The right claimed for his descendant ʻI to offer human sacrifice and to cut down ʻohiʻa wood for images would imply that as ruling chief over the land section of Pakini, lying in Ka-ʻu district, he was entitled to erect a war heiau, a right denied to lesser chiefs. In the sixth line walewale is changed to welawela, meaning “intense heat” or “strong emotion” and. A couplet follows voicing an aphorism consistent with Kukahiʻs distinction between the separate worlds for gods and men: The way [te ara] for the god [no te atua] is below [ki te po]; The way for man [te tangata] is above [ki te ao]. Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream, Guarded by the Ekupuʻu bird living on land, 359. Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.com. Are these actual genealogies in our sense of the term? Grades of rank were distinguished and divine honors paid to those chiefs alone who could show such an accumulation of inherited sacredness as to class with the gods among men. The words Waiʻololi and Waiʻolola are applied in everyday speech to a narrow entrance through which water passes with force and a wide one which receives them without a struggle. Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream, Born is the Hauliuli [snake mackerel] living in the sea, 232. I believe, however, that the reading selected is at least true to Hawaiian poetic art and to the intention as I see it of the passage as a whole. The sacred scent from the gourd stem proclaims [itself], The stench breaks forth in the time of infancy, Born is the child of the hilu fish and swims, The hilu fish rests with spreading tail-fin, Born is the Iʻa [fish], born the Naiʻa [porpoise] in the sea there swimming, Born is the Mano [shark], born the Moano [goatfish] in the sea there swimming, 140. ROCK, DR. JOSEPH. For. . Of the over two thousand lines that make up the whole chant, more than a thousand are straight genealogies listing by pairs, male and female, the various branches (lala) making up the family lines of descent. The birth of the climbing pandanus vine, worshiped as a god of forest growth because of its spike of red at the fruiting point, symbol of fertility, leads directly to the advent of “the man with the water gourd,” who is “Kane of the generative water,” Kane-i-ka-wai-ola, represented, says Kupihea, in gushing spring water. . With the freeing of the slave class, the abolition of the taboos, the development of a constitutional form of government participated in by foreigners to whom the native rules of rank were alien, and the opening-up of lands to individual ownership, the outward marks distinguishing the chief class had disappeared. good from the point of view of the link with wela of the first line but ignored in translation, where the line reads: In lines seven and eight the word kumu is translated by “reason” in place of the usual “source” or “beginning,” and the lines are written with inverted commas as if quoting a popular saying. . . Each usually had a different interpretation, particularly about the earlier sections which describe the development of natural phenomena and life. . . The place names allude to people and the kaona tells the story of a love triangle. The father-daughter marriage is in some groups said to usher in manʻs mortality. . The child in all three cases would be of the niaupiʻo class but entitled to different degrees of veneration in the form of taboos. The approaching night gives birth. Before this creation of heaven and earth, etc.. 14. . the father of Ka-lai-opuʻu and the grandparent fifth removed of the King Kalakaua now on the throne and grandparent fifth and fourth removed of Ka-piʻo-lani the present Queen Consort. Ku proposes. . . Hanau ka Papaua, o ka ʻOlepe kana keiki, puka, 26. . Call him that and he will be courageous; upon this principle a belief in word magic works. Certainly Kukahi does little to clarify the Kumulipo idea of night following night and, “by living as man and wife,” producing the little gods represented, I suppose, by the varieties of plant and animal species which become their bodies in the material world, and later as begetting gods and men in bodily form. O kane ia Waiʻololi, o ka wahine ia Waiʻolola, 54. No more famous family in Hawaiian annals could a girl claim as her own than that of Piʻilani, who succeeded to his fatherʻs lands as ruling chief on the eastern end of the island of Maui. Ka wahine no ʻIliponi, no loko o ʻIʻipakalani, 666. In her character as goddess of heat she may become a possessing spirit (akua noho).2 Says Hoʻolapa, “Taro greens placed on the back of a person Haumea has entered will cook there,” and he adds, “I have eaten such luau and it was really cooked.”