"If I am allowed to lift a page from The Golden Bough: each year the sylvan landscape of old New Zealand provided 'the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.' In a small sweet-potato garden set apart for the god, a Maori priest enacted a sacred marriage that would be worthy of his legendary colleague of the grove of Nemi. Accompanying his movements with a chant that included the phrase, 'Be pregnant, be pregnant', the priest planted the first hillocks (puke, also 'mons veneris') of the year's crop. The priest plays the part of the god Rongo (-marae-roa, Ha., Lono), he who originally brought the sweet potato in his penis from the spiritual homeland, to impregnate his wife (Pani, the field).

During the period of growth, no stranger will be suffered to disturb the garden. But at the harvest, Rongo's possession is contested by another god, Tuu (-matauenga) - ancestor of man 'as tapu warrior' - in a battle sometimes memorialized as the origin of war itself.

Using an unworked branch of the mapou tree - should we not thus say, a bough broken from a sacred tree? - a second priest, representing Tuu, removes, binds up, and then reburies the first sweet-potato tubers. He so kills Rongo, the god, parent and body of the sweet potato, or else puts him to sleep, so that man may harvest the crop to his own use. Colenso's brilliant Maori informant goes on to the essentials of the charter myth:

Rongo-marae-roa [Rongo as the sweet potato] with his people were slain by Tu-matauenga [Tuu as warrior]...

Tu-matauenga also baked in an oven and ate his elder brother Rongo-marae-roa so that he was wholly devoured as food.

Now the plain interpretation, or meaning of these names in common words, is, that Rongo-marae-roa is the kumara [sweet potato], and that Tu-matauenga is man."

"...the Hawaiian staple, taro, is the older brother of mankind, as indeed all useful plants and animals are immanent forms of the divine ancestors - so many kino lau or 'myriad bodies' of the gods. Moreover, to make root crops accessible to man by cooking is precisely to destroy what is divine in them: their autonomous power, in the raw state, to reproduce."

"...the aggressive transformation of divine life into human substance describes the mode of production as well as consumption - even as the term for 'work' (Ha., hana) does service for 'ritual'. Fishing, cultivating, constructing a canoe, or, for that matter, fathering a child are so many ways that men actively appropriate 'a life from the god'."

"Man, then, lives by a kind of periodic deicide. Or, the god is separated from the objects of human existence by acts of piety that in social life would be tantamount to theft and violence - not to speak of cannibalism.

'Be thou undermost, / While I am uppermost', goes a Maori incantation to the god accompanying the offering of cooked food; for as cooked food destroys tabu, the propitiation is at the same time a kind of pollution - i.e., of the god.

The aggressive relation to divine beings helps explain why contact with the sacred is extremely dangerous to those who are not themselves in a tabu state. Precisely, then, these Polynesians prefer to wrest their existence from the god under the sign and protection of a divine adversary. They put on Tuu (Kuu), god of warriors. Thus did men learn how to oppose the divine in its productive and peaceful aspect of Rongo (Lono). In their ultimate relations to the universe, including the relations of production and reproduction, men are warriors."

"...the Hawaiians had a sweet-potato ritual of the same general structure as the Maori cycle. It was used in the 'fields of Kamapua'a', name of the pig-god said by some to be a form of Lono, whose rooting in the earth is a well-known symbol of virile action. While the crops were growing, the garden was tabu, so that the pig could do his inseminating work. No one was allowed to throw stones into the garden, thrust a stick into it, or walk upon it - curious prohibitions, except that they amount to protection against human attack. If the garden thus belonged to Lono, at the harvest the first god invoked was Kuu-kuila, 'Ku-the-striver'."

(Islands of History)