15

The Wharekura, or School of Reeds

Along with a wealth of other information found in his 1904 book The Maori Race, Tregear provides us with many informative details about the functioning of the Wharekura schools in the Maori culture. Tregear tells us that, in addition to the Wharekura school for training priests mentioned earlier, similar schools came to be associated with each Maori tribe, very much as a House of Life and House of Books, also described as priestly schools, were associated with each Egyptian temple in ancient times. Descriptions of how these schools were conceptually organized, along with details of the practical functioning of the schools, are given in chapter 17 of Tregear’s book. He writes, “Ancient legends seem to establish the fact that in some far off country there was a great temple called Whare-kura, the ‘Holy House.’ The locality is said to have been known as Uawa.”¹

According to Best, other names besides Wharekura (or Wharekura) were also applied to the schools. These are given as Whaire Maire, Whaire Takiura, Whare Puri, Whare Wananga, and Whare Purakau. The Maori word maire refers to “a tree having very hard wood,”² perhaps comparable to an oak tree. The word takiura refers to “sacred food cooked at ceremonies.”³ In his book Tuhoe, the Children of the Mist (presented as an overview of pre-Maori cultures in New Zealand), Best writes, “The word wananga seems to be applied to occult knowledge, and purakau to traditions and myths, but the meaning of puri is not so clear to the writer. Possibly some obliging ethnographer will trace it back to the great temple of Jagah-nath at Puri, in Orissa, where tree worship and barber priests obtained.”⁴

Of course, Orissa is the modern name of the region of India that is the seat of worship for the archaic Sakti Cult, from which we trace the early roots of the cosmology of our studies. Jagah-nath is a nondenominational (or cross-denominational) surrogate of the Hindu god Vishnu and has associations with a number of different traditions in India, specifically including the Sakti Cult. Those connections would seemingly make our role in these passages that of the rhetorical ethnographer of Best’s offhand suggestion.

In Best’s view, the variant names applied to the schools reflected differences in the subject matter taught. From that perspective, myths and traditions would have been taught at the Whare Purakau schools, while occult knowledge would have been emphasized at the Whare Wananga schools. Such division of instruction goes hand in hand with a precept of the Maori culture that precluded a student of cosmology from also pursuing occult knowledge. Based on Dogon phonetics, students at the Whare Puri schools would likely have studied cosmology and agriculture, since their term puru relates to the concept of “disorder in the dispersion of spiritual forces.”⁵Disorder is the domain of the Dogon Second World of matter, where matter, originally found in a perfect wavelike state, comes to be reordered. The stages of this Second World are what are reflected in the megalithic symbolism on Orkney Island, given in relation to the cultivated Field of Arou. In support of this viewpoint, a second Dogon word puru refers to “cultivated grains.”

Franceso Brighenti, the author of a book called Sakti Cult of Orissa, makes frequent reference to the temple in India at Puri as one of a handful of sites with legitimate claims of association with the most archaic eras of the tradition.⁶ However, he also expresses confusion that the Mother Goddess who was celebrated there was associated with one of the destructive aspects of the Sakta tradition. The Dogon sense of the term puru, which is rooted in the concept of the disruption of matter in its wavelike state and the subsequent reordering of matter as particles, provides a sensible rationale for the seemingly counterintuitive symbolism at Puri.

Tregear writes that the term Wharekura was “transferred on the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand to tribal buildings with something of the old attributes.”⁷ Because the name given to these schools, Wharekura, is a match for that of a mythical sacred place of ancient instruction located far to the east, any clear definition of the term must properly begin with what is still known about that ancient school. The meaning of School of Reeds that we interpret for the Maori term, its phonetic similarity to the word arou, or aaru, and the stated locale and purposes of the ancient school all lead us to associate the Maori tradition with that of Orkney Island, as discussed in The Mystery of Skara Brae. From this perspective, the name of Tregear’s mythical locality, Uawa, would correspond to the name Arou or Aaru that we assign to the agricultural field on Orkney Island. The compound term Whare-kura would likely combine that same name and a Faroese word for “house of worship,” given as kirkja. Together the terms Arou Kirkja would refer to the Neolithic sanctuary located on Orkney Island, or the “house of worship located at Arou.”

