THE POLYNESIAN METHOD
OF GENERATING FIRE

The following ritual formula was one chanted when a tapu fire for ceremonial purposes was being generated:—

The name Toroi-a-pawa is said to denote smoke, Takutaku the wood dust caused by friction, and Puhoumea the rubbing process, but of this I have received no corroboration. They may be personifications. Tongaruru is said to be a volcano somewhere in the Pacific. Tonga-apai recalls names of isles in the Friendly Group, probably volcanoes active in former times. Maunga-nui is the name of a volcano, apparently in Polynesia, concerning which a very interesting tradition has been preserved. Piere-tu is apparently a personification connected with fire, and is said to denote that the groove is blackened and fire almost generated. As a word of the vernacular speech piere denotes a fissure.

Another ritual chaunt, pertaining to a ceremonial fire termed the ahi purakau, which was kindled during the peculiar ceremony performed when a tree was to be felled for canoe making, or house building purposes, commences thus:—

This performance was for the purpose of placating Tane, the tutelary being of forests, one of whose children was about to be slain. The ahi tumuwhenua was another such tapu fire and rite connected with the same matter. For a full account of the ritual and proceedings see Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, Vol., XL., p. 247.

A name that occurs in these ahi karakia or ritual fires is that of Tumatere, sometimes given as Tu-mata-tere or Tumata-tere. One such formula commences:—

The two final vowels of the name are lengthened in the delivery of the chaunt (which I have heard), but that might be for purposes of euphony. The application or meaning of this name is quite unknown to me.

The karakia (charm, incantation, ritual) repeated over a fire to be used for ritual purposes imparted tapu to that fire. The following is a specimen of such karakia ahi, or fire ritual:—

<<BACK

We have now, however, drifted into the subject of

CEREMONIAL FIRES

about which more must be said, for they entered largely into Maori life and activities. What may be fairly termed religious ceremonies pertained to practically every Maori industry, pursuit and institution. In connection with conception, birth, marriage, death, burial, exhumation, war, peace making, fishing, fowling, agriculture, history teaching, house building, canoe making, travelling, voyaging, and innumerable other subjects, religious ceremonies were performed, and ritual formulae chaunted. Many such centred on ceremonial lustration, many on tapu steam ovens, and many on ceremonial fires. As in Southern Asia fire entered largely into religious ceremonies.

The ahi whakaene was a magic rite of destruction. The ahi torongu was a ceremonial performance designed to destroy a caterpillar pest in crops. The ahi taitai was a ceremonial fire connected with forest industries, i.e. with the tapu of a forest, and gods are the power behind all tapu, the creative power of that institution. All such fires specially generated for ceremonial purposes were termed ahi pahikahika. The ahi parpara was connected with a number of observances, and was a kind of generic term for a number of tapu fires, such as the ahi tute and ahi rokia, both connected with the removal of tapu. Any person who used such fires, or a brand from such in cooking food or other unworthy object, would be slain by the gods. The spot where a sacred fire has been kindled is for ever tapu, unless made common by an adept. I have see natives carefully avoid a spot where such a fire had been kindled thirty-five years before.

The ahi tuakaha, ahi marae, ahi ruahine, and ahi tuku-para are all connected with ceremonial functions. The ahi mahitihiti was a divinatory ceremony in which the performers leaped through the flames. The ahi horokaka pertained to war, the ahi whakamatiti to magic, as also did the ahi tamoe. The ahi pure was a rite connected with exhumation of bones of the dead. Always new fire must be generated for any ceremonial purposes. In the generation of such fire primitive methods have been preserved far into higher culture planes.

The above list may be termed a sample one, and on numberless other occasions ceremonial fires were employed by the Maori; to continue the series of names would be tedious.

Geiger, in his paper on the discovery of fire, has laid stress on the fact that fire has entered into religious ceremonial practically the world over. Among some peoples, at least, fire was looked upon as representing the sun, and we have seen how it is derived from the sun in Maori myth. In the universal contest between Light and Darkness Mahuika is allied with Tane, fire and sun are against Whiro and darkness. Geiger went so far as to declare fire a religious discovery, a statement that may be doubted. Reville refers to the belief of old-time races that fire is a divine being, of celestial and pure origin, which is shut up in wood, and which is contaminated in the long run by contact with men and with human affairs, thus necessitating the generation of new fire. Such then are the ideas connected with fire generally, and the ahi tapu of the Maori in particular.

