Ku laua o Hina

Kii: Division of Forestry and Wildlife

HAWAIIAN

MYTHOLOGY

Martha Beckwith

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS

Honolulu, pages 12-19

KU and Hina, male or husband (kane) and female or wife (wahine), are invoked as great ancestral gods of heaven and earth who have general control over the fruitfulness of earth and the generations of mankind. Ku means “rising upright,” Hina means “leaning down.” The sun at its rising is referred to Ku, at its setting to Hina; hence the morning belongs to Ku, the afternoon to Hina. Prayer is addressed to Ku toward the east, to Hina toward the west. Together the two include the whole earth and the heavens from east to west; in a symbol also they include the generations of mankind, both those who are to come and those already born. Some kahunas teach a prayer for sickness addressing Ku and Hina, others address Kahikina-o-ka-la (The rising of the sun) and Komohana-o-ka-la (Entering in of the sun). Still others call upon the spirits of descendants and ancestors, praying toward the east to Hina-kua (-back) as mother of those who are to come, and toward the west to Hina-alo (-front) for those already born.

The prayer to Ku and Hina of those who pluck herbs for medicine emphasizes family relationship as the claim to protection. All are children from a single stock, which is Ku.

Ku [or Hina], listen!

I have come to gather for [naming the sick person] this [naming the plant] which was rooted in Kahiki, spread its rootlets in Kahiki, produced stalk in Kahiki, branched in Kahiki, leafed in Kahiki, budded in Kahiki, blossomed in Kahiki, bore fruit in Kahiki. Life is from you, O God, until he [or she] crawls feebly and totters in extreme old age, until the blossoming time at the end. Amama, it is freed.

Ku is therefore the expression of the male generating power of the first parent by means of which the race is made fertile and reproduces from a single stock. Hina is the expression of female fecundity and the power of growth and production. Through the woman must all pass into life in this world. The two, Ku and Hina, are hence invoked as inclusive of the whole ancestral line, past and to come. Ku is said to preside over all male spirits (gods), Hina over the female. They are national gods, for the whole people lay claim to their protection as children descended from a single stock in the ancient homeland of Kahiki.

The idea of Ku and Hina as an expression of common parentage has had an influence upon fiction, where hero or heroine is likely to be represented as child of Ku and Hina, implying a claim to high birth much like that of the prince and princess of our own fairy tales. It enters into folk conceptions. A slab-shaped or pointed stone (pohaku) which stands upright is called male, pohaku-o-Kane; a flat (papa) or rounded stone is called female, papa-o-Hina or pohaku-o-Hina, and the two are believed to produce stone children. So the upright breadfruit (ulu) tree is male and is called ulu-ku; the low, spreading tree whose branches lean over is ulu-ha-papa and is regarded as female. These distinctions arise from analogy, in the shape of the breadfruit blossom and of the rock forms, with the sexual organs, an analogy from which Hawaiian symbolism largely derives and the male expression of which is doubtless to be recognized in the conception of the creator god, Kane.

The universal character of Ku as a god worshiped to produce good crops, good fishing, long life, and family and national prosperity for a whole people is illustrated in a prayer quoted by J. S. Emerson as one commonly used to secure a prosperous year:

O Ku, O Li! (?) Soften your land that it may bring forth.

Bring forth where?

Bring forth in the sea [naming the fishing ground], squid, ulua fish.…

Encourage your land to bring forth.

Bring forth where?

Bring forth, on land, potatoes, taro, gourds, coconuts, bananas, calabashes.

Encourage your land to bring forth.

Bring forth what?

Bring forth men, women, children, pigs, fowl, food, land.

Encourage your land to bring forth. Bring forth what?

Bring forth chiefs, commoners, pleasant living; bring about good will, ward off ill will.

Here again, in the antithesis between sea and land, is another illustration like that between male and female of the practical nature of prayer, which sought to omit no fraction of the field covered lest some virtue be lost. The habit of antithesis thus became a stylistic element in all Hawaiian poetic thought. Imagination played with such mythical conceptions of earth and heaven as Papa and Wakea (Awakea, literally midday). Night (po) was the period of the gods, day (ao) was that of mankind. Direction was indicated as toward the mountain or the sea, movement as away from or toward the speaker, upward or downward in relation to him; and an innumerable set of trivial pairings like large and small, heavy and soft, gave to the characteristically balanced structure of chant an antithetical turn. The contrast between upland and lowland, products of the forest and products of the sea, and the economic needs dependent upon each, shows itself as a strong emotional factor in all Hawaiian composition. It was recognized economically in the distribution of land, each family receiving a strip at the shore and a patch in the uplands. It was recognized in the division of the calendar into days, months, and seasons, when those at the shore watched for indications of the ripening season in the uplands and those living inland marked the time for fishing and surfing at the shore. It modified the habits of whole families of colonizers, some of whom made their settled homes in the uplands and in the forested mountain gorges. It determined the worship of functional gods of forest or sea, upon whom depended success in some special craft.