. . The “walling up at the back” and “in front” in an earlier line, Pokini referred to old methods of potato planting.3 The word mohala here applied to the land “is often used in the best poetry for the time of maturity in the virgin”; hence it is here applied to the flowering period of land made productive through cultivation. . Fornander, Polynesian Race, I, 191, 193. . Kuisa 1. . . Since in Hawaiian chants each line is, in general, complete in itself, I follow the usage of the text in omitting altogether end stops. The Kumulipo (“Beginning-in-deep-darkness”) is the sacred creation chant of a family of Hawaiian alii, or ruling chiefs. .                           . For thousands of years until the 1820s, Hawaiians relied on story-telling for remembering – for wisdom-keeping. Like us on Facebook: SHARE. Pokini refers them to a stage in the life of a child as it begins to crawl about and meet the rough and tumble of life. 3. Fornander, Collection (“Memoirs,” No. Beckwith herself, it will be recalled, has compared the Hebrew Genesis and the Kumulipo, but this was a comparison of poetic splendor and artistic worth. Crushed are the flowers, they weep in the cold. 88-90. to support (paʻa) the chiefs (lani). . of the Council on Library Resources. Her translation pictures the rise of earth out of slime at the time when the first light begins to dawn out of darkness before the sun was. The Ao is peopled by creatures endowed with power to develop arts and crafts, all cultural activities; the Po, by creatures “controlled” by gods alone, that is, born not through mankind but through the gods. Once man had this power, say old Hawaiians, and a number of stories are told throughout the Pacific of some trivial failure of the culture-bringer that determined death for mankind.23 If the connection with manʻs ultimate fate suggested above for the drawing contest between Kanaloa and Kane is correct, is it possible that late reciters of the Kumulipo chant have obscured the part played by Kanaloa in the story of Kiʻi and Laʻilaʻi, and “Kiʻi the man” was originally Kanaloaʻs figure drawn after the form of god Kane, into which Kanaloa has “placed his essence” to deceive the woman, just as Wakea in the later story enters the image (kiʻi) set up to lure Ka-weʻo-a? . 2. Bishop Museum Bull. This was the main idea, the kaona once more, of such a sacred intertwining of the lives of the living with the fabric of a long, deified past, with “the forty thousand gods, the four hundred thousand gods, the four thousand gods” of temple prayers.6, But I believe there was something more than mere Direcciones Taino 2. This is scarcely straight personification but rather a doctrine of souls corresponding to and animating material bodies and grouped in succession in time as a means of reaching a system of classification corresponding to the Hawaiian approach to the universe and to society as a whole. 12. The whole passage, thinks Kupihea, here refers, not to the spread of vegetation but to the multiplication of a people through the procreative function symbolized in the “man with the water gourd,” Kane-i-ka-wai-ola. Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream, Born was the Kala seaweed living in the sea, 88. . . Then began the slime which established the earth. Unfortunately this praiseworthy effort to revive interest among Hawaiians in their literary heritage is without importance for this study. O kane ia Waiʻololi, o ka wahine ia Waiʻolola, 430. . . The newborn child of high chief rank is himself quite literally born a god. The small initial k in the manuscript, moreover, is often indistinguishable from the capital. Kupulupulu is Laka, worshiped as god of the hula in the form of the flowering lehua tree and welcomed also as god of wild plant growth upon which the earliest settlers had subsisted and still continued to subsist to some extent during the cold winter months before staple crops were ready to gather. No Kumulipo no (“Concerning the Kumulipo”). They cover earth like the creeping ti plant, the Cordyline terminalis of the botanist, to be found everywhere in damp growth of the low uplands. This is a birth chant, and procreation is its theme. Possibly the name was titular and passed from one court poet to another. XXV. A younger woman of the same name, granddaughter by his daughter Kauwaʻa of that Alapaʻi who was at one time ruling chief of the island of Hawaii, married John Young the