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Mythic Themes of Maori Cosmology

Based on what we have learned from our studies over the course of this series of books, the original concept of a mythic story-line seems to have survived in its most essential form among nonliterate groups like the Dogon tribe in Africa. This makes sense, since what must have started as an oral tradition in eras prior to written language would have continued within these cultures in its root form. However, key aspects of this form can also be seen to carry forward in the later myths of many ancient cultures. For many modern students of mythology, the primary frame of reference would be to the myths of classical Greece or Rome. From our perspective, these represent later forms whose focus was often on the acts and interpersonal relationships of mythic deities, which could take on many of the attributes of a modern-day soap opera.

By contrast, in Dogon society, the cosmological myths constituted a class of story that was told around the fireside at night and therefore presented in a forum that was not strictly limited to trusted initiates of the tradition but rather was also open to the broader populace of uninitiated tribe members. Almost by definition, the storylines of these myths included information that was only of a generalized nature and so would not have reflected inner mysteries of the esoteric tradition. Among the main purposes of these myths, as we understand them, was to familiarize the tribal group with basic cosmological themes, introduce major symbols of the tradition, and frame various cosmological elements and relationships in ways that would hopefully pique the interest of potential new initiates.

Although several mythic Dogon characters came to be defined within these myths, only the creator god Amma rose to the level of a deity in the modern sense of the word. Events within any given myth most often centered on the specific actions of an individual character, and not on the social interactions of a pantheon of gods and goddesses. In their stated context and based on the well-defined meanings of the words that comprise their names, each Dogon character can be interpreted to represent a stage or aspect of creation that is illustrated by the actions of that character in the myth. From this perspective, the mythic characters themselves can be said to have a mnemonic quality, much like other symbols of Dogon cosmology.

In The Pale Fox, French anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen flatly declares that there is no single mythic storyline that outlines the totality of Dogon cosmological thought. However, throughout their writings Griaule and Dieterlen relate numerous episodes as a way of illustrating the Dogon outlook on various aspects of their creation tradition. This illustrative aspect is the same essential function that is served by the body of Dogon cosmological drawings.

Consistent with this mnemonic approach, the ancient civilizing plan assigned creational symbolism to everyday tasks that a tribesperson would perform or associated those concepts with objects and animals that populated a person’s daily life. Structured in this way, seemingly routine activities served to reinforce both the instructed concepts of the cosmology and various skills of the civilizing plan. Through this arrangement, the structures of society came to be self-reinforcing and so contributed both to retaining cosmological knowledge in its correct form and to the long-term stability of the tribal culture. It was this same type of cultural stability, resting on an arguably similar system of cosmology, that characterized ancient Egyptian life over the course of several thousands years.

Attainment of these goals implied that the symbolism of the cosmology might have to be tailored somewhat to accommodate the varied living environments of different tribal groups. So for continental-based cultures such as the ancient Egyptians or the Dogon, the concept of the emergence of space (expressed as the separation of earth from sky) was compared to the raising up of a mountain. For the Maori, who were an island-based culture, the corresponding comparison was to the raising up of an island from the sea, an image that would carry more pertinent meaning within their specific sphere of reference.

One frequent tool of daily life that seems to have taken on cosmological symbolism in many different cultures is that of a basket. Commonly seen in ancient cosmological art, the basket is depicted with a hemispheric handle attached to (from the perspective of a two-dimensional painting or carving) a square-shaped container. In cosmologies of the post-Neolithic era (starting circa 3000 BCE), circles and hemispheres were symbolic of the heavens (“above”), or the nonmaterial realm, while a square represented the earth (“below”), or the material realm. From this perspective, we could interpret the shape of a basket to represent the coming together of the two realms. The written form of an Egyptian word bairi, meaning “basket,” upholds this outlook. Symbolically, the word reads “spiritual existence and existence material.”¹ As the Dogon priests relate, teachers who are described as having been of a nonmaterial nature brought civilizing knowledge to humanity in ancient times. Maori mythology emphasizes similar themes in the context of tales in which the Earth God Tane is said to acquire “baskets of knowledge.” A similar Samoan tale tells of a child who “ascends to the sun” and returns with “baskets of blessings.”

One Dogon word for “basket” is tadu, a term that is phonetically comparable to the Maori word taruke. The Maori root taru refers to “grass” or “herbage,”² the materials from which a basket is typically woven. Calame-Griaule tells us that the Dogon word implies “the basket system of the world, and is a prototype of the Celestial Granary,” a concept that is symbolized by the Dogon shrine that we view as a counterpart to the Buddhist stupa. She goes on to describe the basket as “the first model of the ark,” referring to the egg-of-the-world on which Dogon cosmology bases its concepts of matter. She also sees cosmological symbolism in the circular and square geometric forms that comprise the basket, concepts that reflect conceptual reversal in certain contexts. Regarding the symbolism of the basket, she explains that “backward, it represents the sky (square background, image of the cardinal points) and earth (circular overture).”³ (Conversely, in the archaic view circles were often associated with the sky and squares with the earth. In accordance with this same kind of reversal in symbolism, a Buddhist stupa squares its base and rises to rounded forms, while the Dogon granary squares its roof and rests on a round base.) A second Dogon word for “basket,” given as tomo, can also mean “to inform” or “to educate.”⁴ Similarly, the Maori term tomo can refer to “a large basket.”⁵ An Egyptian word for “basket,” tena, calls to mind the name of the god Tane, who, according to Maori myth, acquired knowledge in baskets.

