Moana IV: Converting the Devil into God
In the film’s final confrontation, Te Ka witnesses the two halves of the psyche: the aggressive masculine in Maui and the compassionate feminine in Moana. When presented with a foe, the masculine confronts as though it is an other whereas the feminine witnesses her foe as a foe only unto themselves.
Maui’s form of confrontation, violence, is superfluous. Maui cannot give Te Ka anything she does not already have: violence, power and a miserable existence since the stealing of the heart. The hero and villain must together comprise polarity. The opposites need of each other as evinced through their contrast with each other. As the Joker tells Batman, ‘You complete me.’ Te Ka is already violent, and so she needs a complementary force that does not threaten her own existence, but completes it.
Te Ka can only be completed by what she lacks: love. Here we see Te Ka suffers from the same pain as Maui: loss of love. It is not pain but what resolves that pain that distinguishes Te Ka from Maui: receptiveness to love.
When Maui sees the heart, he throws it away and fears it, calling it a curse. When Te Ka sees the heart, she crawls to it humbly, receives love, and lets go her pain. While Te Ka appears to be more destructive than Maui, she is in fact responding to the trauma he caused. Despite her depth of rage and destructiveness, she remains receptive to love. This is the path of healing. And through healing, this becomes the path of transformation.
Just as The Return of the Jedi refers not to Luke but Annakin, Moana is essentially not about its eponymous hero but about the return of Te Fiti. She was once good and loving, and chose to accept love to return to her true form. Hence the last thing Moana says before returning the heart:
‘Be who you truly are.’
And now, at the final confrontation, do we understand that Maui and Moana were on a singular quest run in parallel approaches the entire time. Maui tried to resolve the crisis through power; Moana by contrast offered love. Had Maui had his way, this quest would have been about his defeating Te Ka in battle so as to find Te Fiti and give her her heart. His quest was fated to fail, for by defeating Te Ka, he would only have made her worse. ‘Te Fiti’ and ‘Te Ka’ are not physical entities so much as states of consciousness in which a deity relates to the world through love and creation, or power and destruction. Hence the god becomes a cosmic mirror reflecting one’s approach to her. Steal her heart, and she becomes Te Ka. Give her her heart, and she becomes Te Fiti.
Hence Cleanthes’s wisdom returns to us all the more clearly: ‘We choose our Fate by what gods we worship.’ Maui’s fate would have been a failed quest, an enraged demon, and the exctinction of his people. His lack of consciousness would have become the calamitous fate of Moana’s people. This is what Jung meant when he stated:
Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Like Narcissus, Maui perceived love through the lens of his unconscious wound. If a narcissist’s soul were to create an outer world from his inner world, his ego ideal would be a gigantic creature covered in gold (Tamatoa) and his god would be an enraged destroyer of life (Te Ka).
The unconscious of Moana is activated and constellated by her grandmother as a guide, with the ocean as a divine interface. The meaning of Moana’s life is to find out what to do with a divine heart whereas Maui’s is to find out what to do without it.
When Maui looks at Te Ka, he can only see the rage that follows having lost one’s heart, that is, he can only see his core wound. This is what it is to be traumatized: pain serves as our most vivid belief. When Moana looks at Te Ka, she can only see Te Fiti. She remembers the god even when the god cannot remember herself. And this is what it is to love someone traumatized: to see the love in them they cannot remember themselves.
In Moana, we see the hero change the fate of her people by literally changing the god. In this sense, Moana is a deeply Nietzschean myth. For rather than a human turn to a god for help to resolve her quest, the human resolves something beyond herself to complete her quest and attain her own meaning. The question is not the existence of God, but an awareness of one’s own meaning. As Sartre stated:
[E]ven if God existed that would make no difference… [T]he real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again…
Just finding the god did not resolve the quest, and in fact brought on its greatest danger. We can turn to the gods — when they are the right ones. This is akin to children who can turn to their parents — when they are sober and loving and kind. Abused children know that turning to their parents is the source of their greatest abuse. Just as Moana has already demonstrated being more conscious than her parent in Tui, she similarly brings her consciousness of love to Te Ka.
In couple counseling, I tell patients, ‘Your relationship will change when you change.’ Many patients get stuck by waiting for their relationship to change so that only then will they change. When you love, you sometimes have to give better than you receive, give before you receive, whether from the person you are loving or the person who taught you to love. Hence the ‘Original Sin’ of many traumatized individuals is the traumatic childhood that taught them they were exiled from Love, as Yahweh exiles Adam and Eve, as Te Ka exiles Maui. I wonder whether part of the knowlege the first humans gained from the Tree was that of God’s ability to engage conditional love through abandonment and wrath. We have loved each other accordingly ever since.
Adult patients recognize that usually, the elderly parents who abused them will not evolve. Hence we cannot ask our parents to become the version of themselves that would never have wounded us to begin with. The more responsible, empowering route is to become the loving parent we wish we had, evolve within ourselves rather than through others, others who themselves did not give what they wished they themselves had received.
While Maui reciprocates Te Ka’s rage, Moana responds with love. Hence the child becomes the curse-breaker: the first in a line of generational trauma to receive abuse but not give it, ending the cycle of suffering.
Let us return to the final confrontation by witnessing it through the eyes of the one who acutally transformed. Te Ka is presented with two beings: the masculine Maui, who is dancing a haka and wishes to fight, and the feminine Moana, who has a heart and wishes to reconcile. Te Ka is looking at two aspects of her own psyche: the facet that seeks power, and the facet that offers love. She chooses to go to Moana when she had every excuse for seeking vengeance on Maui for stealing her heart, the same Maui she hit and banished in the film’s preamble. But being heartless will never regain one’s heart. And so Te Ka becomes someone different because she does something different.
