Maori Silver Tiki Pendants

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

The Māori Silver Tiki Pendant—whether hung on a warrior’s chest, a midwife’s neck, or embedded in the folds of ancestral ceremony—is not simply an adornment. Through the metaphysics of Bergson, it emerges as a temporal contraction—a living rhythm of ancestral memory crystallized into silver. It does not depict the ancestor—it is ancestral duration, worn and breathing.

Bergson asserts that the self is not an assemblage of past events, but a movement of pure memory actualizing itself in the present. The Tiki is precisely this: the durée of a people pressed into a form that neither narrates nor represents but simply resonates. Its facial features—wide eyes, protruding tongue—are not caricatures. They are visual pulses, outward signs of inner rhythm, encoding a vital tension between seen and unseen, life and spirit.

Unlike Western symbolic abstraction, the Tiki refuses to separate form from force. The pendant is not designed—it is grown through generations, shaped by hands not copying a prototype but feeling a presence through intuitive repetition. This is Bergson’s creative evolution—élan vital—in silver.

To wear the Tiki is not to remember—it is to co-move with the ancestors. Time does not pass in Māori cosmology—it coils. The pendant is a node in this spiral, a dwelling place for presence across thresholds. Its silver surface reflects not just light, but the living gaze of the past folding into now.

Even when recast in colonial silver—where indigenous jade was replaced by imported metal—the pendant did not lose its metaphysical resonance. Instead, it transmuted trauma into survival, bending history without breaking duration. The silver Tiki thus becomes a Bergsonian miracle: the past actualizing itself despite rupture, refusing nothingness.

It is not artifact but vibration—duration clasped to the body.