Tohunga

In the culture of the Māori of New Zealand, a tohunga is an expert practitioner of any skill or art, either religious or otherwise. Tohunga include expert priests, healers, navigators, carvers, builders, teachers and advisors. "A tohunga may have also been the head of a whanau but quite often was also a rangatira and an ariki". The equivalent and cognate in Hawaiian culture is kahuna.

There are many classes of tohunga (Best 1924:166) including:

Each tohunga was a gifted spiritual leader and possessed the natural ability of communicating between the spiritual and temporal realms through karakia (prayers), pātere (chants) or performing waiata (songs) that had been passed down to them by tohunga before them. However, their rites were mainly in the specific fields in which they practiced, as outlined above.

Tohunga held knowledge of most spiritual and temporal rites and knowledge in general were passed down through many generations by oral communication at wananga (places of learning/schools). Tools they also used were taonga pūoro for the purpose of calling on divine intervention or assistance from the gods.

Although Māori had high respect for the knowledge and skills of tohunga, there was a darker side too, and European settlers often held a very poor opinion of them, something which led to the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907.

Many tohunga declined to pass on their oral traditions after the Act was enforced in New Zealand, leaving Māori people bereft of much of their traditional base, beliefs and practices; at the same time as it hastened assimilation. The Act was repealed in 1962, but by this time, much of the language and traditions had been either corrupted or lost, but a few kaumatua and kuia continued to orally communicate their knowledge through the generations.

One observation to the survival of tohungatanga was the insignificance of the "female tohunga‟ perspective and yet women were the "most powerful tohunga" as they had a direct lineage and link to Te Ira Atua (spiritual realm of the gods) and are a class that have been ignored in any literature until now.

Tapu was one of the most deeply ingrained beliefs and religious customs of the Māori. The word tapu may be translated as sacred or forbidden, but the Māori tapu has a host of variations. There was a personal tapu and local tapu; tapu of one kind or another faced the Māori everywhere. It often served a purpose similar to some of the Jewish laws of prohibition and quarantine.

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