Whiro and Tane: The Separation Myth

In the widely told account of Rangi and Papa's separation, several of their children attempt and fail to force their parents apart before Tane succeeds by pushing with his legs rather than his arms, standing the sky away from the earth and letting light into the world for the first time. Whiro's opposition to Tane is placed in some tellings within a further contest for the baskets of knowledge, in which Tane ascends to the highest heaven to bring back knowledge for humanity while Whiro attempts to reach it first or to obstruct him, and loses.

Whiro's association with darkness, sickness and death follows from this defeat: rather than becoming a ruler presiding over an ordered realm of the dead in the way some other cultures' death gods do, he remains a source of harm that acts against the living world Tane brought into being, so his name in many contexts stands for the affliction itself rather than for a person governing an afterlife. Where Hine-nui-te-po, described separately in this atlas, governs an ordered realm the dead pass into, Whiro has no comparable domain of his own in most tellings; his presence is felt through the harm attributed to him among the living rather than through any account of what, if anything, he rules below.