Kāne

Before anything else there was the long night, and Kāne alone inside it. No heaven above him, no earth beneath, nothing to stand on and nothing to look at. In the Fornander account light arrives second, after the dark has had its full turn, and even then the gods take their time. They stack three heavens one over another, the highest for Kāne, the next for Kū, the lowest for Lono. Only after that does it occur to anyone to make the ground, something to rest their feet on, and they call it the great earth of Kāne.

He hung the sun, the moon and the stars in the empty space between the heavens and that new ground. He made the ocean salt, which is why priests ever afterwards purified with seawater rather than fresh. Then came the part everyone remembers.

On the eastern flank of Mololani, a crater hill on the Mokapu peninsula of Oʻahu, fine red earth lies up against soil that runs bluish and black. The three gods went there for their clay. The head of the first man was built from white clay fetched out of the seas of all four directions, the right side from the north and east, the left from the south and west, and the body from red earth worked wet with spittle. Kū did the shaping. Lono passed things across. Kāne stood over the finished figure and said that he had shaped this dirt and now meant to make it live, and the other two answered him, live, live. Kāne and Kū breathed into the nostrils. Lono breathed into the mouth. The thing on the ground rose onto its knees.

They named him for what he was made of, Honua-ula, red earth, and gave him a garden called Kalana-i-hauola, and a wife taken from his right side, and a law. He broke the law. Death came in through that gap, and Kāne, who until then had lived on earth among people, went up to heaven to live instead. In one telling a great white albatross drives the pair out of the garden. In another the woman meets a white-beaked seabird standing in the shallows fishing, is talked into eating the sacred apples, goes mad and turns into a seabird herself, and the trees open a path into the jungle and close again behind her so that the garden can never be found.

The resemblance to Genesis is obvious and it was noticed early. This material was written down in the nineteenth century by Hawaiian antiquarians who had been reading the Bible for a generation, and Martha Beckwith, who assembled the fullest account of it, flagged one version as possibly late. Her judgement was that the influence runs the gentler way round: familiarity with the biblical stories lent colouring and emphasis to traditions that were genuinely there already, rather than the whole thing being invented in imitation. It is worth knowing that in the southern groups Tāne makes a woman out of sand, and that the same three names appear together in Tahiti, where Tāne, Roʻo and Tū were worshipped by the manahune, which puts the arrangement a long way outside missionary reach.

The Kāne that people actually lived with was a good deal less remote than the one in the cosmogony, and he rarely travelled alone. He and Kanaloa came from Kahiki in human shape and went about the islands planting, drinking ʻawa and looking for water. One account has them at Alakahi in Waipiʻo valley on Hawaiʻi, growing bananas with a few minor gods for company, living quietly. The two did not look alike. Kanaloa was tall and fair. Kāne was dark, with curly hair and thick lips, which is a rarer thing to find in the record than it sounds, since most of the great gods are handed down with no face at all.

High in the wet mountains behind Keanae on Maui the pair ran out of water and stood arguing about whether there could be any at that height. Let it be seen, said Kanaloa. Kāne drove his staff of heavy kauila wood into the rock and the water came out of it. Further along, in a gulch beyond Keanae, he did it twice more, one hole and then another, this for you and that for me, and what runs there still carries both their names. In Manoa valley they both reached for a pretty girl and got a boulder in the path for their trouble, and a trickle of water where she had been standing, with two ʻōhiʻa trees leaning over it. On Kauaʻi they left very few springs, because nobody there recognised them as gods.

Worship of him was plain work. No human sacrifice, no laborious machinery. Life is sacred to Kāne, people said, and for a long time his heiau held no images at all. What most families had instead was a stone: a single cone of rock anywhere from a foot to eight feet high, plain or barely carved, set up where a dream had told the kahuna to set it and planted round with tī. They came early, before the heat. Someone chewed ʻawa while a pig baked in the ground. The stone took a sprinkling of water or coconut oil and a wrapping of bark cloth, and the family ate under kapu and left nothing behind, no scraps, no rubbish, then asked forgiveness for whichever broken kapu had brought their trouble down on them.

