Pō- Polynesian LocationLocation · Realm"The Darkness"

Before Light

In the beginning there was Pō. Not a place, not yet a realm, but darkness itself: the condition the world wore before anything existed. Best recorded the Māori creation genealogies that count the phases of this darkness by name. Te Pō-nui, the Great Night. Te Pō-roa, the Long Night. Te Pō-uriuri, the Deep Night. Each phase carried the world closer to what would come, though nothing in the darkness knew it.

Before Pō there was Te Kore, the Void, and between them the first stirrings of existence took shape. The gods formed in this darkness. Ranginui and Papatūānuku clung to each other in it, and their children grew cramped and blind between them. When Tāne finally forced his parents apart, light entered the world for the first time. But Pō did not vanish. It withdrew beneath the earth and waited.

The Road to Te Reinga

Every spirit that leaves the living world travels north. In Māori tradition, recorded by Grey and Best, the dead make their way to Te Reinga at the tip of the North Island, where a pōhutukawa tree grows on the cliff edge. Its roots reach down into the underworld. The spirits descend along those roots into Pō, where Hine-nui-te-pō receives them.

She is not a torturer. She crossed into Pō herself, long ago, when she learned that Tāne was both her father and her husband. She went down into the dark and stayed, and now she gathers the dead as they arrive. When Māui tried to reverse death by crawling through her sleeping body, she woke and crushed him between her thighs. No one has tried since.

The sun follows the same road each evening, sinking into Pō in the west and traveling through the darkness before rising again in the east. Night is not absence. It is Pō, pressing close to the surface, and in sleep the living drift near enough to touch it.