Māori Marsden

Works

• 1975God, Man and Universe: A Māori View

  An essay in Michael King’s collection “Te Ao Hurihuri” that sets out the Māori world view from the creation traditions: a cosmos unfolding by genealogy from the void and the night into the world of light, and the concepts of mana, tapu, mauri and hau that order it.

• 2003The Woven Universe: Selected Writings

  Posthumous collection edited by Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal that brings together his writings on Māori philosophy, theology, knowledge and law, from “God, Man and Universe” to his texts on kaitiakitanga and an extract from his last seminar.

Position

Marsden is on the map as one of the first Māori thinkers to set out the Māori world view systematically in English, from within and with the authority of both traditions in which he had been trained. In “God, Man and Universe” (1975) he reads the creation traditions as a metaphysics: reality unfolds by genealogy (whakapapa) from Te Kore, the void of potential, through Te Pō, the night, into Te Ao Mārama, the world of light, so that the divine, people, land and living things are related as kin. Mana, tapu and mauri are not superstitions but concepts of power, of what is set apart and of the life principle that bind these relations together; the universe is a woven fabric, a kahu, of processes rather than a collection of things. Marsden held that knowledge gained by participation, ritual and intuition belongs together with rational knowledge, and he drew comparisons with modern physics. His account of kaitiakitanga, the guardianship of the natural world as an obligation towards kin, entered debates on environmental law in Aotearoa New Zealand. Because he was both tohunga and priest, his work is often read as a bridge between pre-Christian ideas of the divine and Christian faith; how far his theology shaped his reading of the older traditions remains a question of interpretation. No documented links yet connect him with others on the map.

Life & context

Māori Marsden was born on 10 August 1924 at Awanui in the far north of New Zealand and belonged to Te Aupōuri and other iwi of Te Tai Tokerau (Northland). He attended Wesley College in Paerata and was also a graduate of a traditional whare wānanga, the school in which genealogies, cosmology and ritual knowledge were passed on. He trained at the New Zealand Bible Training Institute and at St John’s College in Auckland, where he took a licentiate in theology in 1957; he was ordained in the Anglican Church in the same year and priested in 1958, and he also took a BA at the University of Auckland. For decades he worked as a minister, teacher and healer and took part in debates on Māori land, law and education. In 1989 he wrote a paper on Māori value systems and the natural world for the government’s reform of resource management law. He died on 18 June 1993 at Te Kōpuru in Northland. His writings were collected after his death by Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal and published as “The Woven Universe” (2003).

Further main works

• Māori Illness and Healing (1986)
• Resource Management Law Reform, Part A: The Natural World and Natural Resources – Māori Value Systems and Perspectives (1989)
• Kaitiakitanga: A Definitive Introduction to the Holistic World View of the Māori (with T. A. Henare, 1992)