67. E67 with Ja Storey - Trusting our experience of life between sky and earth

Mm.

Yeah.

Well, the piece I would probably point to in relation to what I do is this, uh, the star map next to us.

Maybe we can put that in the photo of the podcast.

Yes.

It's known as Scorpius.

That's the one we usually would call it in the West because that's what our Greco-Roman ancestors did.

Um, but- Here in New Zealand, our Māori ancestors, they had never seen a scorpion before.

So when they looked at it, they saw a fish hook.

They saw Maui's fish hook.

And what I like about this is that in Western thought, in Western astrology, Scorpio, the meaning, it's a water sign which goes deep.

There's a depth to Scorpio.

Goes into the deep, dark places.

And then we've got Maui's fish hook, which is a water sign in its own way.

And it goes down into the deeps too.

So this is one of many examples where things overlay and overlap with each other cross-culturally without any reason, without any obvious reason why they would.

Maui's fish hook, when our Māori ancestors and Pacific ancestors would have seen it from Hawaiki, it was part of the time it was literally coming through the horizon.

So they'd be on their waka, they'd be looking out and the constellation would be literally rising out of the ocean.

And this is where we have the names of this land.

We have Te Ika a Maui, which is the North Island.

And this means the fish of Maui.

Because I can just imagine our ancestors watching as they were sailing and they see, they would have, when they first saw Aotearoa there, and then I just imagine them seeing that constellation behind pulling it out.

Whatever it was that moment where these things aligned and they had this, they had this, you know, inspiration of the mythology of, wow, like this is this land being fished out of the waters.

And then when they landed, there's this really magical idea of this land being this massive fish, this massive monstrous fish, which out of its back, it's so big that out of its back is growing trees and birds are living on the trees and there's, and it's dense and the trees are actually so thick that it's creating a cloud, a permanent cloud over this island because this land would have been almost all forest.

And so it just created this, so that's where we get land of the long white cloud is that there would have been a permanent fog of moisture on this land pre-colonization.