THE KUMULIPO

A Hawaiian Creation Chant translated and edited with commentary by

MARTHA WARREN BECKWITH

PART III

The Polynesian Chant of Creation

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Hawaiian Accounts of Creation

FAMILY chant like the Kumulipo, passed down orally from one generation to the next without the stabilizing force of a written text, must have been constantly exposed to political changes within the family and to the urge felt by a new song-maker to revitalize the old memorial by giving it a fresh application to more recent family events. Although as a whole it preserves structural unity, the chant also gives evidence of a piecing-together of genealogies from different branches, together with the myths connected with them, and of changes in mere phrasing to give a different turn to the original design of a passage. Hawaiians themselves are cautious about accepting the Kalakaua text of the chant as the original form. Kupihea, as has been said, believes that Kalakaua took the opportunity to turn some of the enigmatic phrasing into a sneer at his detractors, as he most certainly intended glorification of his own dynasty by publication of the manuscript text. In Kalakaua's rendering some lines differ from this source, as other Kumulipo texts differ in minor details from the Kalakaua text. Poepoe puts it thus: "The writer [Poepoe him self ] can not prove this to be the true form of the Kumulipo prayer chant as it was begun in ancient days.... It is also not clear to him that the form of the chant issued anew in Kamokuiki's book is the same as the original form ... [but it contains] many difficult words ... whose meaning can not be understood in these days.... It is [therefore] proper that this prayer chant of the Kumulipo be called 'The Genealogy of the Beginning of the People of Hawaii' (Kuauhau Ho'okumu Honua o Hawaii)." By the word Honua I understand not the land itself but the people who inhabit it, just as Hawaiian usage makes interchangeable the name of a chief with the piece of land he occupies. The word Ho'okumu, literally "causing to begin," may be better read "founding" or "begining" {sic} than by the word "creation," which reflects biblical thought.

All evidence points to the general acceptance among Hawaiian scholars of Poepoe's cautious conclusion. From the beginning of missionary interest in Hawaiian tradition, the earliest informants have referred first to the authority of the Kumulipo. Poepoe quotes the Mo'olelo Hawaii in these words: "in this genealogy [the Kumulipo] it is said that the earth was not born nor was it made by hand but just grew."David Malo writes, as translated by Emerson: "In the genealogy called Kumulipo it is said that the first human being was a woman named La'ila'i and that her ancestors and parents were of the dim past [he po wale no], that she was the progenitor of the human race." He goes on to tell how "The-chief-who-broke-through-heaven" (Ke-ali'i-wahi-lani) looked below and saw this beautiful woman La'ila'i dwelling in Lalowaia and came down and made her his wife, and "from the union of these two was begotten one of the ancestors of this race." He imagines that these persons originated outside Hawaii but that their names have been preserved in Hawaiian genealogies.

Kepelino, an early convert of the Roman Catholic mission and strongly influenced by the biblical story of creation, makes Kane the active agent in forming heaven and earth. He writes: "In the Hawaiian account, darkness (ka po) was the first thing and light (malamalama) followed. And because Kane made the darkness he was called Kane-in-the-Long-Night (Po-loa), because he alone dwelt at that time and he made it.... And he was called Kane-in-the-Light, meaning that he was the god that made light. And the light was called The-wide-light-made-by-Kane.... And so with the heaven (ka lani), it was called The-wide-heaven-made-by-Kane, because Kane made it." Here, in spite of Christian coloring, the order of creation is like that suggested in the Prologue to the Kumulipo and similar phrases occur. There is first darkness, po, or deep darkness, po-uli, then light, malamalama. Later in the passage Kepelino tells how "muddy-earth" (honua-kele) is "drawn by Kane out of the ocean." Kane becomes "the chief who broke through heaven" of Malo's account, ancestor of the high taboo chiefs or hoali'i in distinction from the low-ranking, na li'i noa, who do not command the taboos of gods.

Other later Hawaiian accounts of beginnings include a memorandum of "The Board of Genealogists of the Chiefs of Hawaii" given before the legislature of 1884, which calls the Kumulipo chant "a setting in order of the beginning of the earth for this race of men," and the committee report of 1904 already quoted. Both are preserved in manuscript in the Bishop Museum, and the second is printed as an appendix to Kepelino. It concludes, without mentioning the chant itself, "This is the genealogy of the Hawaiian people, that is, from Kumulipo-ka-po to Wakea and Papa."

Hawaiians generally represent Po as a period of darkness and give the word the meaning of night as opposed to day (ao). So my translator in a passage from Kepelino: "There was Deep-intense-night (Po-nui-auwa'ea), a period of time without heaven, without earth, without anything that is made. There was only darkness (pouli), therefore it was called Deep-intense-night and Long-night.

"The Deep-intense-night was the darkness out of which all created things (na mea i hanaia) issued (i ho'opuka).... Only gods (he mau akua wale) lived at that time...." The only attempt I have seen made to explain these two opposites, Po and Ao, on the basis of Hawaiian thought about the relation between this material world and a corresponding spirit world called the Po is to be found in Joseph Kukahi's printed text of 1902. There he places the Kumulipo beside other genealogies of beginning like that of Puanue, where "the pillars of earth and the pillars of heaven" (na kukulu o ka honua a me na kukulu o ka lani) are said to have been "born" to Paia-ka-lam and his wife Kumu-kane-ke-ka'a; or that of Wakea, where Papa gave birth to "this group of islands"; or the statement of others that it "was really made by the hands of Kane" (?), although "in the genealogy of Kumulipo, it is said that the Po gave birth to all things and established (pa'a) the heavens, the earth, and all things therein."

