Best — Maori Marriage Customs. 61 



"Toko te rangi 



Tu ke Eangi 



Tau ke Papa-tuanuku. 



Nga rakau i te ngahere 



Te homai mo to kiri 



Kia tutu, kia wewehi mokinokino 



Nga otaota i te ngahere 



Te homai nio to kiri 



Kia tutu, kia wewehi mokinokino 



Nga ongaonga i te ngahere 



Te homai mo to kiri 



Kia tutu, kia wewehi mokinokino. 



This has the effect of destroying her affection, and of 

 causing her to fear her husband. She will not approach him 



again. 



In this account of a singular ceremony the priest takes 

 the applicant for divorce to the stream, pool, or spring set 

 aside for the performance of sacred rites thereat, and there he 

 sprinkles her with water, and takes from her the formless, 

 immaterial personality of her affection for her husband. This 

 he does by just touching her body with his fingers, as if pick- 

 ing or plucking something from her. This semblance or like- 

 ness of her love he washes off or away, as it were, and so it is 

 miria, or separated from her. In his invocation he calls upon 

 the sky to stand apart, on high, and be separated from earth ; 

 and also upon earth to lay separate from the sky ; and upon 

 the nettles, and plants, and shrubs, &c., of the forest to 

 cause the skin (metaphorical) of the applicant for divorce to 

 rise, "like quills upon the fretful porcupine," in dislike of her 

 husband. 



The term for divorce {toko) is taken from the act of Tane of 

 old, he who performed the first divorce on record when he 

 separated earth and sky — for this is an animistic myth, old 

 as man himself. Rangi is the Sky Parent, the personification 

 of the heavens, whose wife was Papa-tuanuku, the Earth 

 Mother (the Ouranos of Grecian mythology). This primal 

 pair originally embraced each other, hence the world was in 

 darkness until Tane separated the parents of gods and men 

 by thrusting up the heavens, an action described by the word 

 toko. Observe the allusion to this in the first three lines of 

 the divorce invocation. 



The term toko is also used to imply the abolishing and 

 driving-away of a high wind by the repeating of a charm 

 known as tokotoko, commencing — 



Tokona nga hau 

 Tokona ki waho, &c. 



A toko, or divorce invocation, is given at page 296 of " Nga 

 Moteatea." 



The following is a portion only of another toko : — 



