George Grey’s account of Māori spirits and the dead

Record summary

Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology presents Māori narratives involving atua, ghosts, the dead and encounters between human communities and supernatural beings. It is an important nineteenth-century textual witness for comparing Pacific ideas about death, presence and communication, but it is not a collection of modern-style incident reports. Grey translated and edited material obtained through Māori informants, and the work reflects selection, Christian-era contact and Victorian publication practices. The underlying oral traditions have transmission histories that cannot be reconstructed from the book alone.