Maori spirituality

Press, 20 July 1984, Page 11

Maori spirituality

Maori spirituality will be discussed in “Credo” on One at 6 p.m. on Sunday. Two hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that, the Maoris of Aotearoa expressed their belief in a Supreme Creator. They called him 10, and they seem to have regarded him as too awesome to be addressed directly: when they wished to catch the fish he had created, or to fell a tree of his creation, they sought the approval of more approachable guardians like Tangaroa and Tane. A system of belief, with Io as its Supreme Father, framed their relationships with everything,

including the greenstone from which they made axeheads and fish hooks. Then came perhaps the biggest culture shock since mankind began. Men of a wildly different colour swept in bringing the iron age, pork, written language, gunpowder, money, rum, and Christianity. They told the astonished Maori that the islands on which he had lived for centuries were now “discovered.” They insisted that the supreme father creator of all things was not 10. He was called God, or Theos, or Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Dieu, or Deus, or Dio.