“Men make heroes, but death carries them away.” – Maori saying
Every culture has its death myth. It is, along with birth, the common experience of life. Unlike birth, however, death is known world-wide as the great mystery. We do not (and perhaps this is strange) wonder what was happening to us before we were born, or where we were, but we do wonder what will happen, and where we go afterward. There is, correspondingly, a home for the dead in nearly every culture. Christianity mostly divides it into two places: heaven and hell. Dante makes even more subdivisions, splitting hell into various circles in which people are punished depending on their sins in life. The Jewish faith had, originally, a large, dark place called Sheol, where the dead went regardless of moral deeds. For the Greeks it was Hades; the Romans called it Pluto.
For the Maori, the underworld, the land of the dead, was called Rarohenga, and the path to the place was through Te Rerenga Wairua, near the site of modern Cape Rainga, at nearly the Northern most point of the North Island of Aotearoa, now called New Zealand.
According to legend, when a person dies their spirit travels along what’s now called 90-mile beach, a beautiful and seemingly endless stretch of sand with treacherous waters that contain no people swimming. Then they reach Cape Rainga, and it’s not hard to see why they chose this place. Beautiful mountains rise all around, a pure white beach below, and out there the point where the Tasman sea and Pacific ocean meet spectacularly. One side, the Tasman, is male, according to myth, the Pacific female. As the winds blow either way, the prevailing current causes one side or the other to churn and gather strength, while the other calms. One side presses, the other yields. If there is balance between them, regardless of which one dominates, there is harmony: the water is beautiful and majestic. If not, chaos. An interesting metaphor.
On the day I went there, a cyclone was slamming into the South island, and we got some of the outskirts of that weather, making the area seem even more spiritual and mysterious. I, of course, don’t believe in spirits in earnest, but I do enjoy putting myself in the shoes of ancient people. What would they have thought, ignorant of the science behind weather, as the winds blew against them here? As the fog rolled past, little bits of cloud torn away by the eddies, swirling through the small pass between the rolling mountains? Sometimes the wind seemed like it had a purpose of its own. Perhaps it was spiteful spirits, trying to blow me off the mountain. Or perhaps they were playful, tugging me along for a dance. I couldn’t have found out. Whatever awaits us after death, this much we know for certain: no one who goes there sends back a message.
“Death closes all”, as Tennyson wrote, mourning the passing of his longtime friend. Certainly, it seems to, and when those who are close to us die we suffer a great loss. I’ve lost one close friend who I hadn’t expected to lose, and I still mourn him. Though many religions promise a blissful afterlife, there is no sane human alive who celebrates earnestly with glee when a friend or relative “passes on”. Even the fact that there are so many euphemisms for death suggests our sensitivity to it. As if calling it by a different name somehow diminishes it. Such is the seeming power of words. Death, of course, doesn’t care what we call it. It just is.
It’s natural, then, that as we developed heroes in our mythology, some of those heroes would battle death. But it wouldn’t be an easy struggle. Even in our common parlance, when one comes close to dying we don’t say (normally) that he “vanquished” death, but that he “cheated” it. He tricked death. This seems the only form of rebellion available against a force that seems so unstoppable as Thanatos.
Tricksters
Tricksters are a special type of hero, of which Odysseus is actually one. He tricked the Trojans, after all, using the Trojan Horse. And he tricked Polyphemus, the great cyclops king, by calling himself “nobody”, and so foiling Polyphemus’s efforts to call for help. Tricksters appeal to us. We can easily imagine the elders telling tales to the children around the ancient campfire, and the stories of tricksters interest us because they suggest a different path to victory than mere brute strength. They suggest that using our wit, really mankind’s greatest gift, we can defeat enemies far more powerful than us. Even, possibly, death itself.
Sisyphus is another Greek character, known by most of us as the man who perpetually rolls the boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down. He is the embodiment of the pointless task, the feeling that we all have at work when we’re forced to do the same job, day in, day out, seemingly with no end. But this was just his punishment. What was he being punished for? Few people ask.
