Kumaras and Kumara Magic

Te Ao Hou, December 1962, Page 36

Kumaras and Kumara Magic This stone carving is one of the religious statues usually known as ‘kumara gods’; it represented Rongo, the god who personified and protected kumaras, and the days of the old Maori religions it was placed with great ceremony beside the field of growing plants so that it would care for them. This particular statue is now in the Wanganui Museum, you will find other ones in other museums, though there are not very many of them; probably a lot were buried in the ground for safe-keeping in time of danger, and were lost when their owners didn't come back to collect them. We have photographed this figure standing in a little kit of kiwi feathers. This kit is not an old one, so it should not be regarded as being strictly authentic. But is is known that on important occasions Maoris decorated their sacred carvings with feathers, so probably it once did look something like this. It would almost certainly be painted with red ochre as well.

In most parts of New Zealand kumaras were Maoris' most important food; certainly they were their most important cultivated crop. Because of this, kumara growing, even more perhaps than fishing, was a very sacred undertaking, involving many solemn rituals. When the first long whistling notes of the pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, were heard in the spring, and when the stars showed that the right time had come, the ground was made ready for the kumara. Light, warm sandy soil suits kumaras best, and when the soil was heavy, women and slaves used to carry hundreds of baskets of gravel and sand to lighten it. If much land was to be planted, the men all around would form a working party to dig the ground—perhaps twenty or thirty or forty men, all keeping time as they dug, swinging their ko rhythmically from side to side and singing an ancient chant. Often they ornamented their heads and the tops of their ko with feathers, and sometimes they hung aurei, the white crescent-shaped mat-pins of bone, from the tops of the ko; these clattered together as they dug, making a pleasant sound. Behind them came other men who heaped the soil into mounds.