younger, later premier under Kamahameha III. Kupihea believes we should relate the series to specific families of settlers belonging to the migration period. The gods who created heaven and earth were three, Kane, Ku, and Lono. Since Hawaiians were not precise in the use of such technical elements as punctuation and capitalization, I have referred their use to each particular case without strictly following the printed text. Hanau ke Ao, hanau ke Awa i ke kai la holo, 150. . On the other hand, the word mahu, unaccented, may apply to a smoldering fire and it would then be possible to think of Kiʻi as personifying the fire of sexual passion, with a place in the interior of the house at the oven kept smoldering for quick rekindling, were it not for the fact that Hawaiians built their ovens out of doors and had no need of house fires for heating. . This chant of Kumulipo is the chant recited by Puʻou to Lono (Captain Cook) as he stood while a sacrifice of pork was offered to him at the heiau of Hikiau at Kealakekua. Dr. Beckwith's translation of the Kumulipo, with the lines numbered to correspond with those of the Kalakaua text at the back of the book, is given piecemeal. 10. We were riding from Lahaina toward Kahakaloa Point, where one strikes the trades across East Maui, and came upon a huge pillar-like block of stone fallen toward the sea. . . Boston, 1897. Kiaʻi ia e ka Manienie-ʻakiʻaki noho i uka, 46. . Moike-. . 1. THE MASTER OF SONG       . The sacred character of the chant is thus clearly established. Mrs. Pukui would render the lines thus: where the poet seems to pause for a general reflection about death as the universal fate of mankind, although, logically, we are still in the period of the Po, before the birth of human. The recitation of the genealogical prayer chant not only honors the long line of ancestral gods with whom he claims kinship but reminds them of their responsibility to this new offspring in the family descent, hence claiming for him as for a child of beloved parents those benefits of fertility in plant and animal life and of success along the pathway of human life necessary for his well being and within the power of gods alone to provide. In the ninth chant Laʻilaʻi seems to live successively with Kane and with Kiʻi. ], 1760. . . (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. Laʻaʻs story has already been told and the part he played in peopling the Hawaiian group. Honolulu, 1930. Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, pp. Koa is the Hawaiian word for a soldier, used with the same intent. Hanau ke Koʻe-enuhe ʻeli hoʻopuʻu honua, 18. of the fifteenth and the whole sixteenth section are devoted to the listing of the Maui branch of the Uli genealogy from Ha-loa, “Long-stalk,” ancestor of the Hawaiian people, to the Lono-i-ka-makahiki called a child of Keawe. 535. . BECKWITH, MARTHA W. Hawaiian Mythology. . . However, she had begun research on the chant before 1938. the symbolism here has been deflected to this practical conclusion from an originally more mythical ending. 1. The closing lines of the chant are hence devoted to the detailing of Piʻikeaʻs ancestry and the aggrandizement of her immediate posterity. From both places all were excluded save those of high rank. Defend The Sacred (Ilocano Welcome Chant) (1:35) 09. 307-10. Further trace of the old stock who count descent from the “first chief dwelling in cold uplands” is lost, “vanished into the passing night.”. Kumu-. . Things born from and sprung up in the day are of the light. The Hon. . Tremble through in shadowy fashion the outlines of the future world. THE name song of Maui at the close of the fifteenth section of the Kumulipo chant tells the story of the struggle for power of a younger son born into the family through an alien alliance, one entitling him to a higher-ranking status than the natural heir. . In the same way the Polynesian creation story as a successive appearance of plant and animal forms leading up to man must be referred to some such factual observation. Kiaʻi ia e ke Kalo-manauea noho i uka, 58. Paʻa ka honua i na keiki manu a ka pohaha, 384. SMITH, S. PERCY. . . . The Random Songs Songs . From the blood and afterbirth born of the union with the reincarnated goddess come the spawn of fish in March and the jellyfish of the sea. “Tuamotuan Concepts of Creation,” ibid., XLIX (Wellington, 1940), 69-136. ], The sixth strife was over the prayer tower in the heiau [? The coral was the first stone in the foundation of the earth mentioned in the chant. `Healing Song` is quite probably a Native chant shared atop a drumbeat. suggest the Polynesian myth of the forcible separation of Earth and Sky to admit the light of day, but I do not know by what authority the idea is read into the word lole, which means “to turn inside out” and is the basis for the cataclysm of world forces read into the text by some commentators, as well as for the idea of the seasonal return of the sun northward at the opening of the new year, as in the queenʻs rendering. The chant closes with the birth of the same three offspring of Laʻilaʻi as were named in the eighth ode when she lived “as a woman” in the land of Lua, here called “part of the family of that woman mentioned above” (la). 