Maori Religion and Spirituality

Maori religion and it's beliefs, rites and ceremonies were strange and complex, and must have been a severe burden with certain laws relating to things tapu, or things sacred and prohibited, the breach of which laws by anyone is a crime displeasing to the Atua of his family.

Anything tapu must not be allowed to come in contact with any vessel or place where food is kept. This law is absolute. Should such contact take place, the food, the vessel, or place, become tapu, and only a few very sacred persons, themselves tapu, dare to touch these things.

The idea in which this law originated appears to have been that a portion of the sacred essence of an Atua, or of a sacred person, was directly communicable to objects which they touched, and also that the sacredness so communicated to any object could afterwards be more or less retransmitted to anything else brought into contact with it.

It was therefore necessary that anything containing the sacred essence of an Atua should be made tapu to protect it from being polluted by the contact of food, for the act of eating food which had touched anything tapu, involved the necessity of eating the sacredness of the Atua, from whom it derived its sacredness.

It seems that the practice of cannibalism must have had a close connexion with such a system of belief. To eat an enemy was the greatest degradation to which he could be subjected, and so it must have been regarded as akin to blasphemy to eat anything containing a particle of divine essence.

In Maori religion, everything not included under the class tapu was called noa, meaning free or common. Things and persons tapu could, however, are made noa by means of certain ceremonies, the object of which was to extract the tapu essence, and restore it to the source whence it originally came.

It has been already stated that every tribe and every family has its own especial Atua. The Ariki, or head of a family, in both male and female lines, are regarded by their own family with veneration almost equal to that of their Atua.

The great mysterious Cause of all things existing in the Cosmos was, as he conceived it, the generative Power. Commencing with a primitive state of Darkness, he conceived Po (Night) as a person capable of begetting a race of beings resembling it. After a succession of several generations of the race of Po, Te Ata (Morn) was given birth to.

Then followed certain beings existing when the Cosmos was without form and void. Afterwards came Rangi (Heaven), Papa (Earth), the Winds, and other Sky-powers, as are recorded in the genealogical traditions preserved to the present time.

That comprising the personified Powers of Nature preceding the existence of man, which Powers are regarded by the Maori as their own primitive ancestors, and are invoked in their karakia by the entire Maori race;

With Maori religion the worship was peculiar to each tribe and each family, in forms of karakia or invocation addressed to the spirits of dead ancestors of their own proper line of descent.

Ancestral spirits who had lived in the flesh before the migration to New Zealand would be invoked by all the tribes in New Zealand, so far as their names had been preserved, in their traditional records as mighty spirits.

From the time of the migration to New Zealand each tribe and each family would in addition address their invocations to their own proper line of ancestors, thus giving rise to a family religious worship in addition to the national Maori religion.

Their knowledge is not from modern times. Papa, Rangi, Tiki were the first to give rules to men for work of all kinds, for killing, for man-eating, for karakia.

In former days the knowledge of the Maori was great, in all matters, from this teaching, and so men learnt how to set rules for this thing and for that thing.

Hence the ceremony of Pure for the dead, the karakia for the new-born infant, for grown men, for battle, for storming a Pa, for eels, for birds, for makutu, and a multitude of other karakia. Tiki was the source from which they came down to the tupua, the pukenga, the wananga, and the tauira.

The men of ancient days are a source of invocation for the tauira. Hence the karakia had its power, and came down from one generation to another ever having power.

Formerly their karakia gave men power. From the time when the Rongo-pai (Gospel) arrived here, and men were no longer tapu, disease commenced. The man of former days was not afflicted by disease. He died only when bent by age. He died when he came to the natural end of life.