A Maori might see many cooking fires blazing around him, but, if he wanted a fire in his sleeping hut, he would have, by violent exertion to kindle it. In like manner he might have to kindle fire whereat to cook a meal, when a tapu fire was burning close by. In early European times, ere the tapu system broke down, he might have to do the same to light his pipe. Should he leave this fire burning, and should a person come along and roast a potato at it for his dinner, then would death smite that sinner swiftly. For the gods are jealous of their abiding tapu, and human life is cheap when gods are angered.

Concerning this peculiar word matini:—At Samoa it is applied to an offering to spirits, or to keep spirits away. Futuna gives a similar meaning. In New Zealand an ahi matini is a tapu fire of the taitai class, at which a bird is roasted by fowlers, and a ceremony performed in order to placate the forest gods, and avert any ill luck or misfortune assailing them for having slain birds of that forest. The ceremony is one of the class termed taumaha. Fire in certain ceremonies seems to have had a purifying influence. In a certain rite performed over a person who had desecrated a tapu place, a cinder of charred wood was placed in his hand. In another extraordinary rite a cinder was passed under the left thigh of the operator, a superstition that takes us back to South Eastern Asia.

Divination by means of fire was not uncommon. One form of this performance was to kindle a fire and note which way the smoke drifted. It was by this means that the Arawa foretold the result of the desperate affray at Te Whatu-o-Mawake.

It was unlucky to kindle a fire on a track, as it is to cook food in an earth oven, when travelling, without scattering the lining of the oven when done with. If a jet of gas issues from burning fuel, it is a spirit come to obtain fire.

The expression ahi mate (extinct fire) denotes the cold hearthstone of a deserted home. Also applied to a hamlet sadly ravaged by an epidemic.

The Maori, like most poorly clad folk, had a great respect for fire, and spoke of it as a parent of man, as he also did of a house. The old aphorism: “He mata ahi, he mata tangata” means that the fire parent and the human parent are equally useful to man.

Apart from carrying his fire generating apparatus when travelling, the Maori often carried live fire. To do so he procured some dry material of slow combustion that would smoulder but not burst into flame. The dried stem of the kahia (Passiflora tetrandra), the dry flowering stalks of Phormium, and a kind of punk that grows on trees, were used for this purpose. The latter was the puku tawai found growing on beech trees; that found on tawa trees is useless for the purpose. When travelling in cold weather natives sometimes procured a bundle of dry manuka bark, which they put ties round and kindled at one end. When they wished to warm hands and feet, as after fording a river, they loosened the ties of the bundle and blew the smouldering bark into a blaze.

Torches used in travelling at night were made of bark, dried leaves of Cordyline, or resinous wood, such as mapara. Of the Phormium fire stick, Hock-stetter, who was in New Zealand in 1859, wrote:—“The dried flower stalks, the pith of which, when ignited, keeps glowing like tinder, are to the travelling Maori excellent slow matches by means of which he is enabled continually to carry fire about [with] him.” Elsewhere he writes:—“He was a robust Maori, who carried the mail bag upon his back, witha glowing slow match in one hand.”

This term denotes a very singular mode of conserving fire at the village home, and was formerly practised when people were to be absent from home for some days, or even weeks. It was a comforting thing, we are told, to find such a fire burning when travellers returned home weary, and with wet fire making sticks. The original ahi komau or buried fire, was, as we have seen, that given to Ruaumoko, and which we know as volcanic fire. This was the ahi tahito that was given to Ruaumoko in the houama. This latter is a small tree, also known as whau (Entelea arborescens).

