The Kumulipo

The Kumulipo, whose name means beginning in deep darkness, is a lengthy Hawaiian genealogical chant, composed and first recited for a high chiefly line in the eighteenth century, that opens not with a single act of creation but with a slow unfolding from Po, a primordial darkness or night, understood as both a literal cosmic condition and a realm continuous with the world of ancestral spirits. From this darkness, successive pairs of beings are named, each pair typically consisting of a male and female counterpart, beginning with the most basic forms of coral and marine life and moving steadily through more complex sea creatures, echinoderms, shellfish, and fish, before turning to insects and plants of the land, and then to birds.

Each new pairing in the chant is set against its counterpart from the preceding generation, a structural device scholars read as expressing a worldview in which every later, more complex form of life is understood as descending from and remaining connected to an earlier, simpler one, so that the chant functions as a genealogy of the natural world itself and not merely as a list of created things, binding every later creature back through its named counterpart to the darkness the whole sequence began in.

After tracing this long unfolding of nonhuman life through the era of night, Po, the chant arrives at the era of light, Ao, and with it the birth of the first human beings, before continuing directly into a genealogy naming the specific chiefly ancestors of the high chief for whom the Kumulipo was composed, binding that individual chief's own lineage seamlessly onto the same unbroken chain of descent that produced the natural world. In this way the chant does not merely explain where the world came from; it argues for the chief's own legitimacy and mana, spiritual power and authority, by presenting his ancestry as continuous with, rather than separate from, the deep structure of creation itself.

The chant survived into the nineteenth century in the keeping of the Hawaiian royal family and was published, with an English translation and extensive commentary, by Queen Liliuokalani during her imprisonment following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, a context later scholars, including Martha Beckwith in her study of Hawaiian mythology, read as significant in its own right: preserving the Kumulipo in print became an assertion of the very legitimacy the chant itself describes, at the exact historical moment that legitimacy was under direct political attack from the government that had just deposed her.