Tūmatauenga

Also Known As: Tū; Tū-mata-uenga, “Tū of the angry face”; also called Tūkāriri, Tūkanguha, Tūkataua, Tū-whakaheke-tangata and Tūmatawhāiti, one name for each victory over his brothers
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the only child of Rangi and Papa who stood unmoved against the storm, and the one who made four of his brothers noa, common, by catching them, cooking them and eating them.
Role in Mythos: Tūmatauenga is the atua of war and of ordinary human work, and in many tellings he stands for humankind itself, though other traditions trace the human line instead through Tāne and Hineahuone, or through Tiki.
Relation to Humans: Every snare set in a tree, net dragged through water and root dug from the ground repeats an act he performed first, so the whole business of feeding yourself is an inherited grudge. He is also the atua a war party addressed before it moved, and the open ground in front of a meeting house is still called his.

The first plan was murder. Packed into the black airless space between their parents, unable to stand up, the children of Rangi and Papa held a council about what to do with the two bodies pressing them flat, and the fiercest of them spoke first and spoke plainly. Kill them. It was Tāne who argued for the gentler crime, separation rather than slaughter, and the brothers went with Tāne. Tūmatauenga was outvoted before the world had any light in it, and something of that has stayed with him.

They took turns at the prising. Rongomātāne set himself against the weight and the sky did not shift. Tangaroa tried. Haumia-tikitiki tried. Tūmatauenga tried, and for all his appetite the heavens stayed exactly where they were. Then Tāne planted his head against his mother, braced his feet on his father, and pushed with his back until the two came apart, and the old accounts remember the sound of it as a cry from both of them, asking their children why.

Light got in. So did Tāwhirimātea, who had refused to agree to any of it. He followed his father into the sky, bred his winds up there in the sheltered hollows, and came back down to punish everyone. Tāne’s forests snapped at the middle and the great trunks were left lying for the grubs and the rot. The sea rose into cliffs of water and Tangaroa fled into his own depths. Rongomātāne and Haumia-tikitiki would have gone the same way if Papatūānuku had not scooped them up and buried them in her own soil, where their leaves later gave them away to somebody worse. Then the storm reached the last brother and found a man standing in it.

Rain came sideways and stripped the ground bare around his heels. He did not move. Eventually the wind ran out of things to do to him and the sky’s temper cooled, which is not the same as Tāwhirimātea losing, and the two of them have never settled it.

What Tūmatauenga did afterwards is the reason anybody eats. He had noticed that his brothers ran while he stood, and he took it personally. He gathered leaves from the whanake, twisted them into nooses, and went up into the forest to hang them among the branches, and after that no child of Tāne could fly in safety. He cut flax and knotted it into nets and hauled Tangaroa’s children out of the water by the basketful. He scraped a hoe out of wood, plaited a kete, and dug up the cultivated root and the wild one, and left the plants to shrivel in the sun. Four brothers caught, cooked and eaten. In eating them he made them noa, stripped of the sacredness that had protected them, and he took from each of them the incantations that would keep them coming back.

Picture a man kneeling in the half dark at the edge of the bush, setting a noose in a fruiting tree with cold fingers and then waiting, absolutely still, for the weight to drop into it. That is a god working. It is also just breakfast, and the tradition sees no gap between the two.

He came out of the whole affair with a set of names, one for each thing he had proved: Tūkāriri, Tūkanguha, Tūkataua, Tū-whakaheke-tangata, Tūmatawhāiti. The one that stuck was Tūmatauenga, Tū of the angry face.

Nothing describes that face. On appearance the record is at once unusually direct and unusually thin. He bore the likeness of a man, as his brothers did, and his children were begotten on this earth and multiplied into people. That is all of it. To picture Tūmatauenga you look at somebody, which is very nearly the point, although it is not the only account of where people came from: other traditions run the human line through Tāne and Hineahuone, the woman he shaped out of soil, or through Tiki.

