The Medicine Bowl
Sacred healer
A vessel was used like a hand to touch the other side without harm or retaliation for the user. Karakia opens the lifeforce from both side flowing so the eye of a healer can see.
Tribes travelled to access the skills of healers and seers known to appease human worries with spiritual intervention from the other side.
Combining talismans and whakapapa as their guide the healer would enter the world of Hawaiikinui where spirit travelled without body.
Those who could connect with such wairua were able to find solutions whether personal or tribal.
Faith and hope came naturally for Maori when someone needed healing. The family would connect with the healer let her know the problem and she would offer direction to return on to the path of life.
Gifts from Tane
Diverse knowledge and skills carry through bloodlines of old healers and tohunga at many levels.
A medicine bowl has its own wairua grown from usage and knowledge past down from previous owners.
​Through a balanced connection with the earth the craft could be as simple as a prayer, a native leaf or a swim in hot volcanic springs, to lighten spirit and life of body.
Medicine people
​Mana followed an intricate path in a woven tribal system based on wairua.
​The medicine energy created for spiritual acts was sourced on historic homelands and these were encased in family wairua by tightly woven karakia.
Tracking Rangatira blood lineage was the natural order of strengthening spiritual whakapapa for the old Maori.
Few had access to the full potential of wairua offered by sacred land as ultimately Papakainga land chose the sacred thread path, not the living.
Hei Tiki
Hei Tiki A Polynesian symbol of lifeforce and great mana across Oceanic archaeology recreating herself in artistic mediums across time continuum.
Her spirit language, the artform of Whakairo in feminine form.
From an old burial site to global symbolism of female wairua is the consistency of her lifeforce as old taonga.
Island medicine
Mokoia Island held many bush medicines including the volcanic hot springs at the base. Hinemoa's pool too hot to step in today was a place of love and romance as medicine.
Old chiefs gathered mauri by karakia to the island from within the hot pools as they acknowledged a great provider and protector.
Karakia
The weave of a medicine bowl is how the papakainga cleans itself with wairua.
To whakapapa land is to be as we once were many generations before when landmarks were more sacred than the names of descendants above it.
Feeding funnel
​For Tohunga there were many ways and tools to see, heal or navigate the worlds of Maoridom and genealogy.
The Feeding Funnel both tool of spirit mahi and practical aperture associated with the tohunga tree.
A medicine bowl of Ta Moko and witness to the sacred line between the living and spiritual mahi.
​With crafts of body, action, and resource, wairua becomes a flowing stream of spirt mixed with old knowledge guiding and gracing those who worked the land with woven energy.
Healing with weave
The journey of women weavers from essential to, medicinal to, the designers of contemporary fabric origins.
The Weaving Pegs tree stilts to an old time of pattern making in story.
