Phallic Worship
July 24, 2019
By AHNZ
Why do contemporary Māori give their carvings extraordinary
phalluses? Is this a profane over-exposure signal designed to mark visual territory and offend? Is it part of a religious tradition being continued or a recent invention?
As mentioned in previous post, tapu taboo actively ensured that Maori artefacts and treasures would not be preserved and passed on. How do we know if the contemporary erections are not entirely contrived?
Authentic Maori Carving
What we do see in the earliest Maori carving are phalluses that are understated or of the same proportions used in Western art. This one (left) from Charles Heaphy in 1842 is on the same scale as a Michelangelo painting or Gross’ The Athlete at Auckland Domain. Such examples are easy to find.
I challenge you to find any from New Zealand that are unusually large.
Missionaries Stole Our Dicks
It is frequently claimed that the evidence for and motive to create such enlarged members has been obscured by Colonial interference…
“The innate prudishness of Western culture where primitive arts are concerned has reached strange limits. Early collections of Maori carvings were expurgated with hammer and chisel..”- Barrow¹
“The more discerning Victorians castrated such carvings with hammer and chisel, which echoes down the ages as recently as 2010…”- Ellis ²
“There are drawers and drawers in the Auckland Museum of carvings that have mutilated genitals due to the early missionaries.”- Puke³
“…a throwback to the colonial era, when Christian missionaries cut the genitalia out of sacred carvings because they believed Māori traditions were morally and culturally inferior.”- Kawana⁴
It’s frustrating, as someone who would like to be corrected, to find evidence for any of these claims. In the Māori/Collectivist world no facts or evidence are required. This knowledge quest of mine is an individualistic pursuit relying upon reason and evidence. However, most who deal in Māori culture align themselves with a pre-Enlightenment world view where matters are decided by race-authority and Identity Political status. It’s enough for people like that to have something said once by a Boss and then to cut-and-paste the words over and over (ref. The Situated Nature of Social Reality.) We can’t do that here.
Where is the evidence for these “draws and draws?” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
r/K Reproductive Selection
Depending on which reproductive strategy is favoured by a given culture a particular preference toward depicting sexuality will result. The K-selected cultures (Dignity and Honour) are, of course, concerned with forming and keeping strong Pair Bonds between husband and wife in order to raise children. The r-selected cultures (Victimhood and Slave) are defined by having low sexual standards and restrictions.
Chastity and modesty and decency are high values for Dignity Culture in particular. Sexual displays are 95% reserved for husbands and wives to make the institution of marriage strong (the other 5% is largely taken up by Crowd Control art; Mesmerise the church-going folk at the feet of a Michelangelo etc.) As a result, such sexual displays as phallic Maori carvings are frowned upon by Dignity Culture folk. It’s no wonder that Victorian Missionaries took exception.
However, we currently live in times of an r-selection mainstream. Sex is used to sell most any product you can name, from soft drink (left) to electricity providers. The above image (Contact Energy) is subliminally sexually suggestive, the camera aimed directly between the pink and flushed woman’s legs; The male rests one hand over his groin and the other intimately on her inner thigh. “Just keep watching,” the advertiser voyeuristically beckons you…
Such images would scandalise Kiwis up until the Boomers came of age in the late 1960s. Yet they are everywhere today and it’s become quite normalised. “The children are the only ones who blush,” sang Lou Reed in 1973…
“Size definitely does matter, says a shocked father left struggling to explain exaggerated genitals on carvings in Hamilton’s Te Parapara Garden to his young children.”- Carvings out of whack, says dad; Stuff
Wainwright of the Manawatu Gorge
There is an Old Guard, a Dignity Subculture, who have not become desensitised to our sexualised world. Frequently Christian, they are usually isolated from the mainstream so seem awkward, naive, ‘innocent,’ and as out-of-step as a Colin Craig photo shoot or the Tarore Youtubers. They accept that they can simply refrain from watching mainstream TV shows and reading mainstream magazines. Yet here is a man who drew the line at a phallic carving being placed in his forest last year. Chief among his complaints is that a sexualisd carving was placed in public and in “plain view of children.”
