Makahiki

The Makahiki opened with the heliacal rising of the Pleiades, called Makali'i in Hawaiian sky reckoning, and ran for roughly four lunar months, associated throughout with the god Lono, understood in Hawaiian religion as a god of agriculture, fertility, and peace. Martha Warren Beckwith's Hawaiian Mythology (1940) records the mythological and calendrical detail behind the season: for its duration the ordinary kapu, the system of religious restrictions that governed much of chiefly and priestly life the rest of the year, were relaxed, war was set aside, and communities turned to tribute collection, feasting, sport and competition.

The season functioned as both a religious observance and a redistributive economic mechanism, with each district rendering tribute that supported chiefly and temple establishments for the year to come.

Beckwith's account also situates the Makahiki within a wider Hawaiian ritual calendar governed by the kahuna priesthood, who tracked the relevant celestial signs and directed the timing of each phase of the season; the transition into and out of Makahiki was itself marked by specific temple rites at the luakini heiau, the class of temple otherwise associated with the war god Ku in the pre-contact period, underscoring how completely the season inverted the ordinary religious order.

A central rite of the season was a ceremonial procession, carrying an image of Lono, the akua loa, in a clockwise circuit around each island district to collect tribute from local communities, accompanied by athletic competitions and games associated with the season's festive character. The Makahiki closed with rites that symbolically restored precedence to Ku, the war god whose ordinary authority the peaceful Makahiki season had set aside, and the regular kapu resumed for the working year ahead.

Captain James Cook's arrival in Hawaiian waters in 1778 to 1779 coincided with the Makahiki season, and the question of whether Hawaiians understood Cook as connected to Lono has been the subject of extensive and genuinely contested scholarly debate, most famously between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. This atlas notes that the debate exists rather than adjudicating it, since it concerns interpretation of contact era events rather than the Makahiki's own well documented pre-contact religious structure.

The tribute collected, called ho'okupu, took the form of agricultural produce, textiles and other goods rendered by each district to its chief, who in turn owed tribute to the paramount chief of the island, making the Makahiki procession simultaneously a religious circuit and an annual accounting of the political economy binding commoners, local chiefs and the ruling chief together.