Ranginui Today: Named in the Sky, Held in the Whakapapa

Ranginui carries a same-figure-other-register edge to Deity 3400, whose own record states him actively venerated in a living tradition, a real and attested standing this article states as plain fact rather than softening it. What that standing concretely consists of is worth stating honestly and precisely, because it differs from his wife's. Te Ara, New Zealand's own national encyclopedia, records his principal cult centre as no single built place at all, held instead in the whakapapa, the genealogical recitation that every account of Maori descent from the gods begins from, and recited by iwi and hapu rather than addressed at a shrine. His visible presence in the world, the sky itself, and the rain and dew Maori tradition reads as his continuing grief for Papatuanuku, keep him a living reference point in ordinary observation of weather rather than an object of a distinct devotional practice built specifically around him. Where Papatuanuku's own worship-standing article records a concrete contemporary practice, the return of the whenua to the land at a child's birth, and Rongo's records a peace-making gathering still conducted under his name, no comparably concrete rite addressed to Ranginui specifically survives in the record consulted; his living standing is genealogical and cosmological rather than ceremonial, a real form of active veneration in Te Ara's own present-tense treatment of Maori religion, honestly distinguished from a rite performed in his name.