Papatuanuku's identity in Maori tradition is inseparable from the physical ground itself; her name is commonly translated as Papa, the earth, standing firm, and Maori usage keeps that literal sense alive alongside her personal one, so that ordinary ground and the goddess are never fully distinct concepts. Before her separation from Ranginui, she lay locked beneath him in an embrace so close that their many children were born and grew in total darkness pressed between their parents' bodies, unable to stand or stretch.
When her son Tane, god of the forest, undertook the separation that his brothers had already failed at, he set himself against his mother below and drove upward against his father, choosing his legs over his arms so that he pushed with a tree's strength rather than a man's, until light broke through the widening gap for the first time in the world's existence. Papa's own response to that violence is remembered as grief rather than relief, a mother's mourning for the husband she can no longer reach, and Maori tradition folds that mourning directly into the visible world: the mist that rises from her forests each morning is understood as her sighs answering the rain her husband lets fall from above, two griefs meeting in the space that now separates them permanently. Her children, once freed into the light, became the gods who govern the forest, the sea, cultivated food, wild food and the winds, so that the whole populated world beneath the sky is, in the most direct sense Maori genealogy offers, her own body and her own family made visible.