Kukahi goes on to explain the Po as a time of nonhumans when there were no "souls" ('uhane) of men living in the flesh but only strange fairy-like beings called 'e'epa and many-bodied beings called laumanamana. He expounds the meaning of the saying "the first people of Hawaii were born of the Po" in connection with the structure of the Kumulipo. He writes:

Like the first seven divisions in the first period of the world in the genealogical account of the Kumulipo night followed night and there lived gods alone [?]. During those intervals night reproduced night by living as man and wife and producing many gods often spoken of by the people of Hawaii as "the forty thousand gods, four thousand gods, four hundred thousand gods," and in the eighth interval birth changed to that of human beings; that is, to La'ila'i and all those born with her....

Laying aside the teachings and beliefs of this people (Hawaiians) in this new time, let our thoughts go back to where the very beginning was thought to be of the growing up of the generations of these islands, to the actual birth of the first person and those born with her out of the enclosures biting hard so as to be felt of the Po (paia 'a'aki konouli o ka Po).

The ancients believed that Po was divided into classes similar to the divisions among men. There is a head and there are head gods (Po'o-akua) who dwell in power over Po; below them are governers (Kuhina), the executioner (Ilamuku), messengers (Alele), guards (Kia'i), down to the lower grades of gods who are commoners among the gods.

The head gods have great power (mana) in heaven and on earth. The generations descended from them are their direct heirs from the Po and they received power in Po. The Kuhina and Ilamuku continue to carry out their power in Po. They have power (mana) over great things and small in Po. Their descendants have like mana to the Kuhina and Ilamuku [of the Po]. From the messengers and guards down to the commoners among the gods come the innumerable hosts of night. They reproduced, separated, and spread throughout Po. It was said that in this life in Po some people were born without bones ('alu'alu) and from that time birth began to change in Po until human bodies came into being. These changes are shown in the genealogical history of the Kumulipo.

From the leading gods, the Kuhina and Ilamuku, descended the classes of chiefs and the priests. They had great power over the lives of people in ancient days and to them were given signs and mysterious omens not forgotten by the people of this race. At the time when the mother gives birth, those of the Po show the signs of a chief. These are made visible in the arching of the rainbow, the flash of lightning, the vibrating roll of thunder, the spread of a low-lying rainbow, and in other signs common to this race. Men of other races ... have been puzzled ... by these signs peculiar to this people. There is no other explanation except the memory of the old faith held by this race that the chiefs are offspring and descendants of the ruling gods of Po, those who have power over the heavens and the earth.

In the night was Mary's son born from the womb of his human mother in the place where animals were fed in the town of Bethlehem. The Magi were startled by a strange light. As they watched closely they saw a bright star over the land to the east and believed and knew that a great person from Po had come to dwell with man. On the same night while the shepherds were absorbed in watching their lambs outside the town of Bethlehem, they were startled by the shouts of thousands and thousands of armies of Po announcing in a genealogical chant,

"Glory to god
In the highest heaven
Peace on earth
Good will to men."

This is an event handed down by the descendants of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan and they fully believed that this was a seed conceived by the 'uhane (Po) and born to a human being. The people of these islands were accustomed to such things and firmly believed that they were the people whom Po caused to be conceived and born here, that they were the Iku ha'i (Ali'i or Mo'i) and the Ikialealea (Ali'i papa [class of chiefs], pua li'i [descendants of chiefs]) of the Nu'upule (Noho-ali'i) referring to the lesser chiefs.

{Beckwith continues} It cannot be argued that ideas of an educated Hawaiian, however steeped in old tradition, can today, after more than a century of foreign contact, fully or even necessarily correctly interpret priestly teaching in the days before foreign infiltration. Certainly Kukahi does little to clarify the Kumulipo idea of night following night and, "by living as man and wife," producing the little gods represented, I suppose, by the varieties of plant and animal species which become their bodies in the material world, and later as begetting gods and men in bodily form. This is scarcely straight personification but rather a doctrine of souls corresponding to and animating material bodies and grouped in succession in time as a means of reaching a system of classification corresponding to the Hawaiian approach to the universe and to society as a whole. He draws a literal picture of the spirit world much as our ancestors took heaven and hell on their face value, but I think- his idea of it as a duplicate of this world we live in is a genuine native concept, and certainly the chiefs' authority and grading were upheld by this doctrine alone of birth from the gods, than which no Mohammedan or Christian teaching of predestination could lay better claim to an invulnerable basis. For his belief, he points to the connection of the spirit world with outward signs in the heavens at the time of a chief's birth and refers to the star over Bethlehem so dear to Christian story, and to the conception of the son of God in the womb of Mary. However primitive may seem to us the premise, granted this, the conclusions drawn are not those of a people lacking in quickness of mind or in mental intelligence.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Other Polynesian Accounts of Creation

THE last chapter has made it clear that Hawaiians in formed in the old culture believed the Kumulipo chant to be certainly at base a genuine native prayer of beginnings handed down from ancient times. Is such a chant unique to Hawaiian culture, or do a similar cosmic philosophy and similar traditions of beginning prove for it a common Polynesian heritage? Since there is general agreement that there was intercommunicatiorn with Tahiti during the migration period, we may look first to Tahitian chants for such like nesses. Tahitian texts recorded by John Orsmond before 1848 and edited by his daughter Teuira Henry for the Bishop Museum publications do contain quite similar concepts based upon a like nature philosophy in their treatment of cosmic forces. From a creation story given to Orsmond in 1822 and repeated later by another reciter with but slight variation I quote from Miss Henry's translation:

Ta'aroa was the ancestor of all the gods; he made everything....

He was his own parent, having no father or mother....

Ta'aroa sat in his shell (pa'a) in darkness (te po) for millions of ages....

The shell was like an egg revolving in endless space, with no sky, no land, no sea, no moon, no sun, no stars.

All was darkness, it was continuous thick darkness (po tinitini ia e te ta'ota'o)....