Tregear describes the surviving Maori accounts of the ancient Wharekura school as being “fragmentary and shadowy,”⁸ yet among the Maori, a very specific understanding has been preserved of the physical shape of the structure in which the original school was housed. Tregear includes a diagram of a horseshoe-shaped enclosure, comparable to an ancient stone structure called a fulacht fiadh (plural: fulachta fiadh) that is commonly found in Ireland. Similar structures have also been excavated on Orkney Island.

One researcher of these sites, an archaeologist from Belfast, Ireland, named Anne-Marie Nurnberger (née Denvir) writes of the Irish structures, “Fulachta fiadh were an integral part of the prehistoric landscape in Ireland, they provide significant evidence of activity in areas with little artifact deposition. They also form the biggest number of a single prehistoric monument in Ireland and over the years have generated much interest in the archaeological world. Yet the purpose of fulachta fiadh is still unclear even though many major studies have been undertaken on them.”⁹

Fulacht fiadh cooking pit (photo by David Hawgood)

Similarly, a website for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland states, “There are currently over 1900 burnt mound sites recorded in Scotland, with the highest concentrations occurring in Shetland, Orkney, Caithness and Sutherland, and in Southern Scotland around Dumfries and Galloway. It has been suggested that this distribution is representative of the original spread of hot stone technologies.”¹⁰

Like many of the place names and designations given by early cultures in Scotland and Ireland, the term fulacht (or fulachta) fiadh is of uncertain origin and meaning. In an article from the Journal of Irish Archaeology, John Ó Néill writes, “Many commentators suggest that the Irish word ‘fulacht’ denotes a pit used for cooking. ‘Fiadh’ in Old Irish meant something like ‘wild,’ often relating to animals such as deer. However, all commentators acknowledge significant difficulties in deriving a genuine etymology for the word ‘fulacht.’ As some historical references clearly use the term ‘fulacht’ to describe a cooking spit, a close reading of these accounts suggests that the term actually derives from a word meaning ‘support’ and probably carries a deliberate reference to the Irish words for blood and meat.”¹¹

However, another potentially viable perspective on the word fiadh is that it derives from the same root as the word Filidha, a Druidic term that refers to a learned class of seers and teachers. Miranda J. Green of the University of Wales writes in her book The World of the Druids:

Many Graeco-Roman writers give the Druids a thoroughly bad press. . . . Other writers present [them as] profound thinkers, intellectuals, and philosophers, scholars of the universe, teachers, and custodians of oral culture. . . . Despite the inherent difficulties of constructing an accurate and complete timeline, [evidence attests to] the longevity of Druidism, even though its character underwent radical changes between its first mention in Gaul and Britain, at the end of the first millennium BC, and the Neo-Pagan Druidry currently practiced in Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Druidism, then, has existed in some guise for over two millennia.¹²

The commonly shared horseshoe shape of the Maori and Irish structures suggests a conceivable connection between the word fiadh and the Maori word pihao, which means “to enclose, as to encompass a fish.”¹³ In the Dogon culture, initiates undergoing such training were referred to as fish. Similarly, as implied by Tregear, the Maori term whare can mean “house.”¹⁴ A wharau is a “hut or shed made of branches,” the same definition that applies to the Egyptian word skhet, a term that we argue defines the instructional sanctuary on Orkney Island.¹⁵ If we allow the possibility of a correlation for these structures to the Maori, then one conceivable purpose of the structure was as a school for the instruction of initiates in the civilizing concepts associated with cosmology. If, as for the Maori, each tribe or village established its own school, that could account for the great number of structures reported by archaeologists. Moreover, when we explore possible phonetic roots for the word fiadh in the enigmatic Faroese language, found in the region of Orkney Island, we discover that the word felag means “academy.”¹⁶ The Faroese word folkaatk implies the meaning “of the folk” or “of the people.” Looked at from this perspective, the two terms folkaatk felag in combination (comparable to fulachta fiadh) could imply the meaning of “people’s academy.”

