A Sign of Aristocracy

Te Ao Hou, June 1963, Page 31

A Sign of Aristocracy In the old days, moko was not at all like this. It was a sign of aristocratic birth; as James Cook noted in 1762, tattooing was ‘peculiar to the principal men among the New Zealanders’. It would have been quite impossible for a slave, or any other person of low birth, to aspire to possess a moko on his face, although practically all men except slaves were tattooed from their knees to their waist. Another early traveller, the Frenchman Dumont d'Urville, wrote in his diary that ‘A New Zealander one day examining the seal of an English officer, noticed the coat of arms engraved on it and asked him if the design was the moko of his family’. And Te Pehi Kupe, whose facial moko is on the inside cover of this issue of ‘Te Ao Hou’, said much the same thing when he explained to his English friends that the marks on his forehead represented his name. He also drew for them the corresponding forehead marks — the ‘names’ — of his brother and son. Even though we have no really adequate explanation of the full meaning of moko, its general significance is clear. Distinguished families possessed marks which belonged to themselves alone, and these were handed down from father to son. Always, though, there were differences; no two moko were ever the same, and the designs allowed for infinite variations. A famous man's moko would be known far and wide, by his friends and by his enemies. Many old stories show that this was so. When, for example, Hatupatu, the youngest of three brothers and his father's favourite, was going with his brothers on an expedition to avenge the burning of the Arawa canoe, his father secretly taught him the tattoo marks of Raumati, the leader of their enemies, so that it would be Hatupatu, rather than his two brothers, who would gain the honour of finding and killing Raumati. Wearing a moko was like having your name written on your face in very beautiful writing. It was also a way of showing that you had reached adulthood, for it was only at puberty that boys and girls were allowed to be tattooed. No girl of good birth was regarded as fit for marriage until this was done, and until then, no boy could consider himself a proper warrior, a person of some consequence in his village. So they endured the terrible pain stoically, sustained by their pride and by the knowledge that henceforth, they were no longer children: they were men and women. In this way, the ceremony of tattooing served as an initiation rite: as the sign of their transition from one role in society to a different role. All so-called ‘primitive’ societies (that is, societies, such as that of the Maori, which did not possess a written language or an elaborate technology, and which lived in comparatively small social groups), had initiation rites of some kind. They served the purpose of bringing home to the boys and girls concerned, and to their relatives and fellow villagers, a sense of the importance and finality of their change of status. Usually, as with the Maori, the initiation rites were accompanied by prayer and pain, and by This Maori chief's drawing of his moko is on a land deed in the possession of the Hocken Library, University of Otago.

a permanent visible sign of their new place in society. This was why slaves could have no moko, unless, of course, they had been captured as prisoners of war. The moko was a mark of a man's or woman's position in society; but a slave, by definition, had no place in society. Men who were not slaves, but who were of undistinguished ancestry, wore the moko from their waist to knees, but did not have it on their faces. Probably, this was because the head, being tapu, was especially important as a mark of distinction. The only important men who did not wear a moko were the tohunga, or priests. The writer does not know of any tradition telling why this was so, but it seems likely that it was a consequence of the prohibition against shedding the blood of a tohunga. Not even another tohunga could do this safely; if you found a tohunga from an enemy tribe, and wanted to kill him, you had to strangle him, or use some other method which avoided shedding his blood. This dried head is in the Dominion Museum in Wellington. There are very few of these heads in New Zealand now, though there are quite a few overseas. Maoris preserved the heads both of relatives and of conquered enemies. Enemies' heads were exposed to view and jeered at, but the heads of relatives were carefully guarded. Their method of preserving them was so good that even today hardly any heads show signs of decay. We have said that boys and girls were not tattooed until adolescence, and that their moko served as a sign that they were now adults. However, only a small amount of tattooing was done at one time; it was so very painful that it would have been quite impossible to do it all at once. This was particularly the case with men, who had so much more tattoo on their faces than women. The artist who did the tattooing was very highly skilled, and was well paid for his work. People eagerly sought out the best artists, as they were very anxious to get as good a moko for themselves as they could; if the artist was a bungler, he could easily ruin their looks for life. A good artist was rewarded with such gifts as canoes, clothes, even slaves; in fact, one of the songs he sang, while he was working away at the tattoo, was a reminder to his client that he was expected to be generous with his payment. People who were not in a position to pay for a good carver often submitted themselves to someone learning the art, feeling that even a clumsy moko was preferable to none at all. One often finds among Maoris today the mysterious belief that art is ‘commercialised’ and debased if it is associated with money. In the old days there was certainly no such attitude; then, the artist—whether carver or tattooer—was paid handsomely for his skill and labour, using the goods which were then the equivalent of money.