But at last Ta'aroa gave his shell a filip which caused a crack resembling an opening for ants. Then he slipped out and stood upon his shell ... he took his new shell for the great foundation of the world, for stratum rock and for soil for the world. And the shell ... that he opened first, became his house, the dome of the god's sky, which was a confined sky, enclosing the world (ao) then forming...

Ta'aroa made the great foundation of the earth (te tumu nui o te fenua) to be the husband, and the stratum rock (te papa fenua) to be the wife ... and he put his spirit into it, which was the essence of himself, and named it Ta'aroa-nui-tumu-tahi, Great-Ta'aroa-the-first-beginning.

Ta'aroa dwelt on for ages within the close sky ... he conjured forth (rahu) gods (atua), and they were born to him in darkness (i fanau i te po)....

. . . It was much later that man (ta'ata) was conjured [forth] when Tu was with him.

Another chant given to Orsmond in 1822 in Borabora and again in Tahiti describes a "chaotic period" after a condition of nothingness in which all was originally confined in a state of balance between such opposites as darkness (po) and light (ao), rapid and slow movement (huru mau-mau, huru mahaha), thinness (tahi rairai) and thickness (tahi a'ana). Pairs of rocks having "affinity between them" (e tau'a ta raua) are the first elements of growth. Tu ("Stability") is conjured forth as artisan. "Roots (a'a) were born for growth in the world." Ta'aroa fixes the dome of the earth upon pillars (pou) brought forth by Tumu-nui as male, Papa-raharaha as female parent. This allows widening of the sky "upon the pillars of the land of Havai'i." The po is extended, mountains grow, water rushes forth, ocean grows, rocks increase, skies increase to ten in number, rain falls, moss and slime appear, forests, food, the paper mulberry plant, creeping plants, weeds, all living things. Atea is above in space--"Earth had become land and it was filled with living creatures. Fresh water flowed throughout the land, sea filled the ocean, and they [land and ocean] were filled with living creatures. But still all was in thick darkness (poiri ta'ota'o). . . ." All this is still taking place within the original shell ('apu) out of which Great Ta'aroa had formed the sky of the gods, the shell called Rumia, translated "upset" in the text.

Compare these Tahitian chants with the Kumulipo. The idea of a first cause in the person of an anthropomorphic deity presiding over creation is absent from the Hawaiian story. In the Tahitian the concept is quite fully developed. Ta'aroa (Kanaloa in Hawaii) "gives a filip and cracks the shell" in which he is confined. He crawls out and stands upon its outer edge. He grows to be a lad, still within the "shell" out of which he has formed a sky for the new land. Ta'aroa feels weariness and delight. At one time he is a conjuror molding earth in his hands or uttering an incantation to stabilize the forms he has molded, at another time a god bending his essence into the rock Tumu-nui that it may unite with Papa-raharaha and upset the condition of equilibrium that has prevented growth and change. Everything is Ta'aroa's. He has created everything. All this is foreign to the Kumulipo. But the Tahitian chants stress, like the Hawaiian Kumulipo, the idea of affinity (tau'a) between pairs of natural forms. They stress the period of darkness during which the shaping of earth and sea took place and their filling with living forms before man appeared.

In Maori myth one cosmogonic account takes the form of a family group like that in the Hawaiian "Chief-who-opened-heaven" to come down to earth and make the beautiful La'ila'i his wife. Here it is the Wide-sky itself, Ranginui, who takes Papa-tu-a-nuku to wife, "sets" (hikaia) vegetation to cover her and "places" (makaia) small creatures "to animate the earth and the waters thereof." Gods are created, seventy of whom are named. All are confined within the embrace of their parents, unable to move or stand upright. A glimmer of light shows and gradually they come forth into the outer world. Eventually they separate their parents to enlarge space for living, and raise the sky upward, a story fully elaborated also in Tahiti but hardly recognized in the Kumulipo. The New Zealand teaching goes on to organize the world, giving to each god his special function and classifying forms according to their order of creation as in Tahiti; first ocean out of which grew land, then small plants, trees, reptiles and insects, animals, birds, the heavenly bodies; finally woman, "from whom mankind in this world sprang," an arrangement scarcely differing from that of the Kumulipo except for its neglect of sea life, so important in the structural plan of the Hawaiian creation chant.

In Mangaia, myths collected by the missionary W. Wyatt Gill describe under a different symbol the change from life within the Po to that of the world of the Ao, the world of living men on this earth. One myth tells how the primal generator, the female spirit Vari-ma-te-takere, dwells in darkness at the base of the dark underworld of Avaiki, "the Mangaian equivalent of Po." Avaiki is conceived like the inside of a coconut shell. It is divided into spaces or lands to each of which one of Vari's children is assigned. Buck thinks such a structural conception is foreign to the Polynesian mind and was probably suggested by the questioner, but such imaginary divisions are applied by Hawaiians to the arch of the sky as it rises from the horizon, and to the spaces of air as one looks toward the zenith--certainly not a foreign interpolation. Uppermost, in the thin land next to the outer shell, dwells Vatea, the Wakea or 'Atea or Rangi of other groups. He climbs into the light and lures "Papa" to him. Gods are born of the two, and eventually Mangaia is pulled up from the depths and peopled by men, offspring of the primal gods. Stories of chiefs succeed those of primal gods.

Here again the poet shapes his story of beginnings upon similar basic conceptions. In a line from a song dated about 1790 the primal goddess Vari-ma-te-takere is addressed as "a goddess feeding on raw taro" (E tuarangi kai taro mata), a reference recalling the children of Haloa born on the Hawaiian genealogy to Wakea and Papa. The word wari (wali) occurs in various Polynesian groups and always with reference to a softened substance: "mud" or "muddy" in Tahiti and Rarotonga; "pulp" or "pap" in Mangareva; "a marsh" in the Tuamotus; "potato grown watery with age" in New Zealand. It is equivalent to the walewale out of which life springs in the first lines of the Kumulipo. The epithet ma-te-takere is translated "at-the-beginning." Takere is applied ordinarily in Polynesia to the keel of a canoe, in Maori to "the bottom of deep water." Perhaps just "at the bottom" would be a fair rendering as applied to Vari. The taro plant propagated by budding, sending up stalk and leaf into the light out of the mud of its underwater or underground rooting, may well be the symbolic form in which the poet of Mangaia, where taro culture is, as in Hawaii, the basic vegetable food, conceives the story of the parent-stock of mankind.