117-22, 136-37; Grey, pp. In the Kumulipo, spirits of darkness have generated animal and plant life of land and sea; now, generations of mankind people the land. But to the Polynesian these functions of sky and earth are themselves direct analogues of the process of human reproduction. . Dr. Beckwithʻs. . These connections help us better understand our privilege and kuleana (responsibility) to care for places and … The printing of the Kumulipo seems to have come as one result of this movement back to old court practices and the ancient clash of rank between the sons of Keawe. . The Lono-i-ka-makahiki mentioned in the chant was Ka-ʻI-ʻi-mamao. . Institute of Great Britain, LX (London, 1930), 235-68. That was the Ka-ʻI-ʻi-mamao here mentioned. In Tahiti Taʻaroa made “the great foundation of the earth” (te tumu nui o te fenua) to be the husband and “the stratum rock” (te papa fenua) to be the wife. Hawaiians certainly consider this their intent. From her high position she comes “bending down over Kiʻi,” that is, she takes a mere man as a husband, and from this union mankind is born, “the earth swarms with her offspring.” The enumeration of some eight hundred pairs, man and wife, descended from Kamahaʻina, “first-born” son of Laʻilaʻi and Kiʻi, and Haliʻa, Laʻilaʻiʻs daughter by Kane, sufficiently testifies to the fertility of the match. . A Hawaiian Creation Chant. They stress the period of darkness during which the shaping of earth and sea took place and their filling with living forms before man appeared. In the prayer quoted above he is distinguished as “Kanaloa the kava drinker” (inu ʻawa). . Born were the mixed breeds, they had no fixed line of descent, Born were the lousy-headed, they were lice infested, Born were the war leaders, men followed after them, Born were the high chiefs, they were ruddy, Born were the stragglers, they were dispersed. a noho! 5. . 4. . Each year when the sun turned its course northward and warmth and quiet weather prevailed, there returned to his worshipers this procreative force, the beneficent god of the Makahiki. The Aukuʻu have been compared to a company of plotters fearful of being overheard by chance listeners, this because of their habit of “hud-, dling together along a sandbank and glancing furtively, owllike, this way and that.”. . The shell was like an egg revolving in endless space, with no sky, no land, no sea, no moon, no sun, no stars. O Kane a Kapokinikini ka pou, o Kiʻi ka mahu, 698. . . In the Marquesan chant the “mothers of various kinds of material” are invoked to furnish these for the construction of the house of the first parents, ʻAtea and One-uʻi. . Awe of the dog child of the Night-creeping-away, 580. In any case, a virgin wife must be taken in order to be sure of her childʻs paternity, hence the careful guarding of a highborn girlʻs virginity until her first child was born. There a Tangaroa god “who delighted in doing evil” set fire in the highest heaven “seeking thus to destroy everything.” “Tangaroa-i-te-po” he is called and “supreme ruler of the underworld.”16 In New Zealand a quarrel is said to have arisen between Tane and Tangaroa when reptiles took to the land and Tangaroa resented this encroachment upon his preserves.17 In the Tahitian octopus myth it is Tane who cuts away the clinging arms of the octopus body of Taʻaroa and fills earth and sky with beauty. . Her story then turns upon the familiar theme of the cannibal wife. . Pukui, California Folklore Quarterly, II, 219. grass to complete the house. Traditions of Hawaii. . . The night produces horn-billed turtles, The night gives birth to dark-red turtles, The night is pregnant with the small lobster, The night gives birth to sluggish-moving geckos, Slippery is the night with sleek-skinned geckos, 405. O ke Akua ke komo, ʻaʻoe komo kanaka, 178. There is first darkness, po, or deep darkness, po-uli, then light, malamalama. . . Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. By a naha union he understands the child of parents of the same family but of different generations and instances the union of father and daughter or of a girl with her motherʻs brother. XXIII. . Pokini would doubtless refer the passage to the bestowal of the burning taboo upon Keawe's first-born at the time when he was officially introduced by name in the heiau to the rank of a high taboo chief. Fornander, Collection (“Memoirs,” No. . . 2. The Kumulipo genealogy continues from ʻUlu. tion by giving her an herb medicine to produce natural birth. . Everyone knows about the battle of Maui with the sun, He drank the yellow water to the dregs [? The feeling for analogy governs their wit, their gift of naming, their swift use of a concrete example rather than abstract definition. This takes place in a kind of tent under guard, and thereafter the girl is closely watched in order to make sure of the parentage of her expected off-spring. It does not appear in any other Hawaiian genealogy so far as I know, in spite of the important part played by the goddess Haumea today in folk belief. . Men multiply “by hundreds,” and the function of sex is once more emphasized in the familiar antithesis. III. . Another suggested rendering would translate mai as a negative particle and conceive the soul taking its way to “Malama”. . Kupihea illustrated by the gurgling sounds made in emptying a gourd filled with water according to the size of the aperture at its mouth, sounds which the pupil in the art of chanting was taught to imitate in order to gain control of the long vibration upon open or closed vowel sounds at the end of a phrase, an achievement considered the high point in a professional reciterʻs technique; but I do not know whether this is a universal practice. The list may further be regarded as a kind of genealogy, since Hawaiians claim that stars are called after chiefs, although the exact connection has never been fully explained. . . . . 6), p. 319. ers.” “This is the genealogy of the Hawaiian people; that is, from Kumulipo-ka-po to Wakea and Papa,” concludes the committee report of 1904. It used poetical devices of sound, such as repetition, assonance, and linked lines, often as a mnemonic device but also with a deeper implication, since an accumulation of words of like sound had power in determining the fates of men. . . The family name ʻI means “supreme” and the epithet mamao expressed the further “remoteness” to which his rank entitled him as first-born of a daughter of the ruling ʻI family of Hilo district to that Keawe who was called “foremost chief of the island,” Keawe-i-kekahi-aliʻi-o-ka-moku. Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, Facsimile reproduction of first edition, published in 1951 . Every Hawaiian knows the story of how, during the great shark war, when the shark Mikololou was dragged ashore and eaten “all but his tail,” or his “tongue” in some versions, a dog seized the remnant and leaped with it into the sea, whereupon the shark, feeling itself in its native element, resumed its full form. O kane ia Waiʻololi, o ka wahine ia Waiʻolola, 88. . In 1949, the Pacific Number of the Journal of American Folklore contained her brief paper (later partly incorporated and revised in her book), “Function and Meaning of the Kumulipo Birth Chant of Ancient Hawaii” (vol. The cosmos is thus the symbol, the sexual life and its fulfilment in the child the inner meaning, the kaona, of the Hawaiian creation chant. Then those who composed the meles (haku mele) were sent for to compose a mele inoa that should eulogize and blazon the ancestry of the new chief-to-be, in order to add distinction to him when he should be born. Product/Service. condemned under the taboo, as it flees, “pitiful without a garment,” to join its companions at the gathering place of the dead, where lies on the coast an entrance or “leaping place” into the underworld.3 “To Malama,” says the chant, and Hoʻolapa explained that Malama “is the place people go when they die,” and Hula-ka-Makani, “the wind that blows at Malama.” One such place he said lay “in Puna district on the island of Hawaii on the Pohoiki side of Kalapana,” but I failed to learn from Hoʻolapa whether all gathering places of the soul in other districts of Hawaii or on other islands are called “Malama” or whether, for all, the Hula (dance) wind blows. . certain allusions. He saw also a chance to strengthen his own hereditary claim to the throne among subjects who regarded genealogical descent as the