It is an interesting co-incidence that the Afterlife is the topic of the current Newsletter issue: yesterday I visited the very tip of New Zealand, where Māori beliefs have it that souls leap off the rocks and start their journey to Hawaiki, the original Māori homeland. This starting point is Cape Reinga (pron. Rianga by Anglophones), for which the Māori is ‘Te Rerenga Wairua’, the flight of the spirits. In this context rerenga is best translated as ‘leaping-place’. But rerenga could also be translated as ‘refuge’ or ‘flight-place’, and wairua could be re-read as wai rua, water+two, i.e. two waters. And indeed Cape Reinga is the meeting-place of two seas, the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, between New Zealand and Australia.
According to Māori mythology, the spirits of the dead travel to Cape Reinga on their journey to the afterlife to leap off the headland and climb the roots of the 800 year old pohutukawa tree and descend to the underworld to return to their traditional homeland of Hawaiki, using the Te Ara Wairua, the 'Spirits' pathway'. At Cape Reinga they depart the mainland. They turn briefly at the Three Kings Islands for one last look back towards the land, then continue on their journey. A spring in the hillside, Te Waiora-a-Tāne (the 'Living waters of Tāne'), also played an important role in Māori ceremonial burials, representing a spiritual cleansing of the spirits, with water of the same name used in burial rites all over New Zealand.
In all this we are tempted to see the spirit as emerging from two bodies of water, perhaps a third, with the addition of the water to cleanse the soul.
But to my mind, the afterlife is a short wee nap till the End of Time.
According to Māori mythology, the spirits of the dead travel to Cape Reinga on their journey to the afterlife to leap off the headland and climb the roots of the 800 year old pohutukawa tree and descend to the underworld to return to their traditional homeland of Hawaiki, using the Te Ara Wairua, the 'Spirits' pathway'. At Cape Reinga they depart the mainland. They turn briefly at the Three Kings Islands for one last look back towards the land, then continue on their journey. A spring in the hillside, Te Waiora-a-Tāne (the 'Living waters of Tāne'), also played an important role in Māori ceremonial burials, representing a spiritual cleansing of the spirits, with water of the same name used in burial rites all over New Zealand.
In all this we are tempted to see the spirit as emerging from two bodies of water, perhaps a third, with the addition of the water to cleanse the soul.
But to my mind, the afterlife is a short wee nap till the End of Time.
Martin Prior