Sisyphus reigned as king of Ephyra, present day Corinth, where he was deceitful and treacherous. Much of what he did we’d all consider wrong today. He was ruthless in business, killed travelers and guests who threatened him politically, even seduced the daughter of a king in an effort to murder the king himself.
The gods grew angry with Sisyphus, and Zeus ordered Thanatos himself to chain him and bring him to Hades. But Sisyphus was a trickster. He cleverly asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains worked, and then used them to chain Thanatos himself. While Thanatos was chained, no human beings on Earth could die. Sisyphus had inadvertently granted mankind immortality.
Ares, the God of War, was angry about this, because war was no fun when nobody died. So he freed Thanatos, and gave Sisyphus to him.
But Sisyphus had thought ahead. He’d asked his wife to throw his naked body into the street upon his death, a great sacrilege in Greek culture. When he arrived in the underworld, he begged Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld, to allow him to return and berate his wife for her disrespectful treatment of him. He argued that he deserved a proper burial. Persephone granted his request. But after Sisyphus “berated” his wife, he refused to return to Hades. So Sisyphus escaped death a second time.
After this, Zeus had had enough. He captured Sisyphus and forced him to roll a heavy boulder up a hill. Once Sisyphus did that, he would be free to do as he wished, immortal. But Zeus had played a trick of his own, which we all know now. The boulder was enchanted, and whenever Sisyphus would approach the top, the boulder would roll away from him, back to the bottom. So the hubris of Sisyphus was punished.
Maui
In Maori culture, the great trickster was the demi-god Maui. Yes, the same Maui from the movie Moana, though that Maui was really an amalgamation of many different legends taken from greater Polynesia, and obviously adapted for Western audiences. So Moana’s Maui is a bit different (though not, as many overly-sensitive types cry out, offensive).
The Maui of the Maori was a shapeshifter, and he took on different shapes to trick the people around him, to sneak into places he had no business being, or to escape danger. He was the embodiment of change in the world. Maui was the Maori Prometheus, giving fire to humans. When he did this, the Gods grew angry with him, setting his island on fire. He turned into a bird and flew about, but had no place to land. Praying to his ancestors, he was finally allowed a reprieve when they caused rain to fall on the island, putting out the fire.
He also pulled the islands of New Zealand from the sea. One day, while fishing with his brothers, Maui used his demigod blood as bait, and with his mystical hook captured the biggest fish the world had ever seen. For days he struggled to catch it, and when he did, he left his brothers to look after it while he gathered the priests required to perform the ritual of turning the fish into the North Island of New Zealand. He was trying to make a new land for his people, a flat land that could be easily traversed so that their villages could all be connected. His brothers grew impatient, however, and tried to chop the fish up. This caused the fish to whip about, and by the time Maui showed up he was forced to conduct the ritual quickly. This is why New Zealand is so mountainous and the terrain is so rough.
As for the South Island, that’s Maui’s canoe, that he used to catch the mighty fish.
“There is one so powerful that no tricks can be of any avail.”
Maui’s greatest task was against death. Maui was the very embodiment of life and ability, and he believed that mankind deserved immortality. In his view, mankind should die like the moon, to be reborn again. To dip into the healing waters, and rise once more. But the guardian of the underworld, Hine-nui-te-po (the volcanic demon Te Ka from Moana was originally named Te Po), told him that men should die forever, so that they would be mourned and remembered.
Hine-nui-te-po, Great Woman of the Night, became goddess of the underworld in a story of incest. Tane, the forest god, lonely on the Earth without a woman to keep him company, decided to make one with the help of this mother, Papatuanuku. She showed him how to make a woman from the red earth (the soil of New Zealand is mostly clay and peat, and I can tell you from driving past several farms with freshly tilled fields it is very red). Thus he made Hina-auhuone, whom he mated with to give birth to Hine-nui-te-po. He then married Hine-nui-te-po. When she realized that he was her father, she fled to Rarohenga, “where the spirits dwell.” When Tane came to find her, and convince her to return, she told him coldly: “Go back, Tane, and raise our children. I will be here to gather them in.”
