Hiʻiaka

The egg crossed the open ocean under Pele’s arm, held warm against the skin the whole way from Kahiki while her elder sister looked for a firepit deep enough to live in. When it hatched, the child inside was the first of the Pele family born in Hawaiʻi, and the name she was given reads like a receipt for the passage. Hiʻiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele. Hiʻiaka in the bosom of Pele. Hiʻi is to carry a child in the arms. Aka is the embryo at the moment of conception. The name is not a description of her. It is a description of what was done for her, and the whole saga that follows is an argument about what that debt is worth.

She grew up in Puna, on the eastern shoulder of Hawaiʻi Island where the old lava runs black to the waterline and the ʻōhiʻa trees put out red lehua blossoms that look like sparks caught mid-air. That grove was hers. So was her friend Hōpoe, whose name means one encircled, as with a lei or with loving arms, and who by most accounts taught her to dance. On a good afternoon there was surf noise on the rocks at Nānāhuki, the smell of hot stone and salt, and two women dancing in a grove nobody else had any business entering. Hiʻiaka was the first person to dance hula, which is why hula hālau still chant for her, along with her sisters Laka and Kapo, before students are allowed through the door.

There is more than one Hiʻiaka. The name belongs to a whole line of sisters, twelve of them in some countings and forty in others, each distinguished by an epithet, and the family’s collective task is to carry the clouds and bring the rain, the thunder and the lightning that come off both storms and volcanoes. Hiʻiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele is the one the stories mean. Her sacred form is the palaʻā lace fern, among the first green things to appear on cooling lava, which tells you something about her department.

The trouble started while Pele was asleep. Her spirit went wandering, followed a hula drum across the water to Kauaʻi, and came back in love with a young chief named Lohiʻau. Pele asked her sisters to go and fetch him. They found reasons. Hiʻiaka agreed, and set two conditions on the way out: forty days, and while she was gone Pele would guard the lehua grove and keep Hōpoe safe. Pele set her own condition in return. Do not embrace him.

Pele armed her for the road with three gifts: ʻAwihikalani, a critical eye that could see forward and speak with spirits; ka lima ikaika o Kīlauea, the strong arm of the crater; and a pāʻū uila, a bark-cloth skirt with lightning folded into it. A skirt as a weapon is not an accident in a tradition where male gods do not get to rule everything.

The journey is where the epic earns its length. She travelled with Pāʻūopalapalai and with Wahine ʻŌmaʻo, the only companion who lasted the whole way, and briefly with a Puna princess named Papulehu who was generous with lei and careless with prayer, and who was therefore blind in her first battle and was eaten. The moʻo Panaʻewa met them as fog, then as needling rain, then as a kukui tree, and Hiʻiaka answered by thickening the vines around the whole forest until the shape-shifter could not move. She tore Pili and Noho jaw from jaw for charging travellers a toll at the Wailuku river. She dealt with Kikipua, a moʻo who stretched her tongue across a gap and let people step onto it, and then laid down her own pāʻū as a bridge and walked to Oʻahu on it. On Maui the chief Olepau refused her hospitality after she had chanted the proper request at his door. She waited until he was asleep, caught his second soul as it drifted loose, and dashed it against a rock near Waiheʻe. She killed him for bad manners and kept walking.

At Haʻena on Kauaʻi she found that Lohiʻau had died of longing. She caught his spirit, worked it back into the cold body, and chanted over him for days until he breathed. Then she turned around and started the long walk home with him, past a seer on Oʻahu named Peleula who tried to win him for the night at a game of kilu, and lost.

The forty days ran out somewhere in there. Pele, with no news and a great deal of imagination, decided she had been betrayed. She sent fire through Puna, burned the ʻōhiʻa groves to stumps, and turned Hōpoe into stone. Hiʻiaka’s far sight was working perfectly. She watched all of it happen from a distance she could not close.

She brought Lohiʻau to the terrace at Kahoaliʻi, on the caldera rim, taught him the chants that would shield him from flame, and embraced him there in full view. Pele told the other sisters to kill him. They hesitated, so Pele did it herself. Then Hiʻiaka went down into the crater and began to stamp. The cliff walls of Uēkahuna shook. The floor cracked, and she went through it, layer after layer, driving down through nine strata toward the tenth, the one holding back the groundwater that would rise and drown the fires of Kīlauea permanently. She was talked out of it at the last stratum.

Her powers all run in one direction. Pele makes land; Hiʻiaka makes it live again. She heals, she brings growth, she is the fern on the new rock and the beach vine that still carries her name, and her messengers are pueo, the owls. What she cannot do is undo. The revived Lohiʻau comes back; the grove does not, and Hōpoe stays stone. Her greatest gifts came from the sister she ends up fighting, which means every one of them is on loan. And her far sight, the best thing Pele gave her, mostly served to show her the fire in Puna in real time from the wrong island. Some tellings end with Lohiʻau choosing her and going back to Kauaʻi at her side, others with him staying between the two of them, others with Pele handing her to a man named Paoa instead. The versions have never agreed, and the story survived precisely because it was retold by people who felt entitled to change the ending. Hoʻoulumāhiehie ran his version as a daily serial in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Naʻi Aupuni through 1905 and 1906, some five hundred pages of it studded with 375 chants, and Nathaniel Emerson published a very different English rendering in 1915 with the sharper edges filed off.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hiʻiaka in Hawaiian mythology?

Hiʻiaka is the youngest and most beloved sister of the volcano deity Pele, and the patron goddess of hula, chant, sorcery and medicine. Her full name, Hiʻiakaikapoliopele, means “Hiʻiaka in the bosom of Pele” and refers to Pele carrying her from Kahiki to Hawaiʻi as an egg. She was the first member of the Pele family to be born in the islands.

Why did Hiʻiaka and Pele fall out?

Pele sent Hiʻiaka to Kauaʻi to fetch her lover, the chief Lohiʻau, with a deadline of forty days and an order not to embrace him. The journey took longer, and Pele decided she had been betrayed. She burned Hiʻiaka’s sacred ʻōhiʻa lehua groves in Puna and turned Hiʻiaka’s friend Hōpoe to stone, and Hiʻiaka retaliated by embracing Lohiʻau in front of her.

What powers does Hiʻiaka have?

Pele gave her three gifts for the journey: ʻAwihikalani, a far sight that let her see ahead and speak with spirits; the strong arm of Kīlauea, for battle; and a pāʻū uila, a bark-cloth skirt with lightning in its folds. She could also catch a soul that had left a sleeping body, and she twice restored Lohiʻau to life after he died. Her deeper role is as a healer of land, bringing growth back to ground that Pele has burned.

Is Hiʻiaka the goddess of hula?

Yes. Hiʻiaka is said to have been the first person to dance hula, at Pele’s request, and hula hālau chant to her along with her sisters Laka and Kapo. Her friend Hōpoe is credited in many accounts with teaching her the dance in the lehua groves of Puna.

How does the story of Hiʻiaka and Lohiʻau end?

It depends on the telling. After Pele killed Lohiʻau with lava and Hiʻiaka revived him, some versions have him choose Hiʻiaka and return with her to Kauaʻi, some have him remain with both women, and some have Pele give Hiʻiaka to a man named Paoa instead. Before any of that, Hiʻiaka stamped down through nine layers of the Kīlauea crater floor intending to flood it and quench Pele’s fires forever, and was dissuaded at the last one.

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