Nukutawhiti: Thomas Kendall’s drawing

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1, 1 May 1980, Page 33

Nukutawhiti: Thomas Kendall’s drawing

JUDITH BINNEY

In July 1824, the missionary Thomas Kendall struggled to complete his account of Maori religious beliefs about the creation of life. As an accompaniment to a long letter, 1 whose contents he had been working on for over a year, he sent a sketch of one piece of carving. He called it Nukutawhiti, ‘a Deity in the First State’ of existence, and he explained that it was ‘emblematical of the Superstitious Notions of the New Zealanders.’ 2 This drawing vanished from the archives of the Church Missionary Society and I could not trace it when, eleven years ago, I published my interpretation of Kendall’s work, The Legacy of Guilt. It had, in fact, come into the possession of the English private collector, K. A. Webster, and had been misidentified by him. Consequently, its existence remained unknown until the Alexander Turnbull Library acquired his collection and Mrs Janet Paul realised what the drawing was. 3 It is an important discovery because it provides new insight into the significance and meaning of Maori carving.

The large figure is Nukutawhiti, the canoe-ancestor of Ngapuhi of the Hokianga and the Bay of Islands. The drawing is of the centre board or carved entrance slab (kuwaha) to a storehouse. It is, in fact, the oldest drawing of a carved storehouse known, antedating Augustus Earle’s images by some three years. In style, however, the kuwaha resembles others constructed in the early nineteenth century. One famous Te Arawa pataka (or storehouse), Puawai O Te Arawa, held in the Auckland Institute and Museum, similarly possesses as its central figure their canoe ancestor, Tamatekapua, 4 who, like Nukutawhiti, was a contemporary of Kupe. In Kendall’s sketch, the features of the ancestor, particularly the very slanted eye and eye socket, together with the knob on the protracted tongue, are suggestive of the Bay of Plenty-East Coast carving style. 5 Te Arawa carvers were particularly famous in the early nineteenth century and it is probable that some of the new and elaborately carved storehouses built at the Bay of Islands were carved by them. 6 These ornate pataka developed there after the introduction of iron cutting tools and were used as the repository for the community’s most valued possessions, such as cloaks and weapons. They were tapu.

Kendall described the significance of the carving he had drawn in his accompanying letter; he wrote that the two-fingered hand was the sign that the figure existed in the ‘First State’, or before creation. He said that man in his first state bore no distinction of form or gender and ‘was shut up between the Thumb and Little Finger’ of the deity. ‘He was a Tapu. See Nuku Tawiti.' 7 In the sketch, yet-unborn man is represented caught between the fingers of Nukutawhiti. He is, presumably, the undifferentiated circle between the two fingers. One other, early, two-fingered carving is known. It is a Te Arawa carving, and there thejoin between the two long, spindly fingers was carved as an interlocking spiral, or figure of eight. One commentator has seen this shape between the fingers as manaia-like, 7 and some other elements relating to creation in the carving can be described. 8

As the canoe ancestor of Ngapuhi, Nukutawhiti was clearly an important mythological figure for this tribe, although the references to him recorded in the nineteenth century are fragmentary. The inference from Kendall’s drawing is, however, that Nukutawhiti was part of a wider cosmological system and there is evidence from other, and early, northern sources for such an interpretation. In the genealogies descending from Nukutawhiti, the origin of the land andofthe ‘real men’ are traced. 9 Moreover, he is the ancestor for whom the great funeral lament of the north and of the east coast, the Pihe, was originally composed. 10 For Ngapuhi, Nukutawhiti stood at the ‘entrance’ into this life and into death. He appears in their accounts of their origin as a tribe and of their settlement at Hokianga, and in their funeral ‘rite de passage’ into the after-life.

The essence of Kendall’s sketch is the particular relationship suggested by the placing of the large ancestor-god, his son (or his lineage) between his legs, and the doorway into the storehouse, described as the ‘Door of this World’. According to Kendall, the Maoris believed in three states of existence: the first is creation and life before this world; the second is life in this world; and the third is the after-life. He was not the only European commentator to come to this understanding and there seems to be evidence, from the north, for such a view. ll But Kendall also understood that for ‘us who are in the Second State’, the first state of existence to which we cannot return, ‘is death and a Tapu .’ 12 The after-life is also ‘death and a Tapu ’ for living men. The passages between these three states of existence were dangerous in the extreme. Maori religious rites of passage were those most particularly concerned with birth (passage into this world) and death (passage into the next) and they all involved tapu lifting ceremonies. I suggest that Kendall’s storehouse carving is emblematic of the passage from the first state

of existence to the second: that is, from life before creation into life in this world. The carving represents Nukutawhiti as the tribal ‘creator-ancestor’, and man as yet undistinguished in form. The entrance to th e pataka is the entrance, symbolically, into this world. On either side of the doorway stand the guardians. To enter the tapu storehouse, then, represented the passage from one world to the next. To cross the threshold of the storehouse in violation of the tapu would be, as Kendall tried to explain, a ‘change of state or death’. 13