“the spiritual damage was irreversible, Paewai said…Its mana is destroyed….Removing it was a symbolic neutering of the whole iwi…Pākehā are embracing te reo and Māori culture…[but] This is just pushing it all way back.” – Rangitāne carving irreparably damaged when phallus lopped off in protest, Stuff
Manahi Paewai, here, represents the vast majority opinion. It is r-selected and specifically Victimhood Culture. It is also Collectivist because few if any will back up these claims, instead changing the topic to Identity Politics by asking “what’s your ethnicity?” or “who are you to ask?” The above is also historically revisionist.
Contrary to Mr Paewai’s Victimhood catastophisation, Peter Buck wrote…
The frequent occurrence of the sex organs in Maori carvings is the natural accompaniment of the human body which is the common motif in Maori art…Maori art is profane and not religious.”- Phallic Worship, The Coming of the Maori (1949); NZETC
Symbolic neutering of the whole iwi? Irreversible spiritual damage? This is only true in-so-far as Mr Wainwright destroyed a symbol of r-selected culture.
Wainwright is an Old School High Catholic upholding the values of chastity and modesty. He’s *so* High Dignity Culture he not only enjoys church organ music, he *owns* a museum full of church organs open to the public. Top those credentials! When he came of age all of New Zealand shared his moral code. He’s one of the last survivors. This forest was his territory to protect and he used every institutional means he could come up with- talking to DOC, the Mayor, the police,…
Takes a great deal for a DC man to resort to civil disobedience. It’s literally true, I assume, that the public was not consulted about installing explicit sexual material in Manawatu Gorge. Wainwright, on the other hand, consulted strenuously before he resorted to taking equal and opposite action.
Many protesters active today (eg Cook statue vandalism, eg Ihumatao occupation, currently) resort to civil disobedience far more quickly. Not only does nobody bat an eyelid but they’re frequently celebrated. This shows that Wainwright’s main crime is being politically unpopular.
As a DC he is not “victimised by seeing a penis,” there is no problem about that. There is a problem to the DC with sexualising the public space. The problem is the squandering of human sexuality every which way rather than moderating it, modestly and privately, as a sacred energy reserved for binding families together. Wainwright acted out of an impersonal motive to save our society from going off a cliff not from personal taste; DC people don’t take things personally.
“A mask for anarchy”
“He acted on what he considered to be a moral imperative but that is not available to him as a defence in law. The defence is formed on a purely subjective basis and that can become a mask for anarchy, for people to take the law into their own hands..”- Judge Lance Rowe, finding Wainwright guilty
Should have made me his defence lawyer! I called Mr Wainwright last night (found his number online) to see if he did have a better defence than this. It had not occurred to him to find out how much of this Giant Phallus and Spiritual Damage stuff was authentic. He seems content to engage his convictions toward civil disobedience to try to highlight his cause; Sentencing to be next month.
What Justice Rowe refers to as “anarchy” is what we have now: Revisionists without justification erecting pornographic totems in public spaces without consultation or appeal. There is an ongoing battle between the K-selected cultures and the r-selected ones, each trying to do the other in. The State, the court, and the media, have all explicitly backed the r-selected side. Well that’s not freedom is it? That’s not finding ways to negotiate and for different cultures to live together in peace. That’s not anarchy.
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1 Maori decorative carving – an outline, T. T. Barrow (1956); JPS
2 A Whakapapa of Tradition, Ngarino Ellis (2016); Landfall
3 Carvings out of whack, says dad; Stuff
4 Rangitāne carving irreparably damaged when phallus lopped off in protest; Stuff
Image ref. Gorge walk entrance opened by conservation minister; Stuff
image ref. The Road Trip
image ref. Tararua man who damaged carving says ‘indecency’ rules; NZH
image ref. Cook, Thief; NZ Herald
image ref. Judge Andrew Becroft, right, watches while Lance Rowe takes the oath of allegiance while being sworn in as a judge; Stuff
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