ultimate test of rank. Folk-Tales from Hawaii. . . © 2002-2021 Encyclopaedia Metallum . Malo further specifies it to be "the walls of heaven; the border of the sky where it meets the ocean," while Kamakau adds, "the place above the dark clouds en-circling the earth." Under the surface meaning of the words lies the hidden meaning, or meanings, the kaona, as the Hawaiians say. . W. D. Alexander, “A Brief Memoir of Abraham Fornander,” in Stokes, Index to “The Polynesian Race,” pp. The Kumulipo enhanced the prestige and fortified the political bid for power of the family to which it belonged by using ancient cosmogonic beliefs, common elsewhere in Polynesia as in Hawaii, in such a way as to trace the family back to the “beginning in deep darkness.”. 241-44, and chap. . Actual blood relationship must always be a debatable point under the social etiquette then prevailing in court circles. The powers of the three joined together were sufficient to create and fix heaven and earth [from Ke Au Okoa, October 14, 1869].15, Since neither Ku nor Lono is named in the Kumulipo chant, it looks as if the displacement of Kanaloa in national worship took place after its composition. Only gods (he mau akua wale) lived at that time. Abraham Fornander, presumably unfamiliar with the Kumulipo, unwittingly accepted the amalgamation as having been preserved for generations in the Hawaiian oral tradition. Pokini, on the other hand, would explain each name of the species born under Popanopano, the male, and Polalowehi, the female, generative agents at this stage of life, as a play upon the characteristics of the developing infant. Slow Down 5. . 424-27, 411, 480. upon his crop; “nothing in the plains is safe from the rats, everything is burrowed out by them,” complains Kepelino.3. . Hanau ke Kaku, hanau ke Aʻuaʻu i ke kai la holo, 160. (Hawaiian Historical Society Reports, No. He grows to be a lad, still within the “shell” out of which he has formed a sky for the new land. . distinguished ancestor. O ke Akua ke komo, ʻaʻoe komo kanaka, 262. (Bernice Pauahi. Ngoni Songs . . BIRTH OF SEA AND LAND LIFE    . The Creation for Ka I i mamao, from him to his daughter Alapai wahine, Liliuokalaniʻs great-grandmother. . 1. . The poet therefore proceeds to explore back into the profound depth of the past for the beginning of the royal ancestral line. XIX. Most explain the series as purely rhetorical, a mere stuffing of the past for the sake of family prestige. The stories of usurping chiefs show how a successful inferior might seek intermarriage with a chiefess of rank in order that his heir might be in a better position to succeed his parent as ruling chief. . Some of these questions are answered on the title-pages of the published text and the queenʻs translation, others in the prose note affixed to the Kalakaua text, amplified from the original Hawaiian manuscript by the insertion of a paragraph, the third, explaining more fully the family connection of the child to whom the chant is said to have been dedicated. Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream, Born is the Heʻe [squid] living in the sea, Guarded by the Walaheʻe [shrub] living on land, 190. ], [The man] to whom her children were born [? . . These he enumerated as follows, but probably as they occurred to him rather than in order of rank: Naha, “an Oahu class originating from marriage between uncle and niece”, Io, “a Kauai class named from a little bird that lives on high lehua trees, the class to which Queen Kapiʻolani (Kalakauaʻs consort) belonged”, Puaiwa, “the class to which Kalakauaʻs line belonged”, Papaua, “the kahuna (priestly) line, a line of high chiefs”, It would be interesting to correlate these “nine daughters of Wakea” with John Whiteʻs “nine sisters” of Tini-rau, son of Takaroa in Maori tradition, although I do not find his passage in the Maori text.1, Kupihea further believes that certain passages of the chant have been inserted to boast of Kalakauaʻs own high lineage and throw discredit upon contemporary detractors. Hanau ka Makaiauli, o ka ʻOpihi kana keiki, puka, 28. In Mangareva, Toa Rupe, daughter of Te Rupe, is mother of the Maui brothers. . The poetʻs dates are given from 1716 to 1784. The eleventh section breaks into two parts of approximately four hundred pairs each. O kupa kupa, kekeʻe ka noho a ka wahine, 624. . [but it contains] many difficult words . The Lore of the Whare-wananga: Teaching of the Maori College on Religion, Cosmogony, and, History, Part I: Te Kauwae-runga or “Things Celestial.” (“Memoirs of the Polynesian Society,” Vol.