From the Takaroa atoll of the Tuamotus Dr. Kenneth Emory of the Bishop Museum collected a cosmic chant in which "the earth's origins" or "roots," as Gessler reads te tumu henua, are similarly compared to the growth of a plant. Emory translates as follows:

Life appears in the world,
Life springs up in Havaiki.
The Source-of-night sleeps below
  in the void of the world,
  in the taking form of the world,
  in the growth of the world,
  the life of the world,
  the leafing of the world,
  the unfolding of the world,
  the darkening of the world,
  the branching of the world,
  the bending down of the world.

Hawaiians use a similar incantation in approaching certain forms of plant life imagined to have originated in the under world of the Po or 'Avaiki, referred to here as "Kahiki," whose spirits are supposed to show themselves on earth in the body of the plant. A species of kava plant called 'ava nene is prescribed to quiet a fretting (nene) child, and Kawena Pukui gives the following invocation to be used in its plucking:

O great kava that sprouted in Kahiki
  grew taproot in Kahiki
  spread rootlets in Kahiki
  grew stalk in Kahiki
  branched in Kahiki
  leafed in Kahiki
  blossomed in Kahiki
  bore leafbuds in Kahiki
I have come to get your leafbuds
  for medicine for--
  for long life for--

In a "family story" from the same informant a similar chant is addressed to an ancestral coconut called upon to provide a bridge for passing over seas. Here the lines conclude with the maturing of the plant which has

  fruited in Kahiki,
  ripened in Kahiki,

and the coconut sprouts above ground, puts forth leaves and fruit and shoots upward as in all good fairy stories. The coconut tree is, of course, to be understood here as a phallic symbol of generation from a single stock which allows the young adventurer to approach his kin over seas.

The process of creation as Emory finds it described in the Tuamotus reads much like the Hawaiian. Development proceeds by "pairing of matter, phenomena of nature, or of abstractions such as 'source of Night and Emory calls this "a wide-spread and ancient Tuamotuan teaching ... confirmed by cosmogonic genealogies and chants which have survived" and not the result of "missionary teaching." In schematic charts illustrating the progress of development of the world in its making, a primal pair represented by male and female phallic symbols lies at the base of the egg shaped shell out of which, as in Mangaia and Tahiti, life is thought of as emerging. These are named on the chart Te Tumu and Te Papa. They are the source of generation. Above them lies the land of Tumu-po:

Tumu-Po, source of the night world
  sleeps below in the non-existence of the earth,
  the slime of the earth
  the limpidity of the earth, etc....
Source whence human beings spring,
Source whence 'Atea sprang.

The shell representing the night world, the Po, is divided in the chart into layers filled with easily recognizable outlines of plants, animals, and men, these last in prostrate position. Above each layer arches a sky; to the summit of the highest sky reaches a ladder of men, one on the shoulder of another. The men seem to be climbing out of the underworld of the Po into a succession of outer worlds, taking with them the plants and animals of the night world as they go. The drawing looks like an adaptation to a migration legend rather than to one of development culminating in the intellectual faculties of adulthood such as some see in the Kumulipo. As in the Kumulipo, there is no single pre siding deity. Birth proceeds by the pairing of earth, the female, with sky, the male. Above the first land, Tumu-Po, arches Tumu-Ao; above the last land, Fakahotu-henua, arches the sky 'Atea. The two are translated by Emory, "Fruitfulness-of-earth" and "Space." They are the parents of mankind:

'Atea produces above,
Fakahotu produces below.

There is much in common here with other creation stories, both Tahitian and Hawaiian. In Tahiti Ta'aroa made "the great foundation of the earth" (te tumu nui o te fenua) to be the husband and "the stratum rock" (te papa fenua) to be the wife. Although the generation of rocks does not enter into the Kumulipo story as we have it, rocks of phallic shape are worshiped in Hawaii as ancestral fertility gods. Tumu-po as source of the night world is no other than Kumu-([u]li-)po of the Hawaiian prayer chant. "This is the genealogy of the Hawaiian people, from Kumu-lipo-ka-po to Wakea and Papa," concludes the report of the Committee of 1904. Both areas represent a succession of generative pairs, in the Tuamotus of "lands" and "skies," in Hawaii of "nights" (Po) advancing toward day (Ao), with some identical names between the two. Both lead up to 'Atea (Wakea), parent of mankind and apex of the arching spaces of sky.

Emory sees a tendency to multiplication of these divisions in the Tuamotus, and this may well have happened also in Hawaii. Original drawings show but three instead of ten, and an early Tuamotuan text reads:

The universe was [first] like an egg.... It at last burst and produced three layers superimposed one below propping two above.

This threefold pattern is perhaps reflected in the trio of males regularly named on Hawaiian genealogies of beginning and active in creation stories relating to the ordering of the universe and the origin of mankind. The appearance of this pattern in Hawaii is generally laid to missionary influence. Although the Christian trinitarian doctrine may have strengthened its use, I see no reason for supposing it to have originated under missionary teaching.

