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Foundational Philosophies in Maori Cosmology

As we have come to understand it, the ancient system of cosmology that we have been pursuing rests on two foundational philosophies. The first of these, broadly familiar to modern audiences, is the philosophy of yoga. It centers on concepts of personal enlightenment that are rooted in the human body, meditation, physicality, fertility, and the personal psyche. Adherents of this philosophy in the archaic Sakti Cult were a group of enlightened women called Yoginis. The Yoginis fostered an esoteric tradition that was passed down from generation to generation by oral tradition, in very much the same way that Dogon cosmology is structured and transmitted. A class of Dogon priests called the Hogon (a term that is phonetically similar to Yogini) are likely modern-day counterparts to these women. The second archaic philosophy on which the cosmology rests is a lesser-known yogic tradition called Samkhya Darshan, which represents a fully realized outlook on the processes by which reality is said to be created. The Sanskrit word samkhya is a compound of the terms sam, meaning “correct,” “proper,” or “discriminative,” and khya, meaning “knowing.” Our primary source for information about this philosophy is a book called Samkhya Darshan: Yogic Perspectives on Theories of Realism by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati.

A likely Dogon correlate to the term Samkhya combines the Dogon word sa, which means “clear,”¹ the word am, which implies “knowledge,” and the word kaya, meaning “expression” or “spoken conceptual word.”² Combined, these definitions seem sensible, since within the Dogon culture, cosmological knowledge is commonly characterized as “the clear word.” In ancient Egypt, the term sa referred to the concept of “wisdom or knowledge deified.”³ Budge defines the Egyptian term Kha as the name of a god or group of gods whose role he does not actually define. However, the name is written with a glyph that arguably depicts the formation of mass or matter symbolically.⁴ In part because the s phoneme is not vocalized in their language, the Maori have no direct phonetic correlate to the term Samkhya. There are perspectives from which the term can be paired with the Maori word mahea, meaning “clear” or “free from obstruction.”⁵ A related word maheahea means “to perceive indistinctly.” In any case, many of the fundamental tenets of the Samkhya Darshan philosophy are clearly attested in the Maori culture. The presence of these in conjunction with many of the key terms, symbols, and practices of the cosmological tradition suggests that we can infer the likely influence of a similar underlying philosophy.

Our entry point to these Maori philosophies comes from a 1983 book on the symbolic structure of the Maori culture called Counterpoint in Maori Culture, written by anthropologists F. Allan Hanson and Louise Hanson. Their working thesis is that the structures of traditional Maori institutions rest on two dynamic structural forms, defined as complementarity and symmetry.⁶ From the perspective of the ancient cosmology, these can be seen as conceptual equivalents to two foundational principles of Dogon cosmology, defined as duality and parallelism (symmetry) and the notion of the pairing of opposites (complementarity).

Within the context of the thesis of the Hansons, these principles of the Maori tradition evolve from a premise that was promoted by anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage. This term represents the notion that a culture’s mode of thinking is shaped by objects and relationships found in their everyday experience. This outlook is a reversed match for the perspective of Dogon society, where it is understood that cosmological thought was intentionally defined in relation to everyday experiences so as to imbue the acts of daily life with mnemonic value, to reinforce the teachings of an instructed cosmology.

While within the philosophy of Samkhya Darshan creation arises as the consequence of the introduction of male and female energies, the Hansons write of the Maori and bricolage that “particularly important in the modeling of reality on this basis was the bifurcation of humanity into sexes.” The Hansons quote Best as stating that for the Maori, “Everything has its male and female element.”⁷ This symbolism extended even as far as to the bilateral symmetry of the human body, where the right side was considered to be male and the left side female. Comparable symbolism is implied in other ancient cultures such as the Dogon, whose practice it was to bury a male body lying on its right side and a female body on its left.

Similar concepts of sexuality and fertility are understood to have been central to the philosophies of the archaic matriarchal tradition from which we believe many of the later classic traditions emerged. In keeping with that outlook, the cosmological processes of creation are conceptualized as beginning with an embrace between a female energy and a male energy. This concept of an embrace is what we infer to be symbolized by the pair of carved arms and hands that wrap around the end of a pillar at the Gobekli Tepe megalithic site. Similarly, the Hansons write that for the Maori, “in the beginning the earth and sky were locked together in a lovers’ embrace.”⁸

As a real-world parallel, concepts of gender and sexual opposites make natural correlates to astrophysical processes that rest on notions of duality and the pairing of opposites. It is for this reason that, in ancient cosmology, the few stages of cosmological creation that cannot be thought of as having a dual nature (such as the single act of perception that is said to catalyze the formation of matter) are often expressed symbolically in relation to a masturbatory or incestuous act, a sexual/creative act that falls outside the expected partnered-pair paradigm.