A great number of these early gods of the sea and the forest are given Ku names and are hence to be regarded as subordinate gods under whose name special families worshiped the god Ku, who is to be thought of as presiding over them all.

 As god of the forest and of rain Ku may be invoked as:

Ku-moku-haliʻi (Ku spreading over the land)

Ku-pulupulu (Ku of the undergrowth)

Ku-olono-wao (Ku of the deep forest)

Ku-holoholo-pali (Ku sliding down steeps)

Ku-pepeiao-loa and -poko (Big- and small-eared Ku)

Kupa-ai-keʻe (Adzing out the canoe)

Ku-mauna (Ku of the mountain)

Ku-ka-ohia-laka (Ku of the ohia-lehua tree)

Ku-ka-ieie (Ku of the wild pandanus vine)

As god of husbandry he is prayed to as:

Ku-ka-o-o (Ku of the digging stick)

Ku-kulia (Ku of dry farming)

Ku-keolowalu (Ku of wet farming)

As god of fishing he may be worshiped as:

Ku-ula or Ku-ula-kai (Ku of the abundance of the sea)

As god of war as:

Ku-nui-akea (Ku the supreme one)

Ku-kaili-moku (Ku snatcher of land)

Ku-keoloewa (Ku the supporter)

Ku-hoʻoneʻenuʻu (Ku pulling together the earth)

As god of sorcery as:

Ku-waha-ilo (Ku of the maggot-dropping mouth).

These are only a few of the Ku gods who play a part in Hawaiian mythology.

The Ku gods of the forest were worshiped not by the chiefs but by those whose professions took them into the forest or who went there to gather wild food in time of scarcity.

Kumauna and Ku-ka-ohia-laka were locally worshiped as rain gods. 

Canoe builders prayed to the canoe-building gods for aid in their special capacities: Ku-moku-haliʻi their chief; Kupa-ai-keʻe (Kaikupakee, Kupaikee), explained as adz (kupa) which eats (ai) the superfluous parts (keʻe), and worshiped as inventor of the bevel adz for hollowing out the canoe; Ku-pulupulu (Ku-pulupulu-i-ka-nahele) called “the chipmaker”; Ku-holoholo-pali (-hoʻoholo-pali) who steadies the canoe when it is carried down steep places; Ku-pepeiaoloa and -poko, the “long-” and “short-eared” gods of the seat braces by which the canoe is carried.

They prayed also to the female deities: Lea (Laʻe, Laea) who appeared in the body of a flycatcher (elepaio) and tapped the trunk to show if it was hollow, and Ka-pu-o-alakai (Ka-pua-) who presided over the knot (pu or pua) by which the guiding ropes (alakai) were held to the canoe; goddesses identified in some legends with Hina-ulu-ohia (Woman of the ohia growth) and Hina-pukuia (Woman from whom fishes are born), wives respectively of the gods of fishing and of upland cultivation, Ku-ula-kai and Ku-ula-uka, and sisters of the first three canoe builders’ gods named above. Some equate Ku-pulupulu with the male Laka, called ancestor of the Menehune people, and hence with Ku-ka-ohia-laka, god of the hula dance. When the people of Ka-u district hear for the first time the sound of the ka'eke drum and flute, as Laʻa-mai-kahiki passes their coast on one of his visits from the south, they say, “It is the canoe of the god Ku-pulupulu,” and they offer sacrifices.

    Ku-ka-ohia-laka is worshiped by canoe builders in the body of the ohia lehua, the principal hardwood tree of the upland forest. His image in the form of a feather god is also worshiped in the heiau with Ku-nui-akea, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa. He is the male Laka worshiped in the hula dance. That is why the altar in the dance hall is not complete without a branch of red lehua blossoms. In Tahiti, Rarotonga, and New Zealand, Rata is the name of the ohia tree. In the cave of this god in Olaʻa on Hawaii grows an ohia lehua which is looked upon in that district as the body of the forefather, Laka. It bears only two blossoms at a time. If a branch is broken blood will flow.

The story of its origin is as follows:

Ku-ka-ohia-a-ka-laka and his sister Ka-ua-kuahiwa (The rain on the ridges) come from Kahiki to Hawaii and live, Ku with his wife at Keaau and Kaua with her husband in the uplands of Olaʻa. When the sister brings vegetable food from her garden to her brother at the sea, her stingy sister-in-law pretends that they have no fish and gives her nothing but seaweed to take home as a relish. In despair at this treatment, Kaua transforms her husband and children into rats and herself into a spring of water. Her spirit comes to her brother and tells him of her fate. He visits the uplands, recognizes the spot as she has directed in the dream, and, plunging into the spring, is himself transformed into the lehua tree which we see today.