The gods Kane and Kanaloa are rather regularly named in this trio with a third figure representing man. Ki'i as this third member occurs but once, and that quite naturally at the moment of dawning from the night world, the Po, into the light of day, the Ao. Similarly a Tahitian chant called "Creation of Man" given to Orsmond by three different reciters between 1822 and 1833 shows Ta'aroa, after land, sky, and ocean have been filled with living things, consulting "Tu, the sacred one, Tu, the great artisan of Ta'aroa," about filling "the room for man." He "conjures up from below" (rahu ra i raro) the man Ti'i. Ti'i takes to wife the "Woman who ate before and behind," and between the two the different classes emerge: "the high chiefs of the royal girdle" (ari'i nui maro 'ura) begotten of the first pair; the lesser nobility (hu'i ra'atira and ari'iri'i) from the union of these with their inferiors; the commoners (te ta'ata ri'i and te manabune) who are not "born" (fanau) but "conjured forth" (i rahua) by Ti'i and his wife.

Ti'i, Tiki, or Ki'i, traditional first man throughout eastern Polynesia, thus personifies the procreative power of mankind or specifically the male sex organ. In New Zealand the progenitor of man is Tane (Kane) son of the sky god, hence called Tane-nui-a-Rangi. To him is attached the story, absent in Tahiti but present in fringing groups of the eastern Pacific, of the father-daughter marriage ascribed to Tiki in Mangareva and the Tuamotus, in Hawaii to Wakea. Allowing a shift from Tu to Kane in Hawaii, both gods of artisans in Tahiti, the Tahitian story of man's origin corresponds in time, place, and function with the first Kumulipo trilogy. Three males join in the task of peopling earth with mankind, Ta'aroa, Tu, Ti'i in Tahiti and an equivalent trio of Kane, Kanaloa, and Ki'i in Hawaii. The "Woman who ate before and behind" in Tahiti becomes La'ila'i, the "Woman who sat sideways" of the Kumulipo.

Another common element with South Sea mythical conceptions in the Kumulipo trio is the octopus form taken by Kanaloa in this chant of the first dawn of day. Exactly in agreement is the Tahitian myth of the cutting away of the arms of the octopus Tumu-ra'i-fenua, "Beginning-of-Heaven-and-Earth," into which Ta'aroa has placed his essence, and the consequent dawn of light (ao) after "the long wearisome night" (po). Hitherto gods have been called into being in darkness; now light dawns over earth. In the Kumulipo, spirits of darkness have generated animal and plant life of land and sea; now, generations of mankind people the land. In the Kumulipo manuscript the first line of the refrain accompanying the births of the first four sections reads, not Ka po uhe'e i ka wawa with its suggestion of the "slipping away" (uhe'e) of night, but Ka pou he'e i ka wawa, thus picturing the god in the form of an octopus (he'e) supporting (pou) in darkness the first heaven and earth exactly as in the Tahitian chant. This is not darkness in the physical sense but applies to the supremacy of the spirit world, the Po, as compared with the world of living men, the Ao.

The eight-armed octopus, called in the Kumulipo the "hot-striking" (hauna-wela), is the manifestation or body in which Kanaloa may appear in some Polynesian groups as god of the sea and sea creatures in contrast to Kane, god of land forms. In Hawaii, a prayer at the launching of a canoe names both gods, Kane as god of the forest from which the tree was cut, Kanaloa as god of the element over which the canoe must travel. A sorcerer's prayer for the healing of the sick invokes Kanaloa "god of the octopus"-- ke akua o ka he'e. The Samoan demigod Tae-o-Tagaloa is born of a woman part human and part fe'e ("octopus"), hence he is part god and part human. Magic connected with the number eight throughout southern Polynesia may derive from the eight-armed octopus. The Maui figure, sometimes represented as a son of the Tagaroa family, is "eight-headed" in Tahiti, "eighth born" in Samoa. In the Marquesas, according to Handy, "an octopus, or if one could not be obtained, a taro root with eight rootlets was used ceremonially in certain rites."

A further factor entering into the position of Kanaloa in Hawaiian accounts of creation, but not apparent in the Kumulipo, shows strife to have arisen at some time either before or after the migration into the Hawaiian group between followers of the Kanaloa priesthood and that of Kane, with Kane eventually triumphant, Kanaloa repudiated, and god Ku set up in his stead as agent with Kane in the creation story. Fornander notes:

"In the mo'olelo of Moi the prophet ... of Molokai; in the prophecies and sayings of Nuakea, the prophetess ...; of Maihea and Naulu-a-Maihea, the prophet race of Oahu ...; of the prophet Hua of Maui--in all these prophesies--it is said that the gods (na akua) created heaven and earth. The gods who created heaven and earth were three, Kane, Ku, and Lono. Kanaloa was a great enemy of these three gods. Before this creation of heaven and earth, etc., everything was shaky, trembling and destitute, bare (naka, 'olohelohe); nothing could be distinguished, everything was tossing about, and the spirits of the gods were fixed to no bodies, only the three above gods had power to create heaven and earth. Of these three Kane was the greatest in power, and Ku and Lono were inferior to him. The powers of the three joined together were sufficient to create and fix heaven and earth [from Ke Au Okoa, October 14, 1869].

Since neither Ku nor Lono is named in the Kumulipo chant, it looks as if the displacement of Kanaloa in national worship took place after its composition. Certainly by the time of the American mission in 1820 the idea prevailed that Kanaloa was rebellious against Kane and worked against him. The missionaries compared Kanaloa with the biblical Satan. Best says, quoting Fornander, "Kanaloa is in Hawaii a personified spirit of evil, the origin of death, the prince of Po ... a revolted, disobedient spirit who was conquered and punished by Kane (Tine) ...."

