Māui is, or was, not an Island in Hawaii, at least not originally; he is (or was) a Polynesian divinity related in certain aspects to the Greek Prometheus and the Roman Lucifer.  Like them, he purportedly stole fire from the gods and gifted it to humans.  That, apparently, was Lucifer’s only sin, he was, after all, to the Romans, a divinity charged with encouraging veracity and light but of course, the media, both ancient and current, have calumnied him incessantly, confusing him with YHWH’s former pet, the Hebrew archangel Hêl él.  But Māui was an even more interesting character than Prometheus and Lucifer.  Like African Anansi or Pueblo Kokopelli or Chinese Sun Wukong or Semitic Joha or Nordic Loki, … he was a trickster divinity.  The most entertaining, dangerous, unpredictable and interesting kind of divinities.

Unfortunately for him, his philanthropy towards humans led to his demise. 

Not satisfied with just gifting us fire, or pulling Islands galore from the ocean floor (one of which bears his name), Māui sought to imbue us, you and me and everyone we know and everyone anyone has ever known, … with immortality.  He sought to accomplish that task, the undoing of YHWE’s curse, by creatively eliminating the death goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, something he attempted to do by penetrating her vagina in the form of a worm, something that in some aspects, at least to some with a sense of humor if not a sense of propriety, seemed inordinately appropriate.  After all, there are worms and there are worms and there are worms, some very large and powerful while others are rather small and seemingly meek, although, in the long term, the latter’s patience tends to be rewarded.  

So Māui penetrated Hine-nui-te-pō, albeit not in an overtly sexual manner, as a tiny worm after which it was his plan to traverse her genital canal seeking to break through to her alimentary canal and then, to exit through her mouth.

For some reason, Māui believed that such journey would be unnoticed, albeit terminal.  Why he believed that perhaps only he knew but, alas, he is no longer available to provide an explanation.

Unfortunately for both us and for him, he was inadvertently betrayed by his avian sidekick, pīwakawaka, who, as sidekicks are all too often wont to do, burst into laughter at the sight of Māui entering Hine-nui-te-pō’s vagina and she, alerted by the ruckus (surprising though that she hadn’t noticed her penetration), became furious and both inadvertently and deliberately, concurrently, crushed Māui to death with her vagina’s obsidian teeth.

Ouch!  Obsidian teeth would seem to have made both sexual congress and successful gestation, at best, improbable.  There are rumors to the effect that it is not only Hine-nui-te-pō who sports that attribute but that’s another story.

Anyway ….

Poor Māui, poor, shredded Māui.  Poor, poor us.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

This vignette is dedicated to Captain Woodruff C. Goble, USMC (retired), lately a florist on Māui but once a hero to many of us.  He still is.  Especially to the members of the Citadel, class of 1968’s, Hotel Company.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/