Hina-ulu-ohia (Hina the growing ohia tree) is the female goddess of the ohia-lehua forest. In the genealogies, legends, and romances she appears as mother of Ka-ulu, the voyager, and wife of Ku-ka-ohia-laka; Kailua on the northern side of Oahu is their home. As wife of Kahaʻi she is mother of Wahieloa and grandmother of Laka at Kauiki in Hana district of Maui. In the shape of an ohia tree she protects Hiʻi-lawe, child of Kakea and Kaholo, and Lau-ka-ieie the daughter of Po-kahi. To both god and goddess the flowering ohia is sacred and no one on a visit to the volcano will venture to break the red flowers for a wreath or pluck leaves or branches on the way thither. Only on the return, with proper invocations, may the flowers be gathered. A rainstorm is the least of the unpleasant results that may follow tampering with the sacred lehua blossoms.

Ku-mauna (Ku of the mountain) is one of the forest gods banished by Pele for refusing to destroy Lohiau at her bidding.He is said to have lived as a banana planter in the valley above Hiʻilea in Ka-u district on Hawaii which bears his name. There he incurred the wrath of Pele and was overwhelmed in her fire. Today the huge boulder of lava which retains his shape in the bed of the valley is worshiped as a rain god. As late as 1914 a keeper escorted visitors to the sacred valley to see that the god was properly respected and his influence upon the weather restrained within bounds for the benefit of the district. The legend runs as follows:

A tall foreigner comes from Kahiki and cultivates bananas of the iholena variety in a marshy spot of the valley. Pele comes to him in the shape of an old woman and he refuses to share his bananas with her. She first sends cold, then, as he sits doubled up with his hands pressed against his face trying to keep warm, she overwhelms him with a stream of molten lava. In this shape he is to be seen today encrusted in lava.

Sick people are sometimes brought to a cave near the place where stands Kumauna and left there overnight for healing. In case of drought an opelu fish is brought from the sea and struck against the rock in order to call the rain godʻs attention to the needs of his worshipers. In case a fish of the proper variety is lacking, a rare plant growing in the vicinity, which has leaves mottled like the sides of the opelu, may be used as a substitute. But all this must be done with the greatest reverence. Visitors to the valley are warned to be quiet and respectful lest a violent rainstorm mar their trip to the mountains. The story told of Johnny Searle has become a legend of the valley and a warning to irreverent foreigners. About the year 1896, while Johnny Searle was manager of Hi’ilea sugar plantation, there occurred a prolonged drought and one evening as he was riding home down the valley with a party of Hawaiian goat hunters he raised his gun and shot at the Kumauna boulder, exclaiming, “There, Kumauna! Show your power!” The shot broke off a piece from a projecting elbow, which some say he took home and threw into the fire. His companions fled. That night (as the story runs) a cloudburst rushed down the valley and flung great stones all over the back yard of the plantation house, where they may be seen today as proof of the truth of Kumauna’s power. Rain heiau were still to be found in early days on Hawaii. A famous healing kahuna of Ka-u nicknamed Ka-la-kalohe, who worshiped his god the sun in Honokane gulch, is said to have been constantly appealed to by the white planter to invoke rain or sunshine. In the Chatham islands an old Moriori could raise a favorable wind for fishing by tapping on the trunk of a special kopi tree. Other trees or rocks sent “a deluge of rain” in response to tapping. In Samoa two spirits, Foge and Toafa, have charge of the rain. When a company go out after doves, offerings are made to them of taro and fish in order to insure fair weather. But if someone follows and strikes the stone which is dedicated to the two spirits, a thunderstorm will fall. In Nanduayalo in the Lau islands a small rock below high-water mark brings a tidal wave if anyone strikes it or breaks off a piece.

A fisherman might choose any one of various fishing gods to worship, and the tapus which he kept depended upon the fish god worshiped. Ku-ula-kai (Ku of abundance in the sea) was one of these gods, some say the one who had control over all the gods of the sea. Reddish things were sacred to him. The fisherman's heiau set up at a fishing beach is called after him a kuula. The god lived as a man on earth on East Maui in the land called Alea-mai at a place called Leho-ula (Redcowry) on the side of the hill Ka-iwi-o-Pele (The bones of Pele). There he built the first fishpond; and when he died he gave to his son Aiai the four magic objects with which he controlled the fish and taught him how to address the gods in prayer and how to set up fish altars. The objects were a decoy stick called Pahiaku-kahuoi (kahuai), a cowry called Leho-ula, a hook called Manai-a-ka-lani, and a stone called Kuula which, if dropped into a pool, had the power to draw the fish thither. His son Aiai, following his instructions, traveled about the islands establishing fishing stations (koʻa) at fishing grounds (koʻa aina) where fish were accustomed to feed and setting up altars (kuula) upon which to lay, as offerings to the fishing gods, two fish from the first catch.