A similar character is given to Tangaroa in the Tuamotus. There a Tangaroa god "who delighted in doing evil" set fire in the highest heaven "seeking thus to destroy everything." "Tangaroa-i-te-po" he is called and "supreme ruler of the underworld In New Zealand a quarrel is said to have arisen between Tane and Tangaroa when reptiles took to the land and Tangaroa resented this encroachment upon his preserves." In the Tahitian octopus myth it is Tine who cuts away the clinging arms of the octopus body of Ta'aroa and fills earth and sky with beauty. Again, in a composition called "Strife and reconciliation between heaven and earth," Tumu-nui, the rock foundation in which Ta'aroa has placed his essence, is pitted against Tine, the two plying their enchantments: Tumu-nui sending heavy mists and rain, famine, night; Tane matching him with clear weather, abundance, the sun by day.

In Hawaii, a contest over the right of the kava drink seems to be connected with Kanaloa's overthrow. In the prayer quoted above he is distinguished as "Kanaloa the kava drinker" (inu 'awa). It is as if an upstart priesthood had overthrown the exclusive prerogative of a ruling priesthood to the kava bowl. The situation may reflect a historic conflict. A Fornander note equates Lihau'ula, "a priest of greater renown than any other," with Kanaloa. Tradition tells also of war between Lihau'ula the elder and Wakea the younger son, after the death of their father has left Wakea landless, and of the eventual success of the younger.

But may not the idea of opposition between the gods depend upon a more basic symbolism in the universal facts of human birth? The embryo lying surrounded by the sac of fluid within the mother's womb belongs to the spirit world, to Kanaloa; with birth it emerges into the world of living men and becomes the child of Kane. Again, Kanaloa, god of darkness and the underworld, takes over man at death. The father-daughter marriage is in some groups said to usher in man's mortality. In New Zealand it is Tane son of Rangi by Papa-tu-a-nuku, originally Tangaroa's wife, who takes his own daughter to wife, and it is she who, learning of her relationship to him, escapes to the lower world "to drag our offspring down." "And now," says one version of the tale, "from this time onward the flow of the 'current of death' of mankind to the 'everlasting night' became permanent." In Mangaia Tangaroa is the first-born son of 'Atea and Papa, but Rongo (Lono) not only secures for himself the main food supply but also takes Tangaroa's wife Taka and has by her a daughter Tavake by whom he has children, and "with the birth of Tavake's children the lineage of the main stock of Mangaia became definitely human." In Hawaii a story tells how the two gods each make a figure of a man and Kanaloa's dies while Kane's lives. Perhaps because Kanaloa made his figure first, all men must eventually die. That is the way the mind works under a deterministic priesthood: "In Adam's fall, We sinned all." It may be that death became inevitable when the first child born to Wakea by his daughter came into the world a foetus. The gods are immortal, renewing their youth as a crab its skin. Once man had this power, say old Hawaiians, and a number of stories are told throughout the Pacific of some trivial failure of the culture-bringer that determined death for mankind. If the connection with man's ultimate fate suggested above for the drawing contest between Kanaloa and Kane is correct, is it possible that late reciters of the Kumulipo chant have obscured the part played by Kanaloa in the story of Ki'i and La'ila'i, and "Ki'i the man" was originally Kanaloa's figure drawn after the form of god Kane, into which Kanaloa has "placed his essence" to deceive the woman, just as Wakea in the later story enters the image (ki'i) set up to lure Ka-we'o-a? It may be that the quarrel over the precedence of the first-born to Ki'i rather than to Kane had originally for the priestly composer an eschatological rather than a political implication.

Changes and substitutions in cult practice must lie back of these variations upon the common theme of world beginnings. Adaptation of traditional elements depends in each case upon the special migration history of the group, its fresh contacts and their resulting influence upon family and cult history. We cannot tell whether a historical struggle between leaders of different factions with their rival deities has given rise to the symbolism of conflict in creation stories or whether the cosmic conflict was itself a symbol of the universal facts of birth and death. Certainly fancy personifies and plays with such cosmic elements. The hero's search after the sun hidden by a god in the under world or to recover a bright lady from an underseas ravisher, and his famous fishing after a robber sea god, are all variations upon the theme of daybreak translated into popular fiction. On the other hand, the cosmic story is itself a symbol of the coming into life, out of the sea of water within the mother's womb, of the child born, as we say, "to the purple," or as the Hawaiian puts it, "hot with fiercest taboo," the child who must, however, eventually die because of some misdoing of the primary deity from whom man sprang.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Ceremonial Birth Chants in Polynesia

IN THE preceding chapters evidence has been brought to show that the Kumulipo chant was accepted as a genuine tradition of beginning for the Hawaiian people and that corresponding traditions from southern groups prove its composers to have drawn from common Polynesian sources. It is possible to go farther and to show that the recitation of similar genealogical prayer chants carrying the family stock back to the gods and connecting it with the beginning of life on earth played a part in other Polynesian groups in ceremonies held at the birth of a chief's son.

Word of such ceremonial functions has as yet come from but two sources, from the Marquesas, reported by Handy, and from the Tuamotus, by Percy Smith. In the Marquesas there are held, says Handy, "Great chanting festivals ... intoned with accompanying rites ... celebrated for various purposes by family groups, or, in the case of chiefs' families, by the tribe." One such occasion is at "the arrival of a first-born heir." The "central feature" is the chanting of the creation chants, vavana and pu'e. Recitation of genealogies is also a feature of the occasion, participated in by representatives of the different branches of the family line. A single chanter opened the recitation. "When he came to a certain point in his chant he would stop and a representative of some branch of the family would continue with the recitation of the genealogy of his branch." This went on until all branches had been represented.

The creation story recounting the impregnation of One-u'i (the sand woman) by 'Atea (Wakea) is the subject of the pu'e chants. It is said to be taboo to teach these to women and women are excluded from the audience when these are recited. The vavana have to do with the development of the child and their recitation is open to all. To quote Handy's summary of their content:

The words [of the vavana] recapitulate the conception, birth, growth, and so on of the child, linking these with the mythical birth of the gods from the level above (papa una) and the level below (papa a'o). in subsequent sections the chants refer to the making of ornaments, weapons, and utensils for the child, to his canoe, to his sacred house and to various practices such as bathing, making cloth, etc., connected with it ... connecting all with mythological references to gods and ancient lands. In parts various gods are summoned to assist in the rite. The chant is very long, containing more than ten thousand words. There is much repetition of phrases-some of them meaningless. . . . Throughout there is mingling of narrative referring to incidents connected with the child, mythological references, and these meaningless phrases.

