Native Hawaiian Religion

Hawaiian tradition sorts the visible world among four great male akua whose domains rarely overlap and whose seasons of ritual attention are kept largely separate. Kane governs light, life and fresh water; springs are called wai a Kane, the water of Kane, and Hawaiian tradition credits him with forming the first human from earth, without the human sacrifice that marks the rites of Ku. Ku takes war, fishing and the sharpest, most demanding kind of craftsmanship, and the great luakini temples where the highest and most feared rites were conducted, including human sacrifice, were his. Lono holds agriculture, rain, fertility and, notably, peace: his season is the Makahiki, roughly four months opened by the rising of the Pleiades, during which war was forbidden, heavy labor suspended, tribute gathered island by island, and his image, a crossbar hung with white kapa cloth, carried in procession. It was during a Makahiki, in 1779, that Captain Cook arrived at Kealakekua Bay and was received in ceremony drawing on the language of Lono, a moment anthropologists still argue over rather than agree on. Kanaloa, paired with or set against Kane in chant, holds the ocean and the deep.

Beside these four stands Pele, goddess of the volcano, who lives at Halemaumau on Kilauea; chant traces her journey down the island chain in an order that matches the islands' actual geological age, and her eruptions are still spoken of in Hawaiian as her own action rather than as a figure of speech. The four akua and Pele are not a closed set. Beneath them stand the aumakua, family and ancestral gods particular to a lineage, so that Hawaiian religious life ran on two registers at once, a shared pantheon above and a private one belonging to each family below it.

The formal end of the old order came from inside it rather than from the missionaries who are often credited with ending it. In 1819, months after the death of Kamehameha I, his son and successor Liholiho, pressed by the chiefess Kaahumanu, sat down to eat publicly with women, breaking the kapu that had kept the sexes ritually separate at meals for as long as anyone could remember. The act was deliberate and public, and it broke the whole kapu system rather than one rule within it: temples were abandoned within months, the priesthood that had served them lost the structure it depended on, and the first Christian missionaries arrived the following year to a religious landscape the Hawaiian chiefs themselves had already dismantled.

What followed was not a clean replacement. Christianity became the religion nearly every Hawaiian professed, and much of the older practice went private or was actively suppressed, a suppression sharpened after the 1893 overthrow of the kingdom, when the Hawaiian language was pushed out of schools and hula and chant lost public standing along with it. Heiau, the stone temple platforms, mostly stood abandoned. The turn came from the 1970s, in what is usually called the Hawaiian Renaissance: the 1976 voyage of the canoe Hokulea, navigated without instruments using knowledge recovered from Pacific tradition, put specifically Hawaiian knowledge back into public pride at the same moment that language immersion, hula in its older forms and the restoration of some heiau for ceremonial use were all gaining ground. Practice today is living rather than reenacted, conducted by Hawaiians rather than performed for visitors, and the atlas records it on those terms.