Kanaloa

The Kumulipo gives him one line and does not flatter him. Born was Kanaloa, the foul-smelling squid. That is the entire introduction one of the four great gods of Hawaiʻi receives in the chant that counts the making of the world, and the smell in it is accuracy rather than insult. Anyone who has pulled a heʻe out of a hole in the reef and carried it home over a shoulder knows the low sharp reek, and the way the arms go on moving against the skin long after the animal has finished being an animal.

For a god of that rank the record is strangely quiet. Kū splinters into war names, Kāne into sunlight and thunder and a dozen lesser forms that carry his name at the front like a family surname. Kanaloa does not splinter. No minor akua is called Kanaloa-of-anything. He arrives, he is invoked, he is fed ʻawa, and he goes.

What he has instead of a crowded pantheon of aspects is a companion. Almost everywhere he appears, Kāne is beside him, and the pair are drawn as deliberate opposites. Kāne is dark, his hair tight and curling, his lips full. Kanaloa is tall and fair. Kāne is called on while a canoe is being built, when the adze is still ringing on the hull; Kanaloa is called on once the canoe is sailing and the water underneath has gone from green to a blue with no bottom in it. The northern edge of the sun’s yearly track across the sky is the dark road of Kāne. The southern edge is the dark road of Kanaloa. The two of them divide the sky the way they divide the work.

They came from Kahiki, the two of them, travelling on the surface of the sea, and they went up and down the islands like a pair of surveyors with a thirst. ʻAwa is their food, and ʻawa needs water. That single practical need is the engine of most of the stories about them. They arrive somewhere dry, they want a drink, and a spring appears.

In the steep country behind Keʻanae on Maui they climbed until the streams gave out and stood arguing about whether water could be got at that height. Let it be seen, said Kanaloa. Kāne drove in his staff of close-grained kauila wood and the water came out of the rock, cold enough to ache in the teeth. Below the road at ʻŌhiʻa gulch there are two holes in the ground where he is said to have set the spear once and then again, saying: this one is for you, that one for me. The water still running out of them is called the water of Kāne and Kanaloa. They did the same at Waihee and Kahakuloa, at Waikāne on Lānaʻi, at Punakou on Molokaʻi, at Kawaihoa on Oʻahu. On Kauaʻi they left very few springs, because nobody there recognised them as gods.

There is a phrase in the old accounts that catches the arrangement exactly: Kanaloa acts as the urge, Kāne as the executor. He points. The other one strikes.

The two of them built fishponds along the way, walling off the shallows at Mokapu with two men who lived there. On Lānaʻi during a famine a fisher boy kept a small hut for his god and put a piece of fish in it every day, saying, here is a bit of fish for you, and the pair were pleased enough with him to end the hunger on the whole island. Their generosity had teeth, though. A Hawaiian-language newspaper printed the warning without softening it in 1865: their power was such that if a man held back what they asked for, ʻawa or anything else, they could take his life if they saw fit.

The ocean itself is thought of as one of his bodies, which is a larger claim than it first sounds. His kinolau run from the heʻe and the muheʻe through the naiʻa and the koholā, the dolphin and the whale, and then come ashore into the maiʻa, the banana, and into ʻuhaloa, a low scrubby weed that grows on dry ground and is used as medicine. Several of those were kapu for women to eat. And the island of Kahoʻolawe is Kanaloa, not merely named for him: Kohemālamalama o Kanaloa, a body rather than a monument, its southwestern point looking down the channel called Kealaikahiki, the road to Tahiti, which is where a navigator lines up his canoe before committing to open water.

The uglier version of him needs its provenance stated. In a body of Hawaiian material written down in the late nineteenth century, Kanaloa leads a company of spirits who rebel because they are refused ʻawa, is beaten by Kāne and thrown into the dark, and becomes Milu, ruler of the dead. He shapes a man out of earth in imitation of Kāne and his man stays stone. He curses humanity with death, makes the poisonous things, seduces the first man’s wife and drives the first couple out of the garden the gods had given them. The shape of that is not hard to identify. Those stories come from Hawaiian antiquarians of the Christian era, several of them writing for missionary employers, and the scholarship that examined them closely, Dorothy Barrère’s study of the Kumuhonua legends for the Bishop Museum in 1969, treats them as late compositions in which genuine tradition has been reset in a biblical frame. The four great akua get rearranged into a trinity with a devil attached, and Kanaloa draws the short straw. It sits badly against everything older, where he and Kāne are named in the same breath by the same worshippers over the same bowl.

His limits are the limits of a god who works through another. He is the urge, not the hand. He was left with almost no springs on Kauaʻi because he could not compel recognition where none was offered. He generates no named subsidiary forms, so there is no Kanaloa of the fishhook, no Kanaloa of the reef, nothing for a household to adopt as its own particular version of him. Even the squid that carries his name drifted, and came to be regarded with unease as an ʻaumakua. Sail far enough south and he grows enormously: Tangaroa is the sea in Aotearoa, Tagaloa makes the universe in Sāmoa, Taʻaroa in Tahiti sits alone inside a shell until he breaks it open and builds the world from the pieces. Hawaiian turns the t to a k and the ng to an n, and the same name comes out as Kanaloa, walking inland with a companion, looking for fresh water to mix a drink.

Kahoʻolawe is a reserve now, and the body running it describes its work as restoring the kino of Kanaloa. That is a stranger sentence than it looks. It commits an agency to the position that an island is a god’s actual flesh, and that bringing back the seabirds and the dryland plants and the fish on the surrounding reefs is not conservation but repair.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kanaloa in Hawaiian mythology?

Kanaloa is one of the four major akua of traditional Hawaiian religion, alongside Kāne, Kū and Lono. He is the god of the deep ocean, of long-distance voyaging and of healing, and he is symbolised by the squid and the octopus. He almost always appears paired with Kāne, and the two are invoked together in prayers over food, canoes and water.

Is Kanaloa the Hawaiian god of evil or the underworld?

No, not in the older material. The stories that cast Kanaloa as a rebel against Kāne, as the bringer of death and as Milu the ruler of the dead come from late nineteenth-century Hawaiian writings produced under Christian influence, some of them for missionary employers. Dorothy Barrère’s Bishop Museum study of the Kumuhonua legends treats that whole cycle as a late reworking, and in the older record Kāne and Kanaloa are worshipped side by side by the same people.

What are Kanaloa’s kinolau, or body forms?

His best-known kinolau are the heʻe, the octopus, and the muheʻe, the squid, along with the naiʻa (dolphin) and the koholā (whale). The ocean itself is regarded as one of his bodies. On land his forms include the maiʻa, the banana, and ʻuhaloa, a medicinal plant. Several of these were kapu for women to eat.

Why is Kahoʻolawe called Kanaloa?

The island of Kahoʻolawe is a kino, a physical body, of Kanaloa, and carries the name Kohemālamalama o Kanaloa. It has long been associated with open-ocean navigation, and its southwestern point faces the channel called Kealaikahiki, the road to Kahiki. The state commission that manages the island today describes its mission as restoring the kino of Kanaloa.

Is Kanaloa the same god as Tangaroa?

They are the same name carried across Polynesia by different languages, but the traditions attached to it differ sharply. Hawaiian shifts t to k and ng to n, so Tangaroa becomes Kanaloa. In Aotearoa, Tangaroa is the sea itself; in Sāmoa, Tagaloa is a creator of the universe; in Tahiti, Taʻaroa breaks out of a shell to make the world. The Hawaiian Kanaloa is a smaller, stranger figure who walks inland with Kāne looking for fresh water.

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