That stone could be addressed under almost any name, because Kāne came apart into hundreds of himself. Kamakau listed thirty household forms and then said there were thousands upon thousands, which Beckwith read as enthusiasm rather than arithmetic. The temple prayers run on for pages as nothing but names: Kāne of the rainbow, Kāne of the little wind, Kāne of the quaking coral, Kāne travelling mountainward, Kāne travelling seaward, Kāne asleep in the full light of noon. One of those forms was thunder. Kāne-hekili comes to his people in dreams with his feet on the ground and his head in the cloud, one side of him black and the other white, and anyone born with a birthmark down the right side belongs to him. Kahekili, the last ruling chief of Maui, had one whole side of his body tattooed to show that he did. During a storm every container in the house was turned bottom upward, people lay face down, and nobody made a sound. Silence is his law. Two stones in a cave at Kahuku on Oʻahu are pointed out as two boys who talked.

His reach is easiest to see in the list of what belongs to him. Sunlight and the east, which is called his high road, and the reason old houses were built with the door facing that way and old people turned toward the sun for the morning prayer. Fresh water in every shape it takes: stream, pool, spring, fishpond, rain, cloud. Taro, sugar cane, bamboo, coconut, ʻawa, wauke, breadfruit, the pig. He is credited with bringing the cultivated food plants to the islands in the first place. He keeps messengers, the awa-iku, who manage the winds and rains and turn aside the mu spirits that make people ill. And there is the water of life, which is the thing his name attaches to most often of all.

For a god sitting at the top of everything, he is easy to refuse. Kanaloa watched him draw a man in the earth and drew one alongside it; Kāne’s stood up and Kanaloa’s stayed stone, and Kanaloa’s answer was to curse the living thing with death and set about making poisons. Kāne did not undo it. He went up to heaven and left the man he had made to die on schedule. He compels nothing. He takes no victims, he breaks nobody, and where he goes unrecognised he simply does not leave much water behind. There is a hula still danced that has him drinking ʻawa, setting his head on a pillow and falling asleep on a mat under a blanket of mist, which is not the posture of a god who intends to intervene.

The chant from Kauaʻi that carries his name is built as one question asked six times over. Where is the water of Kāne? At the eastern gate, where the sun comes in at Haʻehaʻe. In the mountains, at sea, in the rain, in the piled cloud on the horizon. The answers work outward in pairs of opposites until there is nowhere left that the water is not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kāne in Hawaiian mythology?

Kāne is the highest of the great Hawaiian gods, maker of the heavens, the earth and the first human being. He was worshipped as the ancestor of chiefs and commoners alike, and fresh water in all its forms is understood as his body. His name is also the ordinary Hawaiian word for a man.

How did Kāne create the first human?

Kāne, Kū and Lono made the first man on the eastern flank of Mololani, a crater hill on the Mokapu peninsula of Oʻahu, where red earth lies beside darker soil. The head was formed from white clay gathered out of the seas of all four directions and the body from red earth mixed with spittle. Kāne and Kū breathed into the nostrils and Lono into the mouth, and the figure came to life. They named him Honua-ula, red earth.

What is the water of Kāne?

Fresh water is one of Kāne’s physical forms, so streams, springs, pools, rain and cloud are all understood as the god himself. A Kauaʻi chant asks six times over where the water of Kāne is, and answers that it is at the eastern gate where the sun rises, in the mountains, at sea and in the sky. Kāne and Kanaloa were also said to have opened springs across the islands by driving a staff into bare rock.

Why did the worship of Kāne require no human sacrifice?

Life itself was held sacred to Kāne, and his worship was correspondingly plain, without human offerings or heavy ritual, and for a long time without images in his temples. Families prayed instead at a conical stone called a pōhaku o Kāne, set up where a dream directed, planted round with tī and given water or coconut oil, a baked pig and ʻawa.

Is Kāne the same god as Tāne?

They are cognate figures rather than one god under two spellings. Kāne is the Hawaiian form, and Tāne appears across southern Polynesia, where he is credited with making a woman out of sand. The Hawaiian arrangement of Kāne, Kū and Lono has a close parallel in Tahiti, where Tāne, Roʻo and Tū were worshipped by the manahune.

Related Entries

Kū, Lono, Kanaloa, Pele, Hiʻiaka, Kamapuaʻa, Poliʻahu, Moʻo, Menehune, Nightmarchers, Lua-o-Milu, Tane, Tangaroa, Tiki