Te Ka alternately looks between the one being who loves her and the one who made her feel unable to love, the one who made her into Te Ka. In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader alternately looks at Luke (starting at 2:44), the only being who loves him, and the Emperor, who ruined Annakin’s ability to love, the one who turned him into Darth Vader. Like Vader/Annakin, Te Ka/Te Fiti chooses love, sheds her black sarcophagus she gained from her trauma, and resurrects as the being she was before losing her heart. Just as Star Wars is about returning love to one traumatized at its loss, so, too, is Moana.
When we witness the final confrontation through Maui’s eyes, we see his desire to confront the god. Maui’s quest comprises finding his power (hook) to confront Te Ka. Maui never realizes that gaining power and losing love are the same thing, and so he attempts to resolve the myth’s crisis (loss of love) through its worsening (gain of power).
Through Moana’s eyes, the quest is not about using her talisman, but giving it. She is ultimately pursuing not Te Ka but the Te Fiti who lies within. Moana was told by Tala to be who she truly is; this is the mantra of the entire myth, for Maui is not truly a narcissist but learned to become one just as Te Fiti is not truly Te Ka but learned to become her.
I believe that in order to show Te Ka who she truly is, Moana had to learn who she herself truly was. Similarly, a therapist cannot take a patient further than we have taken ourselves. Perhaps Moana’s journey with Maui has prepared her for loving unconditionally, because a narcissist can only be loved by overcoming the pain required to become close to him. Despite being abandoned, betrayed, incarcerated and urinated on (metaphorizing some narcissistic behaviors), Moana learns of Maui’s childhood trauma and earns his respect through her outsmarting Tamatoa. Their journey together can be seen as their journey towards appreciating their need of and love for each other.
If I am right that Maui and Moana represent the masculine and feminine halves of the same hero’s psyche, then Moana’s love for Maui represents the hero’s self-forgiveness for having pushed away love. In this sense, as the dyadic hero becomes whole unto her/himself in love, the ability to give rather than take love is honed until a being filled with love is able to transform one who suffered love being taken away. This follows Moana doing for Te Ka in a climactic moment what she had been for Maui since meeting him: freeing him from his isolation (desert isle), helping him reconnect with his power (hook) for an honorable purpose, overcome his narcissism (Tamatoa), learn self-sacrifice (risk the hook), and redeem his theft (return the heart).
Moana helps Maui reverse the path of narcissism to re-enter the space of love. This is why her quest requires her to bring ‘Maui’ with her despite his not being needed to transform Te Ka back into Te Fiti; the ocean could easily have delivered Moana to Te Ka. Unconditional love (Moana) brings the one who was rejected and so in turn rejected love (Maui) to reconcile love and pain. As Rumi wrote:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
While these barriers existed in Maui’s heart, Te Ka reigned supreme. Once Maui embraced love, Te Fiti emerged. The state of the god reflects the state of Maui’s journey. Maui’s heart is the dreamscape in which the entire quest takes place. Hence finding Maui’s narcissism embodied in Tamatoa in Lalotai. Hence finding Te Ka as a borderline child who is unable to walk. She, like Tamatoa, represents Maui’s wounded child and so she must crawl to love as a baby would.
Maui’s shameless pride was the true curse of his narcissism, for this is what allowed him to commit the ultimate sin in stealing the heart. Hence when that same wounded child — in differing form — returned to receive the love s/he had attempted to take, she did so in a manner opposing pride: the humility of the one who bows before love. This indicates the transformation of the narcissist through humility’s cure for pride. Te Ka thus revealed both Maui’s rage at the absence of love and his ultimate willingness to receive.
Finally, we can relate Moana as an allegory to our civilization itself. As I mentioned above, our ecocide corresponds to the blight on Motunui with the patrilineal reign of chiefs corresponding to patriarchy’s causation of, denial of and mismanagement of ‘climate change’. Moana’s shell placed on top of the stone slabs represents the awakening feminine within our civilization. Te Ka then represents how the divine feminine has been held by a patriarchal culture, with her destructiveness a response to the abuse of Gaia: abuse of Gaia = theft of Te Fiti’s heart.
The god represents the highest organizing principle of consciousness. As above, so below. When civilization is enacting ecocide, one would not expect the god to be loving, but enraged. Te Ka embodies our own age of destructiveness of self and other, life and world, with all its shameless lack of love.
If ecocide is to be resolved, the world will need to be made verdant again. What happens to Te Ka/Te Fiti happens to the world: it is made green and alive. The Bible offers an image with striking resemblance to this transformation. In Zechariah 3, Joshua is given new clothes to replace his dirty ones, which aligns with Te Ka shedding her flesh to take on the reurrection of Te Fiti. Joshua is a Hebrew cognate (Yehoshua) for Jesus (Yeshua). We have resurrection, a messianic chosen one who hearkens a renewed age of love, and a changing of outer appearance as part of holiness. Further, Joshua was the first to be tasked with rebuilding the Temple. The previous holiness is once again created. Finally, once Joshua walks God’s path, he is given a stone, which appears to correlate to Te Fiti’s heart.
Hence the messiah is the human that aligns humanity with God. As Te Fiti emerges from the form of Te Ka, we see she is identical to Moana. The messiah is identified with God after having returned humanity to the Garden, and the talisman (fruit, heart) to God.
Read Parts I Converting Gods and Devils, II Converting Love into Power, and III Converting Trauma to Narcissism.
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