There is no reason to suppose that Hawaiian chants of beginning would follow the exact pattern in content and meaning laid down by the Marquesan. In fact these chants differed among Marquesans themselves: "Every tribe had its own rendition of these sacred chants," says Handy. Nevertheless the description of style fits the Hawaiian to the letter and that of the content supplies a strong argument for Pokini Robinson's view of the Kumulipo as based upon the progress of a child from birth to maturity. That part of the chant, too, which "recounts the basic stages of growth of the world" by naming the various plants as "births" by One-u'i after impregnation by 'Atea in order to provide materials needed for the child's activities after birth may give a clue to the meaning of the sea and land births listed in the Hawaiian Kumulipo. In the Marquesan chant the "mothers of various kinds of material" are invoked to furnish these for the construction of the house of the first parents, 'Atea and One-u'i. The introduction here of "various kinds of fish in the sea" as "wives of 'Atea," which puzzles Handy, must have a similar significance. Thus the gods favorable to mankind are shown preparing upon earth and in the sea provision for the livelihood of that child who is to be their direct offspring, descent from whom down the generations is claimed for the first-born of each family of the tribe through the recitation of vavana and pu'e.

Some twenty years earlier than Handy's report on the Marquesan ceremony, S. Percy Smith had published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society the text and translation of two Tuamotuan chants "sung at the birth of a high chief." These have, so far as I know, attracted no attention from scholars in this area. The translation is the work of "a Tahitian gentleman," with some corrections by Smith himself in line with Maori usage, who discovered in the text "many identical phrases to be found in Maori karakias." These identities he unfortunately does not quote. To Maori influence also he ascribes the prominence of the god Tane and the little importance attached to Tangaroa in the chants. Of their general contents he writes: "In the usual cryptic manner of these compositions, they go back to the beginning of all things, and then trace the origin of the new born to the gods and thence through ancestors to the migration."

In form and spirit as well as in content the chants resemble those of the Kumulipo. There is a like emphasis upon opposites, upon mythological allusions, upon refrain. In the first chant the word tumu serves as keynote as the chanter welcomes the generating pair Tane and Hine, "source" or "cause" or "origin" of all things; hails the rainbow, sign of the birth of a chief, and wishes long life to the child under the name of Rongo, a name identical with the invocations to "Rono" at the ceremony for Captain Cook's deification in Hawaii as the god Lono and highly suggestive in view of the dedication of the Kumulipo to "Lono of the Makahiki." In the second stanza "thought" (manava) expands in various directions, all propitious to the new-born "Rongo." Word is brought and the drum beaten for the chief Rongo. Next a search is declared for the "cause," the "origin," and the child is found to be born from the "stem," from the "seed" spread by 'Atea, Fakahotu, and Rongo, the repeated word tumu in the text being given a variety of meanings in the English translation. A couplet follows voicing an aphorism consistent with Kukahi's distinction between the separate worlds for gods and men:

The way [te ara] for the god [no te atua] is below [ki te po];
The way for man [te tangata] is above [ki te ao].

There follows a series of three-line stanzas, each concluding with a refrain proclaiming the "growth" (tupuranga) of lesser gods (Vaitu) and of men.

The next stanzaic-like verses are recited in turn by representatives from the assembled company, as explained by the translator: ". . . when the subjects of a king went to congratulate him on the birth of a child or other important event, they assembled at the court or mahora, and before commencing their speeches, the one about to commence stamped with his foot to indicate that he asked permission to speak. As soon as he had caught the king's eye, he knelt, and with the preamble 'maeva te ariki' commenced his speech of homage. Having concluded, he arose and gave place to the next."

The second chant opens with a comparison of the family stock, not to a "pathway" but to "a small tree shooting out its roots and becoming widespread like the Kofai." The reference is to a tree bearing red and yellow flowers, colors sacred to chiefs throughout Polynesia and hence an appropriate symbol for the royal lineage. A kind of migration story follows with an enumeration of well-known lands of the Pacific. Succeeding stanzas having to do with the birth of gods are too obscurely phrased for me to attempt analysis. To the god Tane is ascribed power to cause the growth of vegetation. The earth is "broken up," mankind "came forth," and the rainbow is hailed.

In this part of the chant "speakers" from every quarter bring their "orations," which consist in a listing of place names. The word vananga so translated is identical with the Marquesan vanana, and this identity marks a close connection between the function of such ceremonial chants in the two areas. Possibly the Hawaiian word hanauna for "a circle of relatives of one family" is its Hawaiian equivalent. At least it seems to me that Smith's translation of the word vananga in this connection by "oration" does not give the full implication. The whole development of the Kumulipo is based upon the idea of blood descent from a single stock established from the beginning of the race and derived from primary gods. It is fair to conclude from Handy's excellent but all too limited report upon Marquesan ceremonies for a first-born that interest centers here also, not upon any speculative philosophy about how the world came to be so ordered, but upon the immediate effect of the chant upon the child to whom the family must look for its perpetuation on earth. As Handy puts it, "The chants really amount to elaborate causative spells."

