This would, of course, be most inconvenient to persons entering the house. Where the house represented the body of a famous ancestor, it would naturally be highly It appears, therefore, that the Waikato people did not observe the usual symbolic form of the house. Instead, there are open-work spirals similar to those carved on the lower ends of the maihi on smaller storehouses. Phillipps's "Carved Houses of the Western and Northern Areas of New Zealand" will show that the Waikato district is exceptional in that its early houses do not have the hands at the ends of the
The practice of binding or wrapping deities was known in the Cook Islands and inĪ glance through the illustrations in W.
Without the binding the object had no religious significance. The tribal god was believed to enter the object when the shaft was bound with cord in a certain way and a fringe of red feathers was bound round the head as a beard. Occasionally there are two heads, and sometimes the body or part of the body is shown. Inches long with a carved head on the upper end and the lower end pointed so that it can be stuck into the ground. "god sticks" of which there are a few examples, mainly from the west coast of the North Island, in museums. The nearest approach to idols were stone figures associated with agriculture and the so-called It is important to note that the figures in Maori carving, with very rare exceptions, are not religious, but secular. It is a reasonable conclusion, therefore, that either the amount of symbolism in carving has been greatly exaggerated or that it had been lost by the time the Europeans came to New Zealand. There is no convincing evidence that the knowledge was too sacred to be handed on, as much information about equally sacred matters was revealed even to Europeans in the early days of the European settlement. The number of carvers of the nineteenth century who had been taught by pre-European experts makes it highly probable that most of the teachers' knowledge was passed on to the pupils. Meaning, but in fact probably much of it is purely decorative. Is sometimes assumed that every cut in a piece of Maori carving must have a
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