The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai. S. N. Haleole

the tradition of ancient voyages,[6] for hundreds of years none but chance boats had driven upon its shores.[7] But the old tales remained, fast bedded at the foundation of Hawaiian imaginative literature. As now recited they take the form of chants or of long monotonous recitals like the Laieikawai, which take on the heightened form of poetry only in dialogue or on occasions when the emotional stress requires set song. Episodes are passed along, from one hero cycle to another, localities and names vary, and a fixed form in matter of detail relieves the stretch of invention; in fact, they show exactly the same phenomena of fixing and reshaping, that all story-telling whose object is to please exhibits in transference from mouth to mouth. Nevertheless, they are jealously retentive of incident. The story-teller, generally to be found among the old people of any locality, who can relate the legends as they were handed down to him from the past is known and respected in the community. We find the same story[8] told in New Zealand and in Hawaii scarcely changed, even in name.

       Footnotes to Section II, 1: Polynesian Origin of Hawaiian Romance

      [Footnote 1: Bastian In Samoanische Schöpfungssage (p. 8) says: "Oceanien (im Zusammenbegriff von Polynesien und Mikronesien) repräsentirt (bei vorläufigem Ausschluss von Melanesien schon) einen Flächenraum, der alles Aehnliche auf dem Globus intellectualis weit übertrifft (von Hawaii bis Neu-Seeland, von der Oster-Insel bis zu den Marianen), und wenn es sich hier um Inseln handelt durch Meeresweiten getrennt, ist aus solch insularer Differenzirung gerade das Hilfsmittel comparativer Methode geboten für die Induction, um dasselbe, wie biologiseh sonst, hier auf psychologischem Arbeitsfelde zur Verwendung zu bringen." Compare: Krämer, p. 394; Finck, in Royal Scientific Society of Göttingen, 1909.]

      [Footnote 2: Lesson says of the Polynesian groups (I, 378): "On sait … que tous ont, pour loi civile et religieuse, la même interdiction; que leurs institutions, leurs cérémonies sont semblables; que leurs croyances sont foncièrement identiques; qu'ils ont le même culte, les mêmes coutumes, les mêmes usages principaux; qu'ils ont enfin les mêmes moeurs et les mêmes traditions. Tout semble donc, a priori, annoncer que, quelque soit leur éloignement les uns des autres, les Polynesiens ont tiré d'une même source cette communauté d'idées et de langage; qu'ils ne sont, par consequent, que les tribus disperses d'une même nation, et que ces tribus ne se sont séparées qu'à une epoque où la langue et les idées politiques et religieuses de cette nation étaient déja fixées."]

      [Footnote 3: Compare: Stair, Old Samoa, p. 271; White, I, 176; Fison, pp. 1, 19; Smith, Hawaiki, p. 123; Lesson, II, 207, 209; Grey, pp. 108–234; Baessler, Neue Südsee-Bilder, p. 113; Thomson, p. 15.]

      [Footnote 4: Lesson (II, 190) enumerates eleven small islands, covering 40 degrees of latitude, scattered between Hawaii and the islands to the south, four showing traces of ancient habitation, which he believes to mark the old route from Hawaii to the islands to the southeast. According to Hawaiian tradition, which is by no means historically accurate, what is called the second migration period to Hawaii seems to have occurred between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries (dated from the arrival of the high priest Paao at Kohala, Hawaii, 18 generations before Kaméhaméha); to have come from the southeast; to have introduced a sacerdotal system whose priesthood, symbols, and temple structure persisted up to the time of the abandoning of the old faith in 1819. Compare Alexander's History, ch. III; Malo, pp. 25, 323; Lesson, II, 160–169.]

      [Footnote 5: Kahiki, in Hawaiian chants, is the term used to designate a "foreign land" in general and does not refer especially to the island of Tahiti in the Society Group.]

      [Footnote 6: Lesson, II, 152.]

      [Footnote 7: Ibid., 170.]

      [Footnote 8: Ibid., 178.]

2. POLYNESIAN COSMOGONY

       Table of Contents

      In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of other primitive and story-loving people. It includes primitive philosophy—stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth; primitive annals—migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of conquest and overrule. There is primitive romances—tales of competition, of vengeance, and of love; primitive wit—of drolls and tricksters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts. These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar to the Polynesian mind.

      The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in fact, to Anaxagoras's sketch of the universe. Earth is a plain, walled about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, rise the confines of Kahiki, Kukulu o Kahiki.[1] From this point the heavens are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number varying in different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld, sometimes divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors and inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods[2]—the whole inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell.[3] Ordinarily the gods seem to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens. As in other mythologies, heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a reproduction or copy of earth and its ways. In heaven the gods are ranged by rank; in the highest heaven dwells the chief god alone enjoying his supreme right of silence, tabu moe; others inhabit the lower heavens in gradually descending grade corresponding to the social ranks recognized among the Polynesian chiefs on earth. This physical world is again the prototype for the activities of the gods, its multitudinous manifestations representing the forms and forces employed by the myriad gods in making known their presence on earth. They are not these forms themselves, but have them at their disposal, to use as transformation bodies in their appearances on earth, or they may transfer them to their offspring on earth. This is due to the fact that the gods people earth, and from them man is descended. Chiefs rank, in fact, according to their claim to direct descent from the ancient gods.[4]

      Just how this came about is not altogether uniformly explained. In the Polynesian creation story[5] three things are significant—a monistic idea of a god existing before creation;[6] a progressive order of creation out of the limitless and chaotic from lower to higher forms, actuated by desire, which is represented by the duality of sex generation in a long line of ancestry through specific pairs of forms from the inanimate world—rocks and earth, plants of land and sea forms—to the animate—fish, insects, reptiles, and birds;[7] and the special analysis of the soul of man into "breath," which constitutes life; "feeling," located in the heart; "desire" in the intestines; and "thought" out of which springs doubt—the whole constituting akamai or "knowledge." In Hawaii the creation story lays emphasis upon progressive sex generation of natural forms.

      Individual islands of a group are popularly described as rocks dropped down out of heaven or fished up from below sea as resting places for the gods;[8] or they are named as offspring of the divine ancestors of the group.[9] The idea seems to be that they are a part of the divine fabric, connected in kind with the original source of the race.

       Footnotes to Section II, 2: Polynesian Cosmogony

      [Footnote 1: In the Polynesian picture of the universe the wall of heaven is conceived as shutting down about each group, so that boats traveling from one group to another "break through" this barrier wall. The Kukulu o Kahiki in Hawaii seems to represent some such confine. Emerson says (in Malo, 30): "Kukulu was a wall or vertical erection such as was supposed to stand at the limits of the horizon and support the dome of heaven." Points of the compass were named accordingly Kukulu hikina, Kukulu komohana, Kukulu hema, Kukulu akau—east, west, south, north. The horizon was called Kukulu-o-ka-honua—"the compass-of-the-earth." The planes inclosed by such confines, on the other hand, are named Kahiki. The circle of the sky which bends upward from the horizon is called Kahiki-ku or "vertical." That through which, the eye travels in reaching the horizon, Kahiki-moe, or "horizontal."]

      [Footnote 2: The Rarotongan world of spirits is an underworld. (See Gill's Myths and Songs.) The Hawaiians believed in a subterranean world of the dead divided into two regions, in the upper of which Wakea reigned; in