Ta'aroa's Shell: A Tahitian Account of Tangaroa's Creation

Tangaroa, known in Tahiti as Ta'aroa, is already recorded as bringing the world out of his own shell there; the fuller account is a distinct creation narrative in its own right, separate from the Maori story of a son forcing his parents apart. In the Tahitian telling Ta'aroa exists alone before anything else, self-created inside a shell that spins in an empty void with no sky, earth, sun or stars yet made. Finding himself alone and unable to move within it, he shakes his body until the shell cracks, emerges into a world he finds utterly silent and bare, and sets about building the rest of creation from the only material available to him: himself. He breaks the shell into fragments to make the rocks, sand and foundation of the world; his own backbone becomes the mountain ranges; his tears fill the seas, lakes and rivers; and his fingernails and toenails become the scales of fish. Other tellings extend the same logic further, his ribs becoming hills and his feathers becoming the covering of trees and plants. The account is comparative rather than merely local: it belongs to a wider Polynesian pattern of the self-created god who builds a habitable world from his own body, distinct from the Maori telling of siblings separating their parents even where, as here, the same god's name survives the journey between the two traditions.