Ranginui

Maori cosmological chant describes a beginning in which Ranginui and Papatuanuku lie together in total darkness, so closely joined that no light can reach the many children born between them. Those children, the gods who would go on to preside over forest, sea, wind, cultivated food and wild food, live cramped in that narrow space for a long, unspecified age, and it is their own council, held in the darkness, that decides what to do about their parents' embrace.

Several brothers try first and fail. Tumatauenga, later god of war, proposes killing their parents outright and is refused by the others. Tane, god of the forest, succeeds where his brothers could not by turning himself upside down, setting his shoulders against Papa and driving his legs upward against Rangi, so that he pushes with the strength of a tree rather than the strength of arms, forcing his father slowly away from his mother until light pours into the world between them for the first time.

One brother alone, Tawhirimatea, god of storms and winds, opposes the separation from the start, refusing to let his parents be parted, and when it happens anyway he follows his father up into the sky rather than remain below, gathering his own children, the winds and clouds, to make continual war on his brothers' domains ever after. George Grey's nineteenth century collection of Maori genealogical chant remains the fullest published record of how this separation was told, gathered directly from Maori sources rather than composed after the fact.

Ranginui's significance in Maori tradition runs well beyond the single dramatic scene of his separation from Papa. He is the fixed point at the top of whakapapa, the genealogical recitation through which Maori tradition reckons descent, so that every named god, every ancestor and every living person can in principle be traced back through an unbroken chain of begetting to Rangi and Papa themselves at the very beginning. That genealogical framework is not merely decorative; it is the primary vehicle through which Maori religious knowledge was preserved and transmitted before sustained European contact, recited by trained tohunga, ritual specialists, who held long chants in memory rather than in writing.

After the separation, Rangi's continuing grief for Papa is read directly into the weather: rain and dew are understood as his tears falling toward the wife he can no longer touch, answered each morning by the mist that Papa is said to send rising from her forests in return, so that the ordinary daily cycle of dew and mist becomes a standing testimony to a loss that never fully resolves. Some traditions add that Rangi and Papa's children, out of pity for their parents' continuing sorrow, turned Rangi to face away from Papa, which is why the sky, as commonly understood, no longer looks directly down at the earth.

George Grey's collection, made in direct consultation with Maori chiefs and tohunga in the 1840s and 1850s, remains the source most often cited for the fullest version of this genealogical and emotional framing, and Maori cultural revival since the twentieth century has drawn on the same chant tradition to keep the account current rather than treating it as settled history.