To make the ahi komau of this world a small hillock was deemed the best site. In the side of this hillock an excavation resembling a ditch was made. The lower end was about thigh deep; the upper end knee deep. The important essentials were a length of the dried trunk of a cabbage tree (Cordyline australis), and the same of a tokitoki (Titoki. Alectryon excelsum). A length of dry, weathered heart of matai (Podocarpus spicatus) might be used instead of the titoki. The latter was laid in the bottom of the ditch, at the lower end thereof, and the dry Cordyline trunk was laid in the upper end, its lower extremity touching the upper end of the titoki. The upper end of the Cordyline was set on fire, and the whole of the two trunks covered with closely packed stones. The ditch was then filled in with clay, except a small air hole at the upper end where the trunk was kindled. The stones became heated and preserved the dryness of the buried trunks; if the clay lay on them the fire would be a failure. I believe a layer of stones was also placed underneath the trunks. Some natives maintain that such a buried fire would burn for months. When fire was required, a dry flowering stalk of toetoe (Arundo conspicua) was thrust down the hole caused by the trunks smouldering away, until it came into contact with the fire; the dry, fluffy panicles readily ignited. This ingenious method of conserving fire was often of very great service in former days.

An old aphorism runs as follows:—

To return home from an arduous journey, wearied, worn, with wet kauahi, to find the ahi komau burning, is as pleasant an experience as being received by a kindly hospitable person.

A singular form of fire was that known as the ahi tu popoto or ahi whakanoho. It was used when a fire was desired for its warmth in a small hut, but smoke was considered specially undesirable. Thus it was a feature of the specially built hut erected for a woman during the birth of her child, and which was occupied by her for a week or so after that event. In such a place the ordinary charcoal fire (ahi waro) in a stone fire place in the floor was not approved of. To make a tupopoto fire a sheet of the bark of a white pine tree was procured, and laid, inner side uppermost, exposed to light and sun. It soon curled up until it assumed the form of a hollow cylinder. This cylinder was set upright in the floor of the hut, and kept in that position by having its lower end sunk a few inches in the earth. It was then filled with dry charcoal, and a few ties of aka (stems of climbing plants) were secured round it. The charcoal was then lit on the top, and, as it kept burning slowly downward, it consumed the retaining bark vessel. Such a fire emits a considerable amount of heat and lasts for some time. When all the charcoal was consumed, another tupopoto soon replaced it.. This fire does not give forth any smoke, and does not blaze.

<< BACK

The Maori artisan never evolved the chimney; his method of warming and lighting huts was a very primitive one. A small square pit sunk in the middle of the floor of a hut, and lined with four stones, was the only form of fire-place used. A larger building might have two or more such takuahi, as they were called. All four of these stones possessed proper names, one of which was Puhahana. The word hahana means “to shine, to glow, to give forth heat. "Possibly this is connected with pushan=the sun, of far off Asia. A few Sanscrit words are retained in the Maori language. In the takuahi of a tuahu (tapu place where rites were performed) ceremonial fires were kindled, and the gods to be invoked were “located” in that fire. The stone called poutama was formerly utilised as lining stones for these tapu fireplaces. A famed old one, named Tokaroa, is yet preserved in the Tamarau family of Ruatoki. The Rev. T. G. Hammond, of Patea, Taranaki district, has remarked that the stones used to line a fire pit were called parua, or tautau hauhunga. These sound like generic terms for the four stones collectively.

Charcoal fires were often employed by the Maori folk in order to warm their huts in winter. Wood fires were also used, especially when artificial light was desired, as on long winter evenings. These woods that emitted the least smoke, such as maire (Olea), were specially sought for such a purpose. Native huts are often abominably smoky, as the so-called window is the only means of escape for smoke when the door is closed. Hence a name for the window space is puta auahi, or smoke escape. Notwithstanding the discomfort of the smoke, the writer has often been glad to pass a night in these huts, when the winter rains were in evidence, and Paraweranui was abroad. The development of the fireplace, from the Maori takuahi to the cheerful and infinitely more comfortable chimney fire of modern life is a subject of some interest, as a token of advancing culture.