As other writers have observed, the threshold beams in all Maori buildings possessed particular symbolic significance. The threshold, paepae, mediates life and death, and door lintels, painted red, warn of tapu. The storehouse carving, then, carries the warning of the presence of tapu and the threat of death. Tapu demarcates the human and the ultra-human: it is the protector of life, and the source of death upon its violation.

On either side of Nukutawhiti stand two human figures, whom Kendall has called the ‘Dual Rib’. The figure on the left is female, and that on the right is male, by the universal signs which Kendall has sketched between their legs, presumably to avoid drawing their carved genitalia. The ‘Dual Rib’, Kendall wrote, ‘remains in the Side’ of the creator-god in the first state of existence, that is, it contained the two principles of creation, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Life’, but they were ‘hid or shut up’ in the Dual Rib and not yet distinguished. 14 In this carving, the ‘Dual Rib’ is ‘close to’ the side and the implication is that the ribs are separating and taking on specific form, male and female. Little human figures in this relationship to the central figure appear in a number of kuwaha carvings. As the dual rib, nga rara, they represent the two creative principles, knowledge (or wisdom), and life.

Between the legs of Nukutawhiti are the ‘Spiritual Waters’, which Kendall said, were divided at creation. The implication from the carving is that the image derives from the breaking of the waters which precedes birth. Nukutawhiti, here, appears to be sexless and this may not simply be prudery on Kendall’s part, for he was, as Kendall said, a deity in the first state, or before the distinction of gender. Alternatively, the right hand of Nukutawhiti may be resting on his penis, a gesture undoubtedly referring to creation. Some pataka figures are sexless, others clearly are male, while yet others are in the act of parturition. Some are a male and female pair copulating.

Nukutawhiti’s son, who appears as the sky-father in the genealogies, 15 holds on his breast a lizard or ngarara. Moreover, he appears about to eat it. Carvings of a lizard held in precisely this manner are found in Maori wood sculpture. They may be images of conception. Kendall said that the lizard was emblematic of the dual rib of creation, nga rara, and of the creative force itself, to which he gave the name the eternal Word, or the Logos. The lizard is held to the breast, u, which Kendall said was the seat or source of life, while its tongue appears to be joined to that of the man. Elsdon Best commented that there were a number of Maori carvings in which ‘the lizard is shown with its head in a person’s mouth’. He drew—like Kendall —on Gnostic traditions when he observed that the tongue appeared to be ‘attached to that of the man, as though the

latter were receiving inspiration or some special endowment.’ He noted that the lizard was believed by the Gnostics to bring forth life ‘through the mouth’ and was ‘the type of the generation of the Word—that is, the Logos or Divine Wisdom.’ 16 Best and Kendall were clearly making the same equations, but are either reliable? Certainly the lizard was held in great fear by the Maori, because it was associated with death. It was usually considered to be the manifestation of a deity from another world, and was the bearer of death to violators of tapu. It was believed to devour their entrails. It was the man-eater. But in the carvings, the man appears to be about to eat the lizard. Is he conquering death, and bringing life, or is the lizard a dualistic figure? In the Maori myth structures, one is constantly aware of the duality of life and death. Most of the gods have ambiguous roles; tapu is an ambiguous force; and the lizard, bearer of death, is also the source of life. In one version of the Maui myth cycle, as told to Augustus Earle, when Maui fished up the land he brought up with it the lizard, ngarara, and in his mouth, held by his long hair, was the first man. Earle added that almost all the carvings were ‘illustrations of this idea in some way or other.’ 17 It is not irrelevant to notice that, in another northern version of this myth, when Maui fished up the land, his line had hooked onto the gable of Nukutawhiti’s house: 18 it was the house of life.