Just how far the idea of magic versus religious worship is involved in any ceremonial act is an individual question, not one possible of verifying as a general conclusion. My own observation of the attitude of Hawaiians toward even their minor deities, derived, however, entirely during post Christian times, leads me to believe that the majority endowed their gods with the passions of men just as they gave their chiefs the honors of gods during life, and after death set them up as gods. Certainly they looked upon these dwellers in the spirit world as capable of manifesting themselves not only in material forms and forces of nature but also in the bodies of human beings living on earth among men. Chants and stories of the gods are so handled. The whole material world is thus the product of deity made manifest. The newborn child of high chief rank is himself quite literally born a god. The recitation of the genealogical prayer chant not only honors the long line of ancestral gods with whom he claims kinship but reminds them of their responsibility to this new offspring in the family descent, hence claiming for him as for a child of beloved parents those benefits of fertility in plant and animal life and of success along the pathway of human life necessary for his well being and within the power of gods alone to provide.

Conclusion

THE Kumulipo chant in its present form is evidently a composite, recast from time to time as intermarriage brought in new branches and a fresh traditional heritage. It seems to have belonged in Keawe's time to the Lono priesthood, perhaps brought from Oahu, where Lono worship was particularly active, to Maui, the genealogy of whose ruling chiefs down to Pi'ilani occupies the last section; thence brought into the island of Hawaii through the marriage of Pi'ilani's daughter Pi'ikea with 'Umi, usurping chief over that island after Liloa, with which marriage and its offspring the reckoning ends.

We have no proof that, as in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus, the birth of a son and heir to the ruling chief was celebrated in Hawaii by the recitation of the story of creation together with genealogies and songs of honor belonging to different branches along the family line, and that the Kumulipo chant served this function within the family to whom it belonged. Hawaiian accounts of ceremonies :at the birth of a royal child do not mention the chanting of a Kumulipo at a great tribal gathering as part of the rites on such an occasion, nor does the prose note offer evidence of such a recitation. But from its likeness to chants so used in the Tuamotus and the Marquesas and the queen's association of its composition with the birth of Keawe's first-born son, we may perhaps infer some connection with the ceremony.

Every birth of a niaupi'o child was in fact regarded as a repetition of the first human birth, that of the son Ha-loa to Wakea through his own daughter, from whom the whole race counted descent. So the Hawaiian Naua Society writes, after telling the story of the "Lauloa taro" that grew from the buried foetus of Wakea's first child, after which the living child was named: "Now you must understand that the children born to Haloa these are yourselves. . . ." Every first-born of a ruling chief took, to quote Fornander, the name Wakea: O Wakea ka inoa, o ke kumu ali'i keia o Waloa, reads the text. The word Wa-loa I take to be a contraction of Wa'a-loa, "Long-canoe," and the whole phrase, left untranslated in Fornander, to mean that he is " male of the chief stock." The canoe is, like the plant stalk, a symbol in riddling speech of the male procreative organ. The epithet "long" in both cases emphasizes by means of a concrete symbol the long continuance of the stock down the ages from the first divine procreator, here memorialized under the name Wakea. In the child is born again an image of the divine parent, to insure continuance of the family line.

Not that the cosmic conception has no place in the poet's imagery. The rebirth of light each day, the annual return of the sun from the south to revivify earth, serve not only as symbols of this human birth but as that birth's direct pattern or even its determining factor in the perpetuation of the race. The priest celebrates the rebirth of day, the Ao, with the story of the emergence of plant and animal forms in perpetual continuity, calling each by name. He celebrates the birth of man with the history of the lineage of which the child is offshoot, rehearsing the names of ancestors by whom the perpetuation of the family line has been secured. The dawn of day, the annual turn of the sun, are not only symbols but the event itself to which the birth of mankind succeeds and upon the acknowledgment of which man depends for his own high claim to ancestry from the gods. As Wakea, the sky world, bursts the bonds of night and rises out of the womb of waters where it has lain in darkness, so the child bursts the sheath where it lay within its mother's womb and emerges into the light of reasoning human life.

Kupihea reasoned from the flow of water preceding childbirth that water must be the medium through which the god of generation "works." Whether this idea of water as the original fructifying element was traditional or was Kupihea's own idea I do not know. It is, however, clear that his thinking started with observed facts of human birth and proceeded by analogy to cosmic beginnings. In the same way the Polynesian creation story as a successive appearance of plant and animal forms leading up to man must be referred to some such factual observation. This was easily to be found in the life of the embryo from conception up to the time of birth, a course of development which must have been perfectly known to a people skilled in agriculture, expert also in the art of abortion, upon which also depend so many beliefs and practices connected with embryonic deities in animal form, and out of which the picture of an evolving cosmos might easily serve as prototype. The poet gave it expression in the two worlds of the Po and the Ao. Hawaiian tradition passed down the teaching in the story of the buried foetus out of which sprang the taro plant, to be followed by the birth of mankind, to whose genealogy is thus attached the creature world born not to man but to the gods, whose spirits inhabit the Po and manifest themselves on earth for man's harm or protection. "To what shall I apply my procreative power?" asks the first parent in a Maori birth chant. It was not by the dawn of light that the generative god made himself known but by the organ of procreation itself, through which was intrusted to the newborn male the preservation of the family stock on earth and its continued functioning in the spirit world of the gods. Not speculative philosophy about how the world came to be must have inspired the poetic symbolism, but care for the sacred spark in man from its inception to its maturity into a divinity born as a human being on earth to carry on the family ruling line. The cosmos is thus the symbol, the sexual life and its fulfilment in the child the inner meaning, the kaona, of the Hawaiian creation chant.

We must read this ancient prayer chant in the light of Polynesian thought. Certainly it includes much that is ancient and pre-Christian. Additions may have been made from time to time, even up to that of its late transcription. Parts are undoubtedly omitted or altered from their original form. Old symbols may be applied in new directions. Such changes however cannot destroy the value of the text as a genuine example of the sacred creation story of a Polynesian people, true as it is to native poetic style not alone in its composition as a whole but in particular passages, and reflecting old Hawaiian social life and philosophy in its treatment of the birth of life on earth and the myths of the gods.

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