Maori cosmological chant describes a beginning in which Ranginui and Papatuanuku lie together in total darkness, so closely joined that no light can reach the many children born between them. Those children, the gods who would go on to preside over forest, sea, wind, cultivated food and wild food, live cramped in that narrow space for a long, unspecified age, and it is their own council, held in the darkness, that decides what to do about their parents' embrace.
Several brothers try first and fail. Tumatauenga, later god of war, proposes killing their parents outright and is refused by the others. Tane, god of the forest, succeeds where his brothers could not by turning himself upside down, setting his shoulders against Papa and driving his legs upward against Rangi, so that he pushes with the strength of a tree rather than the strength of arms, forcing his father slowly away from his mother until light pours into the world between them for the first time.
One brother alone, Tawhirimatea, god of storms and winds, opposes the separation from the start, refusing to let his parents be parted, and when it happens anyway he follows his father up into the sky rather than remain below, gathering his own children, the winds and clouds, to make continual war on his brothers' domains ever after. George Grey's nineteenth century collection of Maori genealogical chant remains the fullest published record of how this separation was told, gathered directly from Maori sources rather than composed after the fact.