Along these same lines, the Dogon see direct parallels as existing between the processes of biological reproduction and those of the formation of matter and of the universe. From this perspective the pairing of opposing forces, conceived of as opposite sexes, underlies the symbolism of creation for many cultures. The Hansons define a similar principle at work in the Maori culture, where they say the Maori “used the complementary structure of sexual union followed by the production of offspring to conceptualize the origin of [diverse] things.”⁹ The principle is most overtly expressed in a quote that opens the second chapter of Counterpoint in Maori Culture, which the Hansons attribute to Nepia Pokuhu, a Maori priest from New Zealand who lived in the mid-1800s. The quote reads, “To be clear on this: all things issue forth from Rangi and Papa; nothing which can be imagined came from Papa alone, or from Rangi alone.”¹⁰

On the macroscopic level of the formation of the universe, the Dogon priests describe the configuration of elements that preceded an event comparable to the big bang as involving two inward-facing thorns (perhaps structures comparable to two black holes) that fed matter inward and confined it gravitationally as if inside an egg. As this constrained matter spun more and more quickly, it eventually reached a state where the gravity of the black holes that introduced the matter was no longer strong enough to contain it. The egg ruptured and scattered matter to all corners of the universe, in the words of the Dogon “like pellets of clay.” Maori mythology includes an episode whose proper symbolic interpretation may be similar to that of this Dogon storyline. In the Maori myth, two large hills (one described as male, the other female) fell in love. Their embrace blocked the flow of a river, whose waters then backed up to form a lake. In the Maori rendition of the tale, a magician recognizes the situation as being an improper one and uses his magic to restore the flow of the river.¹¹

From the perspective of the philosophy of Samkhya Darshan, it is the interaction between the nonmaterial and material universes that facilitates life in the material realm. This interaction is characterized by an inward and outward flow of energy. In the human sphere of the Maori culture, the Hansons characterize that godly influences were understood to result from the “union in the complementary relationship between physical and spiritual beings.”¹² The Hansons are careful to assert this perspective as a kind of tool of analysis, rather than make any literal claim for the earthly presence of spiritual beings. However, the viewpoint resonates with overt claims made on the part of cultures such as the Dogon and Buddhists for actual, emanated spiritual energy.

However, the view of the archaic Sakti Cult was that attempts to communicate knowledge were also routinely made between the nonmaterial and material domains. This communication could take the form of vivid images or events that might appear in dreams, auspicious astronomic signs, or unusual movements or behaviors of animals. Communication from a nonmaterial realm was also understood to occur through what we might perceive as unlikely coincidences. The Hansons tell us that concepts parallel to these existed in the Maori culture, conceptualized as the communication of the atua (the notion of the infinite that is interpreted by some as gods) with the human world.¹³ These atua are described in terms that would be comparable to fairies in Scotland and Ireland, and the Hansons actually refer to them as fairies. They write, “In certain respects [these] fairies were ethereal beings . . . yet fairies were corporeal enough.”¹⁴ The atua interacted directly with humans, took the form of animals, and could be the source of “apparently random events.” They were also understood to be the source of omens. In the words of Augustus Earle, a New Zealand resident who observed and wrote about the Maori, “There is not a wind that blows but they imagine it bears some message from [the atua].”¹⁵ The Hansons state that messages from the atua needed to be interpreted symbolically and that a class of skilled experts called tohungas (“skilled persons”) was required to interpret them. Appropriate to this outlook, Tregear informs us that Maori words for “omen” included the terms aitua and tohu.¹⁶

In the definitions of the philosophy of Samkhya Darshan, the truthful knowledge that can be attained by an individual in the evoked multiplicity of the material realm is referred to as mahat.¹⁷ The Maori term maha means “many.”¹⁸ In ancient Egypt the likely correlate is the familiar term maat, which is treated in the context of “correct knowledge.” The Maori term ma means “white,” “pale,” and “clean,” terms and concepts that we associate with the instructed knowledge of the cosmology and with the nonmaterial universe.

Within Samkhya Darshan, the ascent or manifestation of the elements is defined by the term ahamkara. A likely Maori correlate to this word is marama, meaning “to rise up.”¹⁹ The same term forms the root of a Maori word for “enlightenment.”

From the perspective of the Samkhya Darshan philosophy, humanity is confined within ascending cycles of growth and enlightenment that compare with the Hindu cycles of karmic rebirth. The confinement or bondage comes out of a kind of false identification, in which an individual is understandably convinced that the illusion of everyday experience represents true reality.²⁰ Liberation from this cycle is arrived at through the attainment of a kind of discriminating knowledge, defined as enlightenment, that ultimately allows a person to distinguish between existence and nonexistence. Consistent with that outlook, the Maori concept of knowledge can be expressed by the words uhumanea²¹ and ihumanea.²² The term uhumanea combines the phonetic root uhu, meaning “cramped” (a synonym for the concept of “confined”), and what is arguably the term human. A similar linguistic relationship between the notions of confinement and knowledge is expressed by the Egyptian word khent, which means “confined” but also is the term for a “shrine, sanctuary, or temple,” locales that were intimately associated with instructed knowledge.²³ In ancient Egypt, each temple included a House of Life and a House of Books, places where civilizing skills were preserved and taught.