Chapter II. Maori Cosmogony and Mythology

This is a 19th-century scholarly ethnographic compilation of Māori cosmological genealogies and creation myths, presented in the tradition of comparative mythology and recorded from oral traditional sources. The work's central argument is that the Māori had no creation tradition in the theological sense but rather a cosmogony structured entirely as genealogy: existence begins with personified Night (Po), proceeds through successive generations of natural powers (darkness, light, void, winds), and descends through the gods to humanity. A structurally distinctive feature is the author's division of Māori religious life into three layered epochs — a universal national religion of cosmic powers shared across the Pacific, tribal invocations of pre-migration ancestors, and family-specific ancestor worship established after the migration to New Zealand — with genealogies serving as the literal substrate of religious ritual (errors in recitation were held to nullify a karakia's power). The text includes the foundational Māori cosmogonic narrative of Rangi (Heaven) and Papa (Earth) being separated by their children to admit light, and Tane's successive unions with various nature-females in search of a wife capable of bearing human offspring. The most distinctive scholarly claim is that the Māori religious system is not primitive animism but a coherent, stratified theology whose "national religion" of shared Pacific deities — Rangi, Rongo, Tangaroa — constitutes evidence of a common ancestral culture across Polynesia. Readers interested in Māori cosmology, Polynesian comparative religion, or 19th-century ethnographic method will find dense primary genealogical material alongside an interpretive framework shaped by Victorian evolutionary assumptions about religious development.

Chapter II. Maori Cosmogony and Mythology

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