Sea Deities

Sea Deities holds figures whose defining domain is the sea itself, granted or claimed as a portfolio in its own right rather than a single creature or feature of the water. Tangaroa and Watatsumi are the atlas's two entries. George Grey's account of the separation of sky and earth gives Tangaroa's claim to the sea a specific origin: forced to flee by his brother Tane's fury after helping to part their parents, his own descendants divide with him, the fish following him to the sea while the reptiles among them take the forest instead, a rift the tradition still marks by saying karakia before a canoe is launched or a fish taken. The Kojiki gives Watatsumi's claim a different shape entirely, a sea king presiding from a palace beneath the waves, recognizing a grandson of the heavenly gods by his bearing before a word is spoken, and later summoning every fish of the sea to recover a lost hook. Everything said here about either figure is already recorded on their own pages; the heading adds no further ritual or cultic detail beyond identifying what the two entries share.

The two accounts share the domain and little else, an origin built on flight and rupture set against an origin built on sovereignty and ceremony, and the heading exists to hold that domain in common rather than to claim the two figures resemble one another beyond it. It is kept apart from Departmental Gods, the wider catch-all this atlas uses before a portfolio narrows to a single domain, and beside Earth Deities and Sky Deities as the third of a small set of elemental-domain headings. A second entry belongs here whenever another catalogued figure holds the sea itself, not a single sea creature or a coastal feature, as a named domain.