The rites built around him were not gentle. The first enemy killed in a battle was the mataika, the first fish, and taking him carried real prestige; the man who did it shouted his claim across the fighting on the spot. The heart was cut out and offered in the whāngai hau, the feeding of the hau, which delivered the essence of the kill to the atua who had made the killing possible. At the tohi, the dedication rite performed at a sacred stream soon after a child was named, boys were often given to Tū and girls to Hineteiwaiwa, so a household knew early which world each child was being handed.

His ground survives in a place most visitors walk straight over without noticing. The marae ātea, the open swept earth in front of the meeting house, belongs to Tūmatauenga; the house standing behind it belongs to Rongo, who is peace. Speech made out on that flat packed ground is permitted to be hard, because it is being made on Tū’s floor, and the challenge that opens a welcome once carried a real question about whether the visitors intended violence. Step over the threshold and the rules change, and the talking inside is expected to look for agreement. A pōwhiri is a walk out of one brother’s jurisdiction into another’s.

He was never the only option, either. Maru held the war god’s place through Taranaki and much of the south. Kahukura and Uenuku were war gods too, both tied to the rainbow. Aotearoa did not run one national pantheon with a single deity of battle at the top of it, and the tribal records differ from each other in ways that matter.

The newest thing carrying his name is modern, and worth being exact about rather than blurring into antiquity. In 1994 the New Zealand Army took Ngāti Tūmatauenga, the tribe of Tūmatauenga, as its own name and its own identity as an iwi. The title was given by Sir Charles Bennett, the last commanding officer of 28 (Māori) Battalion, and the Army’s national marae at Waiouru was opened in October the following year. Nobody involved presented this as ancient practice. It is a twentieth-century institution asking a very old atua for a whakapapa and being granted one.

His powers all run back to the same afternoon. He can stand where his brothers cannot, and standing is the whole of his method; he outlasted the worst weather in creation by refusing to be moved by it. He holds the karakia for forest, sea, cultivated food and wild food, which means he can command abundance in all four of his brothers’ domains, and he holds them because he beat their owners first. Everything he grants humans is a spoil of war.

The limits are just as tightly drawn. Tāwhirimātea he could not defeat, could not make common and could not eat, so the storm stayed above him as a permanent enemy and still comes for his descendants at sea and on land. His victory over the other four cost him any relationship with them except appetite. And death, the thing most people would expect a war god to own, is not his at all: it entered the world later, when Māui tried to crawl through Hine-nui-te-pō and did not come out the other side. Tūmatauenga did not invent human mortality. He only found the uses for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tūmatauenga?

Tūmatauenga is the Māori atua of war and of human activity, and one of the sons of Ranginui the sky father and Papatūānuku the earth mother. In the most widely told traditions he is also humankind itself, the ancestor from whom people descend. His full name, Tū-mata-uenga, means Tū of the angry face.

What is Tūmatauenga the god of?

Tūmatauenga is the god of war and of the everyday human work that resembles it: hunting, fishing, cultivation and cooking. He gained authority over each of those domains by defeating the brother who owned it, so snaring a bird, netting a fish or digging up a root all repeat his original victories.

Why did Tūmatauenga fight his brothers?

Tūmatauenga attacked his brothers because they abandoned him during Tāwhirimātea’s assault on the world. While Tāne’s forests were broken and Tangaroa fled to the deep and Rongomātāne and Haumia-tikitiki hid in the earth, Tūmatauenga alone stood and endured the storm. Afterwards he snared, netted and dug up their offspring, cooked them and ate them, making those brothers noa, or common.

What does the marae ātea have to do with Tūmatauenga?

The marae ātea, the open ground in front of a meeting house, is the domain of Tūmatauenga, while the meeting house itself belongs to Rongo, the god of peace. This is why speeches on the marae ātea may be forceful and confrontational, and why speeches inside the house are expected to be conciliatory.

Why is the New Zealand Army called Ngāti Tūmatauenga?

The New Zealand Army adopted Ngāti Tūmatauenga, meaning the tribe of Tūmatauenga, as its Māori name and identity in 1994. The title was afforded by Sir Charles Bennett, the last commanding officer of 28 (Māori) Battalion, and the Army’s national marae at Waiouru was opened in October 1995. It is a deliberate modern adoption rather than an inherited tradition.