now the most widely told of all, does hand him a body and then immediately takes something off it. Beaten by Tūmatauenga, in fury at his brothers and as a sign of love for his father, he tore out his own eyes, crushed them in his hands and threw them up into the sky, where they lodged against Ranginui’s chest and became a cluster of stars. Matariki is the short form of Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea, the eyes of the lord Tāwhirimātea. It also accounts neatly for the wind’s manners. A blind god feeling his way around the sky will come at you from any direction at all.

The version most readers know reached print by a particular road. In the early 1850s a Te Arawa man named Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke wrote out hundreds of pages of his people’s traditions for the governor, George Grey, who published them in Māori in 1854 and in English translation the following year. That is one man’s telling, from one iwi, arranged by a colonial administrator, and it has had a century and a half of head start on every other account. Other tribes order the brothers differently and name different children. The Matariki reading of his name has travelled fastest in recent years: it carried a national holiday into New Zealand law in April 2022, first observed that June.

His powers run as wide as the sky. Rain that starts and does not stop, hail, mist, dew heavy and light, the squall that gets up out of nothing off a cold coast. During the war on his brothers the water he sent down submerged the greater part of the dry land and left only a little of it standing above the sea. He carries no weapon and has no shape in which to be wounded.

His limits are equally plain. He could not break Tūmatauenga, and unlike his brothers he cannot be snared, netted, dug up, cooked or made ordinary. In the telling where he blinded himself he cannot see where he is going. And he can be spoken to. Alongside the incantations for good fishing and abundant crops, the old prayers include ones asking Tāwhirimātea for a favourable wind, which is the arrangement people settled on in the end. They never beat him. They learned to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tāwhirimātea?

Tāwhirimātea is the Māori atua of wind, storm and weather, one of the children of the sky father Ranginui and the earth mother Papatūānuku. The winds, clouds, hail and rain are described as his own offspring, which he sends out from the sky. He is the only one of the brothers who opposed the separation of their parents.

Why did Tāwhirimātea fight his brothers?

He fought them because they tore his parents apart against his wishes. When Tāne forced the sky and the earth away from each other to let light into the world, Tāwhirimātea went up to live with his father, bred the winds and the storm clouds, and attacked each brother in turn. He wrecked Tāne’s forests, drove Tangaroa into the depths of the ocean and hunted Rongo and Haumia, who were hidden inside the earth by Papatūānuku.

Which god defeated Tāwhirimātea?

Tūmatauenga, the atua of war and of humankind, was the only brother who stood against the storm and could not be shifted. Tūmatauenga afterwards took revenge on the four brothers who had deserted him by making them into food, using snares, nets and a digging tool. Tāwhirimātea alone could not be caught or eaten, so he was left as a permanent enemy of people.

What does Tāwhirimātea have to do with Matariki?

Matariki, the star cluster also known as the Pleiades, is a shortened form of Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea, meaning the eyes of the lord Tāwhirimātea. In the widely told account, Tāwhirimātea tore out his own eyes after his defeat, crushed them and threw them into the sky, where they stuck to his father’s chest and became the stars. This is also why he is described as blind. Matariki became a New Zealand public holiday in 2022.

What are the names of Tāwhirimātea’s winds?

He sent one wind to each of the four quarters, and their names are the ordinary Māori words for those directions: tūāraki for the north, tonga for the south, marangai for the east and hauāuru for the west. Alongside them he produced squalls, whirlwinds and a long list of named clouds, including the cloud that runs ahead of a hurricane.