Tangaroa

Tangaroa is the great Polynesian god of the sea, known as Ta'aroa in Tahiti, Tagaloa in Samoa and Tonga, and Kanaloa in Hawaii, and he is the clearest single instance of a pattern that runs through Pacific religion: the same god holds sharply different rank from one island group to another. In western Polynesia (Samoa, Tonga) Tagaloa is the supreme creator, the sky-dwelling origin of the islands and the gods; in Tahiti Ta'aroa brings the whole world out of the confines of his own shell, a cosmogony of great beauty in which the shell becomes the sky and his body the land.

In Maori tradition and in Hawaii, by contrast, he is one great god among several, powerful over the ocean but not sovereign. This variation is not confusion but the natural result of related peoples developing a shared inheritance separately over centuries across a vast ocean. The fullest surviving version of the Tahitian shell cosmogony was set down by Teuira Henry, a Tahitian-American scholar working from manuscripts and oral testimony collected earlier by her missionary grandfather, published as Ancient Tahiti by Honolulu's Bishop Museum in 1928. In it Ta'aroa is described as dwelling, before creation, inside a cosmic shell called Rumia; splitting it open, he shapes one half into the sky and the other into the ocean depths and the land, a single act of self-division from which the whole visible world proceeds. Because this text rests on early nineteenth-century transmission through a single missionary-linked family line, scholars treat it as an invaluable but mediated record of Tahitian priestly tradition rather than an unmediated ancient scripture.

In the Maori account, Tangaroa is one of the children of the primal parents Rangi (Sky) and Papa (Earth), and his story explains a piece of the living world. When the brothers force their parents apart and Tawhirimatea, god of storms, makes war on his siblings in anger, Tangaroa flees to the sea; and because his descendants divide, some fish taking to the ocean, some reptiles fleeing to the forest of his brother Tane, Tangaroa and Tane are set at odds, which is why, in the traditional understanding, offerings and karakia (ritual words) are made to placate Tangaroa before a canoe puts to sea or fish are taken. In Hawaii, Kanaloa is often paired with Kane as a complementary power, associated with the ocean and, in some traditions, with healing springs. These remain part of living Polynesian traditions, and are presented here as such rather than as beliefs of the past.