As we move forward historically from the archaic era to more modern ancient times, symbolic elements that originally took a generalized form tended to become more stylized. For example, the eight Dogon ancestors, who are more often referred to by their ordinal sequence than by individual names, are likely correlates to the eight paired deities of the Egyptian Ennead or Ogdoad. Beyond association with specific honored family lines of Dogon society and association with particular civilizing skills, none of the Dogon ancestors becomes individualized within their mythic plotlines—not in the same way that ancestral deities such as Neith, Ra, Ptah, Thoth, or Anubis do in ancient Egyptian mythology. Rather, the Dogon most often treat the term ancestor as a symbolic construct, one that relates most sensibly to concepts of biological reproduction. Like other cosmological words, the term takes on meaning in a variety of different contexts. As matter emerges, a pair of Dogon ancestors is defined in relation to each quadrant of the circular egg-in-a-ball figure. This figure consists of a circle divided by two intersecting lines of axis. From the perspective of biological reproduction, ancestors take on a generational aspect that could relate sensibly to genetics. Similarly, within the constructs of Dogon civil life, each ancestor heads a family lineage and so plays a role in the structures of the society itself.

In culture after culture, we find that the contours of ancient cosmology are entwined with elements of an instructed civilizing plan. The skills that comprise this plan are the same ones that would be required to move a culture from a state of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture. In the view from which the Dogon priests explain their tradition, specific civilizing skills were defined as instructed Words, and each skill was associated with one of the eight mythical ancestors. Similarly, in the ancient Chinese tradition, a group of eight mythic emperors were credited with having brought these same civilizing skills. Within the Maori culture, we can see evidence of a comparable set of associations reflected in terms like ranga, meaning “to weave,” which recalls the name of the deity Rangi, or in the word papua, meaning “seed,” which is phonetically similar to the name of the goddess Papa. These homonyms suggest a correspondence within the Maori culture between civilizing skills and ancestral deities.

Because a single set of symbols was used in the Dogon culture to define at least three parallel themes of creation, the complexities of symbolism as it functions within the Dogon cosmological tradition starts to become somewhat unmanageable. One apparent solution to that difficulty lies with a series of four-stage Dogon metaphors that effectively allow us to group symbols into distinct categories. Overt reference is made in the Maori culture to the most familiar of these metaphors, which is defined in relation to primordial elements comparable to water, fire, wind, and earth. However, other cosmological metaphors of the Dogon are also similarly reflected in the Maori culture. For example, symbolic references in the Dogon tradition are associated on another level with categories of living creatures of the animal kingdom. These categories were meant to define ascending stages of creation. Insects represent concepts of nonexistence coming into existence, fish are associated with the reorganization of waves into particles, four-legged animals correlate to the formation of space, and birds symbolize material creation, spiritual ascension, and knowledge. Similarly, Best notes that Maori terms associated with the Earth God Tane take the form of names of birds.⁶ In accordance with the metaphoric progression of symbolism, the ancestry as it is given in Maori myths shows an evolution of the bird-related concepts that begin with insects such as flies and smaller vermin. At the topmost level of the metaphor, Maori bird references play out comparably to Dogon and ancient Chinese references. Many of these relate to the mythical theme of the Mulberry Tree, a symbol that demonstrates parallelism to the Tree of Life concept that survives in many ancient cultures.⁷ In the Maori culture, these symbolic animal references are framed in relation to Tane’s stated responsibility to render the forest fertile.

From ancient Egypt, the symbolism of hieroglyphic words suggests to us that the hawk or falcon, which is an icon of the Egyptian god Horus (or Heru), at one time held a symbolic meaning. Meanwhile in accordance with other four-stage Dogon metaphors, the working of a symbol is often compared to that of a seed (which initiates growth, as in the stages of the growth of a plant) or a sign (which catalyzes the formation of a Word). For the Dogon, our material universe constitutes a kind of reflected form or image, one that presents only an illusory appearance. Hawks, which in ancient Egypt came to be associated with kingship, are also commonly found in the region of Orkney Island (a region we associate with the term aaru) and in the nearby Faroe Islands. One Maori term for “hawk” is aahu.⁸ Another is kahu, a term that can also mean “to spring up,” “to grow,” or “to foster.”⁹ Appropriate to the Dogon definitions and creational metaphor, the Maori word kahua means “form or appearance,” while the word kahui refers to a “herd or flock.”

A stone woodworking tool called an adze played a significant symbolic role in the mythologies of the Dogon and of ancient Egypt. The adze was also adopted as a glyph shape within the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, where we interpret it to represent the force or process by which waves attain mass.¹⁰ Cosmologically speaking, Dogon symbolism of the adze relates to the differentiation of matter in its wavelike state into the first four primordial elements of water, fire, wind, and earth. Dogon discussion of the adze effectively sets the stage to introduce one of the four-stage metaphors for classifying cosmological symbols. The adze also plays a noteworthy role in the mythology of the Maori, which is again given in relation to the notion of waves. Best relates that whenever rough waters were encountered at sea, an expert priest who was in possession of a stone adze could offer it, along with carefully intoned incantations, as a way to calm the sea, moving the tool as if to chop at the waves.¹¹