Kendall’s drawing provides the possibility of penetrating the previously closed world of meaning in Maori carving. The implications of it relate to other elements in the structure of the Maori cosmogony: the constant references in metaphors to the demarcation, and the crossing, of the threshold between life and death, and the all-important rites of passage, in Maori religious practices. I suggest that many other carvings also referred to this duality of death and life. In this carving, the tapu storehouse was protected by Nukutawhiti, the founding ancestor of the people, who, as his name tells us, came from a ‘distant land’. He brought the people to their new home at Hokianga. He stood astride the doorway into life, but violation of the tapu of the house would bring death. The guardians of the doorway stood on eternal watch. They were the reminder that to break the tapu of the house was the final ‘change o (state’ from this world.

REFERENCES 1 Kendall to CMS Secretary, 27 July 1824, Kendall Letters &c., Mss Vol. 71:66, Hocken Library, University of Otago. This letter is reproduced as Appendix I, Legacy of Guilt (Auckland, 1968) p. 171-6. 2 Verso of the drawing, Alexander Turnbull Library.

3 K. A. Webster had misdated it (1825) and attributed it to the later missionary, William Williams. Webster’s annotations appear at the bottom, right, of the drawing. 4 Augustus Hamilton, Maori Art (Wellington, 1901) p. 140. 5 Personal communication with D. R. Simmons, ethnologist at the Auckland Institute and Museum. 6 The storehouses drawn by Earle also possess Bay of Plenty features and there are several references in the first missionary journals to carvings then being made by men from ‘the southwards’, often described as ‘the Thames’ or ‘the Tauranga’. The eighteenth century explorers did not describe the ornat epataka whakairo at the Bay of Islands, and as they were spectacular buildings, this omission is taken as an indication that they did not then exist. 7 Frank Willett, ‘A Maori Store-Chamber Slab in the Manchester Museum’, Man, LV (December 1955), 177. This kuwaha was purchased in Auckland about 1900; it is not one collected by Kendall. 8 To be discussed in full in the New Zealand Journal of History, April 1980. 9 In particular, the genealogy written down by Aperahama Taonui of Hokianga in 1849, ‘The Taonui Manuscript’, translated by D. R. Simmons, Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum. XII (December 1975) 58-9, 62-3. 10 ‘Nukutawhiti. The Pihe (Lament) for Nukutawhiti, with a Historical Narrative Explanatory of the Same, as Recorded by Mohi Tawhai. With Transalations and Supplementary Notes by George Graham’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, XLIX (June 1940) 221-234. This version, and the narrative of the origin of the Pihe, was written down by Hone Mohi Tawhai in 1885. 11 See John White’s early account in his 1856 ‘Lectures on Maori Customs and Superstitions’, published AJHR, 1861, E-7, p. 10. White was drawing on Hokianga informants and, in particular, on Aperahama Taonui, who wrote down his genealogy of the Maori ancestors, cited above, for White.

12 Kendall to CMS Secretary, 27 July 1824. 13 Kendall to CMS Secretary, 3 June 1823, Mss Vol. 71:54, reproduced Legacy of Guilt, p. 134. He did not use this phrase with reference to the storehouse carving but to another; however, the context of‘entrance’, with the consequent

violation of tapu, was identical. 14 Kendall to CMS Secretary, 27 July 1824. 15 Hone Mohi Tawhai placed ‘Ranginui’ as the ‘eldest son’ of Nukutawhiti in the whakapapa he recorded in c. 1860, 1885, and 1892. Aperahama gave the son’s name, or the lineage name, whanau, as Te Papa-tahuri-iho and explained that the name meant the ‘descending of the sky to the earth’, ‘e ahu iho ana te rangi ki raro’. (I have taken John White’s original translation in preference to Simmons’s. See the manuscript, ‘The Book of the Ancestors’, Mss 120, Auckland Institute and Museum.) Aperahama’s explanations of the whakapapa, at this point, tell the story of the union of Rangi and Papa, sky and earth, or the beginning of life. For Hone Mohi Tawhai’s whakapapa, see D. R. Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth (Wellington, 1976) p. 39, where two are compared with Aperahama’s, and the third is in ‘Nukutawhiti’, p. 225. 16 ‘Notes on the Occurrence of the Lizard in Maori Carvings’, New Zealand

Journal of Science and Technology, V (March 1923), 334-5. Best is citing C. W. King, The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Mediaeval (2d ed., London, 1887) p. 107, and a note, ‘Possible Origins of the Lizard in Maori Carvings’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, XIX (1910) 225. 17 Augustus Earle, Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand [1827-1828], ed. E. H. McCormick (Oxford, 1966) p. 191. 18 Father Catherin Servant, Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838-1842, translated byj. Glasgow, ed. D. R. Simmons (Wellington, 1973) p. 51.