Nothing is more obvious to a rational being, however ignorant or stupid, than that the universe and its various parts, as far as they fall under his notice, were produced by some agent inconceivably more powerful than himself; and nothing is more difficult to be conceived, even by the most sagacious and knowing, than the production of them from nothing, which among us is expressed by the word Creation.  It is natural therefore, as no Being apparently capable of producing the universe is to be seen, that he should be supposed to reside in some distant part of it, or to be in his nature invisible, and that he should have originally produced all that now exists in a manner similar to that in which nature is renovated by the succession of one generation to another; but the idea of procreation includes in it that of two persons, and from the conjunction of two persons these people imagine every thing in the universe either originally or derivatively to proceed.

The Supreme Deity, one of these two first beings, they call Taroataihetoomoo, and the other, whom they suppose to have been a rock, Tepapa.  A daughter of these was Tettowmatatayo, the year, or thirteen months collectively, which they never name but upon this occasion, and she, by the common father, produced the months, and the months, by conjunction with each other, the days; the stars they suppose partly to be the immediate offspring of the first pair, and partly to have increased among themselves; and they have the same notion with respect to the different species of plants.  Among other progeny of Taroataihetoomoo and Tepapa, they suppose an inferior race of deities whom they call Eatuas.  Two of these Eatuas, they say, at some remote period of time, inhabited the earth, and were the parents of the first man.  When this man, their common ancestor, was born, they say that he was round like a ball, but that his mother, with great care, drew out his limbs, and having at length moulded him into his present form, she called him Eothe, which signifies finished.  That being prompted by the universal instinct to propagate his kind, and being able to find no female but his mother, he begot upon her a daughter, and upon the daughter other daughters for several generations, before there was a son; a son, however, being at length born, he, by the assistance of his sisters, peopled the world.

Besides their daughter Tettowmatatayo, the first progenitors of nature had a son whom they called Tane.  Taroataihetoomoo, the Supreme Deity, they emphatically style the causer of earthquakes; but their prayers are more generally addressed to Tane, whom they suppose to take a greater part in the affairs of mankind.

Their subordinate deities or Eatuas, which are numerous, are of both sexes:  The male are worshipped by the men, and the female by the women; and each have morais to which the other sex is not admitted, though they have also morais common to both.  Men perform the office of priest to both sexes, but each sex has its priests, for those who officiate for one sex do not officiate for the other.[31]