MAORI TOHUNGAS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19853, 17 July 1934, Page 2

MAORI TOHUNGAS

MYSTICAL GIFTS. The Bishop of Ao-tea-roa, Rt. Rev. F. A. Bennett, in a recent Rotary Club address at Hastings, said that his own ancestors came to New Zealand from HUwaiki in the Arawa canoe. The Taki Timu canoe, the remains of which were shown him at Waimarama, was a strictly tapu canoe—so tapu that not even food was allowed upon it. The food for its crew had to be carried in another canoe. It is not known how many people came to New Zealand in the Taki Timu canoe, said the bishop, but it was known that there were as many as 140 in one of the others. How did the Maoris find New Zealand? In the belief of the more modern Maori, Kupe was the first navigator to sight this country, and when he went back to Rarotonga to tell his people of his discovery, and to urge them to come to Ao-tea-roa, he told them to set out with the moan and Venus on their left, and to sail on a beuring slightly south-west. If the map was referred to, it would be found that the directions were fairly accurate.

One of the legends connected with the voyage to New Zealand was that the canoes had been guided to their destination by two tfiniwhas or seamonsters. said the bishop, who proceeded 'to explain that the name Ao-tea-roa, meaning a long white cloud, did not refer to a cloud in the physical sense, but was a metaphorical phrase indicating the relief that came to the discoverers after their long and anxious journey.

Mentioning that he was on the steamer Tahiti when she went down in August, 1930, the bishop said that the passengers saw two large sharks hovering about*. When he reached Auckland again he went to Rotorua to see an old Maori friend wTio was dying. The speaker told the old man about the fish that were seen from the Tahiti, and the story was greeted with the most joyous laughter. When asked for an explanation, the old man said that the two fish were not fish at all, but were the ancestors of the bishop, and had come in the form of fish to protect him from disaster. When asked what his ancestors would have done to the speaker if he had fallen overboard, the old man replied that they would have guided him to land and safety. “I believe,” said the bishop, “that the Maoris had psychological powers that we knew nothing about to-day.” He had been told by old Maoris, who had been eye-witnesses, that, for example, a tohunga in search of some secret knowledge would put five sticks in the ground, the sticks lepresenting the god of war, the god of peace, and so on, and merely by repeating incantations over them could make one of them ultimately begin to tremble. “I am not wholly inclined to pooh-pooh the idea,” the bishop added. The Maoris, he said, had many mystical powers that had always been a secret from the pakehas.