From Hinetitama to Hine-nui-te-po

The widely told account gives Hine-nui-te-po an earlier identity and an origin story that explains why death entered the world of the living. As Hinetitama, she married Tane without knowing that he was also her father, a fact of the world's early genealogy in which the first beings were made from few enough parts that such a relationship was unavoidable.

On learning the truth she was overcome with shame and anger and fled down into the underworld, taking the name Hine-nui-te-po, the great woman of the night, and instructed Tane to remain above and raise the children they already had in the world of light, while she would draw their descendants down to her when their time came. This is presented in Maori tradition as the origin of human mortality itself: death is not an accident or a punishment imposed from outside but the direct consequence of a goddess's own decision at the world's beginning, made in grief rather than in cruelty. Her earlier name, Hinetitama, is sometimes translated as the dawn maid, and the shift from that name to Hine-nui-te-po is itself read by some tellers as marking the passage from day to permanent night, binding her personal transformation to the daily and cosmic order rather than leaving it as an isolated family drama.