Tiki te Hatu

Also Known As: also written Tiki-te-hatu, Tikitehatu and Tiki Te Hatu; the name is read as Tiki the lord
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Rapa Nui Mythology, Polynesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He begets, and what he begets is the furniture of the living world, ending with people.
Role in Mythos: He is the generative figure of the Rapa Nui creation chant, holding four consecutive couplets near the end of the litany where every other god gets one.
Relation to Humans: The last of his four unions is the one the chant’s English column renders as the making of man, which puts every islander downstream of him. No prayer, offering or shrine addressed to him has ever been recorded, so whatever the relationship was, it was not worship of the kind the island gave Makemake.

In December 1886 an old man on Easter Island sat down in front of an American paymaster and recited a list. He had refused for days. What finally moved him was rum, which is not the provenance anyone would have chosen for the longest creation text the island has. The chant was called Atua Matariri, and it ran in couplets of one unvarying shape: this one entered that one, and from it came a third thing. Thistle. Obsidian. Flies. Sharks. The porpoise. The stars. Four dozen unions, and the world assembled out of them the way a wall goes up, stone by stone, nobody pausing to admire it.

Four of those couplets in a row belong to a single name, and that is the whole of what the island preserved about him. Tiki te Hatu.

The first of the four pairs him with Hiho-hiho-ki-te-turu, and out of it comes the paroko, a small rockfish that lives in the tidal shelves of black basalt along the island’s shore. It is a strange thing to be a god’s firstborn. The paroko is the fish a child catches by hand in six inches of warm water while the swell breaks somewhere behind them, and on an island with no rivers and few trees it is also the kind of food that actually keeps people alive. The second couplet gives him Hina-popoia, and the third gives him Maea. The fourth gives him Ruru-a-Tiki-te-Hatu, whose name carries his own inside it, and out of that union, according to the English that travelled with the chant, came man.

That English is worth being careful about. Ure Vaʻe Iko spoke Rapanui; the translation was supplied by Alexander Salmon, a Tahitian-English intermediary working at speed, and it is not really a translation at all. It is a gloss, confident where it should be tentative, and it turns a line about one named thing into a tidy abstraction. Where Salmon wrote that Tiki te Hatu and a goddess produced luck, or life, the chant is naming something more specific and stranger that nobody has fully recovered. Alfred Métraux went back over the whole text in the 1930s, working on the island with Rapanui speakers, and produced readings that are closer to the bone: Tiki-the-lord, copulating with Running-and-flowing-down, produced the paroko. The rhythm survives. The neatness does not.

The name itself opens outward. Tiki is the oldest human-shaped figure in the Polynesian world, the first man in Māori tradition or the one who makes him, the Tiʻi of Tahiti, the kiʻi of Hawaii. Hatu is the word for lord or master. So the Rapa Nui god is Tiki wearing a title, which is the form the figure took at the furthest-flung corner of the Polynesian triangle. There is a small irony in the island’s stone: the giant figures on the ahu are moai, never tiki, and calling them tiki is a visitor’s mistake that has been made for two centuries. The word for the carving never took hold here. The name did.

He came from somewhere, but the chant does not say where, and neither does anything else. No origin story attaches to him, no death, no quarrel with a brother, no theft, no descent. This is a god with no biography.

What he has instead is a second life in the island’s king lists. The ariki of Rapa Nui were remembered in a long recited sequence running down from Hotu Matuʻa, and roughly thirty places into that sequence stands a Tiki Te Hatu, with a Te Rurua Tiki Te Hatu a few positions below him and a Te Riri Katea further down still. Those are the same names, in the same order, as the fourth couplet of the creation chant. Métraux published a study of the king lists in 1937 and Sebastián Englert worked over them again a decade later, and the overlap is plain in both. What it means is not. A cosmogony may have been dressed as a genealogy so that the ariki could claim it, or a genealogy may have been read back as cosmogony by informants recalling a chant nobody had needed in fifty years. The island was in no condition to explain. The Peruvian slave raids of 1862 and the smallpox that followed had carried off most of the people who held the tradition, and by 1886 the men who could still recite were few and elderly and knew exactly what they were holding.

His power, then, is narrow and total. He does not throw thunder, split the sky, fish islands out of the sea or steal fire. He produces. Four times, and the fourth time produces the beings who would go on to recite the list. It is a remarkably economical way to be a creator: no world-shaping labour, no adversary, just the same act repeated until the world contains what it needs to contain.

The limits are equally plain. He generates but does not govern. The god who ruled the island’s religious life was Makemake, who had a cult, a season, a rock full of carvings at Orongo and an egg brought back across the water every spring, and none of that is Tiki te Hatu’s. He receives no offerings in any account. He gets no temple. He has no part in the founding voyage, no word to Hotu Matuʻa, no appearance in the stories about the two peoples or the toppling of the statues. He exists at the point where the world is being made and then stops existing, which is a limitation and also, if the chant is read straight, the entire job description.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tiki te Hatu?

Tiki te Hatu is a creator figure in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) mythology whose name means roughly Tiki the lord. He appears in the island’s creation chant Atua Matariri, where four consecutive verses name him as the begetter of a rockfish and, in the last of them, of humankind.

What did Tiki te Hatu create?

The chant credits him with four things in four successive couplets. The first is the paroko, a small rockfish of the island’s tidal shelves; the last, in the English gloss recorded with the chant, is man. The two middle results were rendered loosely as life and luck by the chant’s first translator and have never been securely recovered.

Is Tiki te Hatu the same as the Polynesian Tiki?

He is the Rapa Nui form of the same ancient Polynesian figure. Tiki appears as the first man or the maker of the first man across Polynesia, as Tiʻi in Tahiti and kiʻi in Hawaii, and on Rapa Nui the name carries the title hatu, meaning lord. The island’s own stone figures, however, are moai, not tiki.

Where does the story of Tiki te Hatu come from?

From the chant Atua Matariri, recited in December 1886 by the elderly islander Ure Vaʻe Iko to the American naval paymaster William Thomson, and re-examined on the island in the 1930s by the ethnographer Alfred Métraux. The same name also appears about thirty places down the Rapa Nui king lists, which Métraux and Sebastián Englert both studied.

What did Tiki te Hatu look like?

No source describes him. The chant gives him four partners and four results and never mentions a face, a body or a size, and no carving on the island has ever been identified as him. The silence is total and appears to be original rather than lost.