Ika-Roa- Polynesian SpiritSpirit"Father of Stars"
Also known as: Te Ika-Roa
Description
A great fish swimming through the heavens, its body the luminous band of the Milky Way and its offspring every star in the sky. Polynesian navigators steered by Ika-Roa's children, and the dead traveled along his body toward the spirit world.
Mythology & Lore
The Long Fish
Ika-Roa, the Long Fish, stretches across the night sky. His body is the Milky Way, that luminous band of light visible from any ocean, and the stars scattered across the darkness are his offspring. Elsdon Best recorded that Māori astronomers understood each star group as a child of this celestial fish, born from his body as he swam through the heavens. The navigators who crossed thousands of miles of open Pacific steered by those children. They read their positions at the horizon to hold a course no landmark could confirm.
Māui's Hook
In the southern sky, near the great fish, hangs Te Matau a Māui: Māui's fishhook, identified with the tail of Scorpius. Hook and catch suspended together among the stars. Māui had fished islands from the sea floor. Above him, the sky held a fish no hook could land.
The Road to Te Reinga
When the dead departed, they traveled north along Aotearoa to Te Reinga, the leaping place at the land's edge, and descended into the underworld. But in Best's record, the spirits also climbed Ika-Roa's body, following the Milky Way's luminous path toward the spiritual homeland. The same fish whose children guided the living across the ocean carried the dead out of the world entirely.