The man in the moon becomes, in Maori legend, a woman, one Rona by name.  This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water to a stream.  In her hand she carried an empty calabash.  Stumbling in the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at it some such epithet as “You old tattooed face, there!” But the moon-goddess heard, and reaching down caught up the insulting Rona, calabash and all, into the sky.  In vain the frightened woman clutched, as she rose, the tops of a ngaio-tree.  The roots gave way, and Rona with her calabash and her tree are placed in the front of the moon for ever, an awful warning to all who are tempted to mock at divinities in their haste.

All beings, gods, heroes and men, are sprung from the ancient union of Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa.  Rangi was the father and Earth the great mother of all.  Even now, in these days, the rain, the snow, the dew and the clouds are the creative powers which come down from Rangi to mother Earth and cause the trees, the shrubs and the plants to grow in spring and flourish in summer.  It is the self-same process that is pictured in the sonorous hexameters:—­

  “Tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether
  Coniugis in gremium laetae descendit, et omnes
  Magnus alit, magno commixtus corpore, fetus.”

But in the beginning Heaven lay close to the Earth and all was dim and dark.  There was life but not light.  So their children, tired of groping about within narrow and gloomy limits, conspired together to force them asunder and let in the day.  These were Tu, the scarlet-belted god of men and war, Tane, the forest god, and their brother, the sea-god.  With them joined the god of cultivated food, such as the kumara, and the god of food that grows wild—­such as the fern-root.  The conspirators cut great poles with which to prop up Heaven.  But the father and mother were not to be easily separated.  They clung to each other despite the efforts of their unnatural sons.  Then Tane, the tree-god, standing on head and hands, placed his feet against Heaven and, pushing hard, forced Rangi upwards.  In that attitude the trees, the children of Tane, remain to this day.  Thus was the separation accomplished, and Rangi and Papa must for ever remain asunder.  Yet the tears of Heaven still trickle down and fall as dew-drops upon the face of his spouse, and the mists that rise in the evening from her bosom are the sighs of regret which she sends up to her husband on high.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology.]