William Colenso’s Māori accounts of atua and sacred places

Record summary

Missionary and naturalist William Colenso recorded Māori narratives, religious concepts and accounts connected with atua, tapu places, spirits and landscape features in papers and nineteenth-century publications. These materials can support comparison of how local anomalous-place traditions were translated into missionary and scholarly categories. Their value lies in identifiable authorship and historical context, not in proving supernatural events. Colenso’s selection, translation and theological assumptions shaped the record, and individual passages must be located in the relevant publication or manuscript rather than cited from generalized summaries.