Hine was the key to immortality, and Maui was determined to get it from her. This is actually a really interesting myth, and you’ll see why. Maui knows that Hine sleeps at night, but leaves guardians to protect her. These guardians aren’t worried about animals, too stupid to threaten her, but are told to watch for anything that moves on two feet, which must be a man (birds are, presumably, also a threat. Or perhaps she, too, was annoyed by seagulls). Maui, then, cleverly snuck past walking on all fours, while his companions were turned into warbling birds which flew above him.
Once inside her lair, Maui observed Hine sleeping. She was a dreadful monster. W.D. Westervelt writes in Legends of Maui, a Demi-God of Polynesia, “the flashing eyes they could see in the distance were dark as greenstone, the teeth were as sharp as volcanic glass, her mouth was large like a fish, and her hair was floating in the air like sea-weed.” Now to Maui’s task. To escape death forever, he would have to reverse the process of birth (since birth leads to death) by passing through Hine’s vagina, through her body, and out her mouth (clearly some anatomical incorrectness applies to this story. Leave it be, I beg you). Perhaps you giggled at that notion. You wouldn’t be alone.
In fact, Maui cautions his companions against giggling. “Giggle when I’m done,” he says, “but not before.” They say okay, very well, and he begins. He enters her vagina, which is walled with obsidian teeth, razor sharp. As he’s about to pass through, one of his companions can’t help himself. The incredible sight causes him to laugh, waking Hine, who splits Maui in half with her vagina dentata. This is why this story is so interesting to me: basically the fact that men are immature and laugh at stupid things is, in Maori myth, the reason for the fall of man. Quite a departure from all the gullibility of women in the Christian myth (as well as the corresponding notion that man will basically follow women, perhaps literally, into hell).
Anyway, Maui dies, and this represents the Maori fall of humankind. Maui, after all, was known for his ability to change the world. He wrangled the sun, forcing it to give us a day and a night. He pulled islands from the sea. He even, according to some myths, gave humans legs and arms. But once he died, and was kept for ever after by Hine in the land of spirits, there would be no more changes to the world. That’s why the world has stayed constant ever since.
Hubris
There’s an obvious moral lesson that I’ll just get out of the way. Most of these myths involve Gods with a capital G, and the intent was to show that one cannot challenge them. This is captured in the idea of the word hubris, the original meaning of which was a form of arrogance that specifically involved stepping out of one’s place in relation to the Gods, the answer for which was nemesis, a word which has also been twisted in the modern lexicon, but which originally meant the inevitable downfall of the hubristic hero.
In my reading, though, I offer a different interpretation. Hubris is ultimately tragic because it represents a failure of mankind to be realistic. The punishments lavished on the tricksters, though, suggest that perhaps the victory of the Gods was not so out of reach after all. Why, after all, did they need such strict punishments? If the defeat of the hubristic were inevitable, why discourage the behavior so vehemently?
Perhaps the Gods knew what was coming for them. Perhaps they saw in these clever heroes the greatest threat to their supremacy, and saw the need to crush them under boot, to stomp out the resistance. To leave behind only the servile cretins who offered sacrifices and hoped for the best. These days, we have, thankfully, escaped from much of that. And these days, thanks to our own Mauis, with names like Tesla, Shockley, and Newton, we’ve taken much more of the God’s power than simply fire. Indeed, as Carl Sagan pointed out, there are now humans who live in the sky, like the Greek gods of old.
In this view, Tricksters like Maui, Odysseus, even Sisyphus, are a unique type of hero. Not one who wrestled a large lion, or some other paltry act, but “men who strove with gods”. They are our liberators, the ones who took us from our primitive roots and propelled us forward. In their hubris they showed a unique type of bravery which we now properly laud: the bravery of the oppressed against the oppressor. But they had more than bravery. They had the quintessential human ability, which is intellectual. We imagine individuals like the Marvel heroes, capable of feats of great strength, impervious to damage, as well as moral paragons. But there’s no real chance for that. As far as our slight, mortal life is concerned, the time bookended by oblivion, the only chance we have to be heroes is through our cleverness – to become Tricksters.
We might as well. After all, it seems, based on most 9-to-5 jobs, that we’ll be rolling the ball up the hill again and again anyway.