Tipua

Beside the highway at Ātiamuri, in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island, there is a pale boulder with a cleft in it. Dry bracken sticks out of the crack. People still stop and push a sprig in, or leave a twig, a coin, a piece of food, and then drive on. The rock is called Te Kōhatu o Hatupatu, and the offerings are not decoration. They are an old courtesy paid to something that is not simply a rock.

Māori have a word for that condition. Tipua, or tupua in other districts, is applied to anything that steps outside the ordinary rules of the world. As a describing word it carries the sense of strange, supernatural, abnormal, terrifying. As a noun it can mean a goblin, a demon, an object of fear, a strange being, and in the early contact years it was also turned on foreigners, which says something plain about how newcomers looked from the beach. The word does not name one creature. It names a quality, and the quality can settle on almost anything.

Lieutenant-Colonel Gudgeon, writing for the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1906, put it about as bluntly as it can be put: anything out of the common, or seeming to hold powers that cannot be accounted for, may fairly be called a tipua, and under that heading come stones, trees, and even fish, so long as the appearance of the thing is curious enough. He added the detail that matters most. Everything else in the world is subject to law. A tipua obeys none, human or divine. It is only somewhat amenable to karakia, and then only when the karakia comes from a tohunga with a reputation behind him.

So the category is wide and the edges are deliberately soft. Taniwha, the great water beings who guard river bends and drag off the careless, are tipua that live in the landscape. Lesser gods were called tipua too. A whale that did not behave like the humpbacks and sperm whales being cut up on the beach could be described as a tohorā tipua, a demon whale, and the distinction was not a compliment. The volcanic country has its own compound, ahi tipua, the uncanny fire, which is what the geysers and steaming ground of the central plateau are: when Ngātoroirangi was freezing to death on Tongariro he called across the ocean to his sisters Te Hoata and Te Pupu to bring fire from Hawaiki, and where they surfaced the ground still smokes and smells of sulphur. Even Whiro, the atua of darkness, death and everything that goes wrong, carries the word in his full name, Whiro-te-tipua.

The most everyday form is also the least dramatic. Certain trees and certain stones were understood to hold a supernatural presence, and were called rākau tipua and kōhatu tipua. They stood beside tracks, and the tracks were walked. A woman coming down through wet bush with a load on her back, in that cold green light under the tree ferns where the air smells of leaf mould and everything drips, would reach the known tree, break off a fresh twig, lay it among the browning twigs left by everyone who came before, say what needed saying, and keep walking. The whole transaction took a few seconds. It was not a sacrifice. It was closer to a nod.

There is no picture of a tipua because a tipua is not a shape. What the sources describe instead is the wrongness that gives the thing away: a log that will not float the way a log floats, a rock cleft in a way rock is not usually cleft, an animal too large or too pale or too solitary for its species. Kurangaituku, the bird woman who kept Hatupatu caged among her tame birds and hunted him across the pumice country when he broke out, is called a tipua, and she is described as part woman and part bird, with feathers and long claws in place of hands. When Hatupatu could not outrun her he spoke a karakia to the stone in front of him and the stone opened, and he stood inside it in the dark, listening, while she went past. That rock is the one at Ātiamuri with the bracken in it.

The powers follow from what the word means. A tipua is not bound by the ordinary sequence of cause and effect, which is exactly why it is called one, and so it can change its shape, appear where it should not, hold a stretch of country under its influence and make a place dangerous without ever showing itself. Some are guardians and some are simply hostile, and the same being can be either depending on who is passing and how. What a tipua cannot do is be reasoned with on human terms.

The limits are equally specific. A tipua is anchored. It belongs to its rock, its tree, its reach of river or its patch of steaming ground, and outside that it has no hold. It can be addressed, if the person addressing it knows the words and carries the mana to make them work, and the failed attempts of people who thought they qualified are their own small genre of story. Most of all, it is satisfied by very little. A green twig, laid down without ceremony by someone with somewhere else to be, was enough for centuries.

Almost everything written about tipua in English comes through two colonial-era recorders, Gudgeon in the Journal of the Polynesian Society and Elsdon Best in his forest lore papers of 1907 and his Māori Religion and Mythology of 1924, and their framing has coloured the concept ever since. The word itself is older and healthier than their accounts of it. It sits in the Māori dictionaries with citations from Māori-language newspapers of the 1900s and from Māori contributors writing in the 1920s, and it is still in use. The bracken in the rock at Ātiamuri is not historical.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tipua in Māori tradition?

A tipua, also spelled tupua, is anything supernatural, strange or abnormal in Māori tradition. The word covers spirits and lesser gods, but also rocks, trees, logs and animals that behave outside the ordinary rules of the world. It describes a condition rather than a single named creature.

Is a taniwha a tipua?

Yes. Taniwha are tipua that dwell in the environment, particularly in rivers, lakes and coastal waters. Tipua is the broader category, and taniwha are one well-known kind within it, alongside supernatural trees, stones and lesser gods.

What are rākau tipua and kōhatu tipua?

Rākau tipua are supernatural trees and kōhatu tipua are supernatural rocks. Travellers passing them commonly left offerings of twigs, green branches, bracken or food at their base, sometimes with a spoken karakia. The practice acknowledged the presence in the object and asked for safe passage.

What does a tipua look like?

There is no fixed appearance, because tipua is a quality rather than a species. A tipua is recognised by being wrong for its kind: a whale unlike other whales, a stone cleft in an unnatural way, or a being like Kurangaituku, who was part woman and part bird with claws instead of hands.

Can a tipua be controlled?

Only partially. Tipua obey no law, human or divine, but they are somewhat amenable to karakia recited by a tohunga with an established reputation. Ordinary people managed them by respect instead, leaving a small offering when passing a place a tipua was known to inhabit.

Related Entries

Taniwha, Patupaiarehe, Ponaturi, Maero, Hākuturi, Nuku-mai-tore, Pouākai, Tāne, Tangaroa, Ranginui and Papatūānuku, Māui, Mareikura, Aitu