Kanaloa

Polynesian Accounts of Creation

Ta’aroa (Kanaloa in Hawaii) “gives a filip and cracks the shell” in which he is confined.

The gods Kane and Kanaloa are rather regularly named in this trio with a third figure representing man.

Three males join in the task of peopling earth with mankind, Ta’aroa, Tu, Ti’i in Tahiti and an equivalent trio of Kane, Kanaloa, and Ki’i in Hawaii.

Another common element with South Sea mythical conceptions in the Kumulipo trio is the octopus form taken by Kanaloa in this chant of the first dawn of day.

The eight-armed octopus, called in the Kumulipo the “hot-striking” (hauna-wela), is the manifestation or body in which Kanaloa may appear in some Polynesian groups as god of the sea and sea creatures in contrast to Kane, god of land forms.

In Hawaii, a prayer at the launching of a canoe names both gods, Kane as god of the forest from which the tree was cut, Kanaloa as god of the element over which the canoe must travel.

A sorcerer’s prayer for the healing of the sick invokes Kanaloa “god of the octopus”—ke akua o ka he’e.

A further factor entering into the position of Kanaloa in Hawaiian accounts of creation, but not apparent in the Kumulipo, shows strife to have arisen at some time either before or after the migration into the Hawaiian group between followers of the Kanaloa priesthood and that of Kane, with Kane eventually triumphant, Kanaloa repudiated, and god Ku set up in his stead as agent with Kane in the creation story.

Kanaloa was a great enemy of these three gods.

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.

Certainly by the time of the American mission in 1820 the idea prevailed that Kanaloa was rebellious against Kane and worked against him.

The missionaries compared Kanaloa with the biblical Satan.

Best says, quoting Fornander, “Kanaloa is in Hawaii .

In Hawaii, a contest over the right of the kava drink seems to be connected with Kanaloa’s overthrow.

In the prayer quoted above he is distinguished as “Kanaloa the kava drinker” (inu ’awa).

A Fornander note equates Lihau’ula, “a priest of greater renown than any other,” with Kanaloa.

The embryo lying surrounded by the sac of fluid within the mother’s womb belongs to the spirit world, to Kanaloa; with birth it emerges into the world of living men and becomes the child of Kane.

Again, Kanaloa, god of darkness and the underworld, takes over man at death.

In Hawaii a story tells how the two gods each make a figure of a man and Kanaloa’s dies while Kane’s lives.

Perhaps because Kanaloa made his figure first, all men must eventually die.

If the connection with man’s 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 Ki’i and La’ila’i, and “Ki’i the man” was originally Kanaloa’s 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 (ki’i) set up to lure Ka-we’o-a?