Apparently this performance has been long known in Asia and the Pacific region. In his Natives of Northern India, Crooke describes it as performed by Bhils, and says it was apparently confined to the non-Aryan peoples of India. A form of the feat was practised in Tibet. It was known in Japan, and witnessed at the Straits Settlements. The Tahitians occasionally performed it, as described in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. X., p. 53. The same Journal describes the Fijian aspect of the ceremony (Vol. III., p. 72, and Vol. VIII., p. 189). In Vol. VIII. of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, Colonel Gudgeon describes a performance conducted at Rarotonga by a native of Raiatea, Society Group. Several Europeans, including the Colonel himself, walked barefooted over the hot stones.  Umu is a common name for the pit in which food is cooked by a steaming process; the stones that provide the heat being heated by a fire made in the pit. In Vol. XX. of the same Journal, Major J. T. Large describes a fire walk performed at Atiu, an island of the Cook Group. The pit used was twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and four feet deep. On a huge fire in this pit were placed the stones to be heated. The director was one Pauro Moari, of Raiatea. When the logs had burned down to embers, the hot stones were levelled by means of long poles. Major Large was one of the party that walked barefooted over the stones, which, he remarks, did not feel unduly hot. Some explanation of the freedom from injury of the performers is given in the papers mentioned.

According to Maori tradition the above feat was performed in New Zealand in olden days. An account of a performance was obtained by the writer from Himiona Tikitu, of Te Teko, and published in Vol. XXXIV. of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, p. 93. I have been told that a fire walk took place at Paraparaumu, south of Waikanae, in past times.

Fire signals were often employed by the Maori in olden days, especially alarm fires and as a call to arms. Blazing fires were used at night, and smoke signals during the daytime. Such a smoke signal fire is termed an ahi whakapua.

A good pair of fire making sticks (kauahi and hika) now lying before me were made by Paitini Pukaha, an old native of the Tuhoe tribe, who took them to Rotorua in April, 1920, in order to present them to the Prince of Wales. He was ridiculed for bringing such a paltry present, and so withdrew, abashed, afterwards presenting the sticks to the writer. Te Rangi-ua, nephew of the old man, then generated fire with these sticks, and a moving picture was taken of the process. The kauahi or kaunoti is eighteen inchese in length, three and a-half inches wide, and one and a-quarter inches thick. Fire has been kindled on it three times, and each of the blackened grooves is about three inches in length and less than a quarter of an inch deep. The rubber is one foot long, one inch thick in the middle, roughly cylindrical, while the rubbing end is not brought to a point, but is over half an inch in thickness. Heavy pressure has, however, rounded the extremity and caused it to assume the rounded form of the grooves. Both pieces are dry, light kaikomako wood.

ASIATIC ORIGINS

In his Story of Religions, the Rev. E. D. Price remarks of Agni, the god of fire (as he is depicted in Vedic hymns) as “the immortal messenger sent by the gods to men, and is the director of sacrificial rites and religious ceremonies.” This concept resembles the Persian myth already reviewed, and we may also compare the Maori myth of Auahi-tu-roa, or Upoko-roa (the comet) being sent by the sun lord to convey fire to mankind. In local myth Tane and Maui are both credited with providing man with fire, and both represent Light. Mahuika produced the five Fire Children, represented by the five fingers, and the fingers are known as “The Five of Maui” (Te Tokorima a Maui). The fingers of man grasp the rubbing stick to generate fire. In Maori and Polynesian myth Maui is closely connected with the moon. In Northern Polynesia he is the son of Sina or Hina (personified form of the moon). In Babylonia and elsewhere the moon was viewed as being older than the sun. Tane, personified form of the sun, was one of the younger children of Sky and Earth in Maori myth. From Uruk and Sin of Baylonia to Sina and Rongo of Polynesia, as from Ra to Tane, we note strange analogies between Asiatic myths and those of the far spread Polynesian race.

The ancestors of the Maori who left the hidden land of Irihia, where the small seed called ari was an important food supply, could not hold their own against the hordes of “black peoples.” They turned their backs on the beloved Hawaiki; they faced the gleaming east whence Tane called them, and sailed boldly forth on the vast ocean in search of a new home. They brought with them strange concepts and world-old myths; they preserved primitive institutions and arts that mark them as of great antiquity; they connect us with the old, old peoples of the Pleiades Year, and see in low hung Vega the loved token of their ancient home.

<<BACK