The Perfect Wizard.

The whitebeard Ngahoro, of NgatiMahanga, thus addressed Best at Te Whaiti: “Son! Great is your knowledge of the sacred invocations of our ancestors; with you are the spells and magic of the men of old. My thought grows—that you will yet be able to slay men by your great knowledge of karakia, not pakehas, maybe, but certainly Maoris.”

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In one of his newspaper articles (it was the now defunct weekly the “Canterbury Times,” in which much of his Tuhoe Land lore was published) “Te Peehi” discoursed on the marvellous complexity of the makutu or witchcraft rites and traditions and charms. This was his lightsome method of sketching the methods of the tohunga makutu:

“Should I desire to bewitch you so as to cause your death, I can (if endowed with the necessary powers) take the hau of your voice as you are talking, and so destroy you—that is if you are not quick enough to perform the mata puru,, and by tying the regulation number of bands of flax round your limbs and body, and invoking your atua, so render my magic powers harmless. Before that, however, I should probably have repeated the deadly incantation known to fame as the mapuna, and even if you diverted that by means of the kaiure, I could still bring you down by luring your wairua into the man destroying Rua iti, and slaying it with the Kopani harua, and even if you got tired and went home to lunch, the maiakai would fetch you; or ran away, then my punga would take the swiftness from your feet, or I could take your manea from your footsteps and thereby send you down to Sheol. Of course you might recite Tu-matapongia and so render yourself invisible, but that would not save you from my nene and umu hiki, even though you braced up and performed the tokotea, which is doubtful. By this time you would, no doubt, be assailed by Tumata-rehurehu, which is a pahunu and therefore not a thing to be trifled with; or the miti aitua would descend upon you—which is Hades—so what are you going to do about it anyhow?”