Mahuika is the Maori goddess of fire in Polynesian mythology. Grandmother of the trickster-hero Maui — she keeps the sacred flame in her fingernails and toenails. When Maui tricked her into giving him fire and tried to destroy the last spark, she threw it into the trees — embedding fire in the trees from which humans now strike it through friction. One of the foundational fire-origin myths of Polynesia.
Featured throughout Maori oral tradition and Pacific mythology.
Mahuika does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Mahuika reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.