Other linguistic similarities can be cited to suggest potential links between the Maori schools and the Dogon and ancient Egyptian cultures. For example, according to Tregear, the chief priest of the Wharekura temple held the title of paroro, a word that bears a phonetic resemblance to both the Dogon term for chieftainship, faro, and the Egyptian title pharaoh.¹⁷

Tregear informs us in The Maori Race that, like shrines we have studied in the Buddhist and Dogon traditions that were aligned along an east-west axis, the structure of the Wharekura was “carefully oriented, its front being eastward.”¹⁸ Similarly, the name was also understood to define a circular enclosure at whose symbolic center rested the notion of a creator god, a deity named Kahukura, who was known as the rainbow god. In Point of Origin, we discussed similar symbolic associations between the circular base of a shrine and colors of light, along with a center point that was deemed to represent all of the colors combined.

Typically, the Maori schools were devoted to classes of instruction. In the first, which pertained only to the ariki candidates for priesthood, instruction was given in mythology, astronomy, history, and the “mysteries of life and death.” Students who were not on the track toward the priesthood were taught skills of agriculture and “practical astronomy,” a term that referred to astronomic skills that related to the agricultural calendar, which were required for the planting and harvesting of crops.¹⁹ Instruction for boys generally began when they were twelve years old and lasted for three to five years. Although as a general rule no woman was allowed in the school building, the opening ceremony was attended by an elder priestess. This detail might possibly constitute a remnant of the archaic matriarchal tradition, from which we trace the later cosmologies.

Classes were conducted over the course of four or five months per year, running from autumn until springtime. Instruction began with a priest who, prior to the commencement of any religious instruction, recounted the history of the tribe. By tradition, each of the instructor-priests spoke in turn, and only one spoke at a time. The first month of instruction was devoted to the subject of the primary gods of the Maori tradition. Once completed, it was followed by tutelage in incantations and witchcraft. Certain of the most sacred incantations were not allowed to be recited indoors but were explicitly reserved for use in the woods and mountains. According to Tregear, instruction ended at midnight each night, and the students slept during the daytime. Students were not allowed to go to places where food was being cooked, but instead food was brought to, or provided by, the school.

During the months of recess, the students’ resolve to maintain secrecy regarding the details of their instruction was routinely tested, with their friends encouraged to try to coax information from them. Those who were found, against prohibitions, to have revealed privileged information were expelled from the school. Meals were taken in the building, but sleeping there was prohibited. Because laws of tapu applied to the students during their months of instruction, and thereby transferred a kind of sacred quality to them, they were not allowed to associate with tribe members who were deemed to be nonsacred.

At the completion of a student’s course of instruction, a final incantation called the whaka-pou was recited, whose purpose was to firmly establish the teachings of the priests in the mind of the student. Tregear relates that the Maori word poua means “fixed.” The student was then taken to an altar (consisting of an upright stone or a shrine) and instructed to hurl a flat rock or stone. If the stone broke, it was taken as a sign that the student had not properly assimilated the teachings. If the stone remained whole, a second test was applied and an incantation called hoa was recited, whose purpose was, by willpower only, to make the stone vibrate. The incantation was conceptualized as a vehicle through which the will of the student was applied.

Students of the occult were required to perform additional tests prior to graduation that included a demonstration of the ability to kill an animal or a person through the power of incantation. One purpose of the test was to demonstrate that the student had the strength of personal will to actually act on what he had been taught. Tregear tells us that the student was required to kill a person who was close to him, someone other than a parent or sibling. Best suggests that the more closely related the killed person was to the student (specifically including parents or siblings), the more powerful a demonstration was made of the skill and knowledge of the student. In some cases where the priest may have been elderly or infirm, the teacher named himself as the student’s target victim.

Tregear tells us that “one or more schools of astronomy” were located outside each important village. These schools were open every night, but no one was allowed to enter or leave, or to sleep there, during the hours when stars might be visible, from sundown to sunrise. Discussion at these schools centered on agriculture, hunting and fishing, and ways in which the constellations and stars regulated these activities. In villages where no such school existed, a house was designated as the Whare Mata. Among other meanings, the Maori word mata can imply the notions of observing objects (such as the stars) and acquiring knowledge.²⁰