Page:Maori Religion and Mythology.djvu/47

CH. iii. Where lies your fault? Was eating a kutu your fault? Was sitting on tapu ground your fault? Unravel the tangle, Unravel, untie. Take away the fault from the head Of the Atua who afflicts this man. Take away the disease, And the mana of the curser. Turn your mana against your tohunga, And your whaiwhaia. Give me the curse To make as cooked food. Your Atua desecrated, Your tapu, your curse. Your sacred-place-dwelling Atua, Your house-dwelling Atua, Give me to cook for food. Your tapu is desecrated by me. The rays of the sun. The brave of the world, The mana, give me. Let your Atua, and your tapu Be food for me to eat. Let the head of the curser Be baked in the oven, Served up for food for me Dead, and gone to Night.

The latter part of this karakia is a curse directed against some tohunga supposed to have caused the disease by his art of makutu.

Makutu was the weapon of the weak, who had no other mode of obtaining redress. There is no doubt but that it exercised a restraining influence, in a