Kāne (Kāne-nui-ākea; called Tāne elsewhere in Polynesia)

The old houses faced east. A man woke, turned toward the doorway and the sun coming up out of the water, and prayed there, because that was the road the god travelled: the red road of Kāne, running in from Haʻehaʻe, the gate in the eastern wall of the sky where the sun is let through each morning. A whole theology sits inside that habit of architecture. He arrives with the light, and he arrives from the sea.

On Kauaʻi they put the same idea into a chant built out of one repeated question. Where is the water of Kāne? At the eastern gate where the sun comes in. Out with the floating sun, where the cloud shapes rest on the ocean. On the mountain peak, on the steep ridges, in the deep valleys, where the streams run. In the driving rain and the rainbow, in the piled mist, in the blood-red rain, in the black mottled sacred cloud. And deep in the ground, in the gushing spring, in the ducts of Kāne and Loa: a well-spring of water to quaff, a water of magic power, the water of life. The chant does not describe him. It locates him, everywhere water is, and then it asks him for some.

He came to the islands from Kahiki with Kanaloa, the two of them walking in the shape of men, drinking awa and planting bananas and looking for water, because awa must be mixed with water and they were thirsty a great deal. In the precipitous country behind Keanae on Maui the two stopped, high up, with no spring anywhere. Kanaloa said the word that starts the story: oi-ana, let it be seen. Kāne pushed his staff of kauila wood, close-grained and heavy, into the face of the cliff, and water came out of the rock in a cold rush that has not stopped since. Two holes are still shown just below the road across Ohia gulch, where he set the point down once and then again and said, this is for you, that for me. They opened springs at Waihee and Kahakuloa, at Punakou on Molokaʻi, at Kawaihoa on Oʻahu. On Kauaʻi they left few springs, because on Kauaʻi nobody recognised them as gods.

Descriptions of his person are thin, and the thinness is the point. One account gives him dark skin, curly hair and thick lips, with Kanaloa fair and tall at his shoulder. As Kāne-hekili, Kāne in the thunder, he appeared in dreams standing with his feet on the ground and his head in the cloud, one side of his body black and the other white, and men born with a birthmark on one side were understood to belong to him. His law in that form was silence. When the thunder came, every container in the house was turned bottom up, everyone lay face down, and nobody made a sound. Otherwise his body was a stone: a single conical pillar, plain or barely carved, planted about with ti, sprinkled with water or coconut oil and covered with a piece of bark cloth while the family prayed at it. The early heiau of Kāne held no images at all.

The oldest account of his origin puts him at the hinge of the world. In the Kumulipo, at the eighth chant, where the long night of the gods gives way to the day of living things, four are born together: the woman Laʻilaʻi, Kāne who is a god, Kiʻi who is a man, and Kanaloa, the great octopus. Other tellings begin further back, with Kāne alone in the unbroken darkness before there is any heaven or earth to speak of. Light is made. Three heavens are raised, the highest for Kāne, the next for Kū, the lowest for Lono, and beneath them the great earth of Kāne to rest their feet on. He hangs the sun, the moon and the stars in the empty space between. He makes the ocean salt, which is why the priests purified with sea water ever after.

Then he makes a man. On the eastern flank of Mololani, on the Mokapu peninsula of Oʻahu, fine red earth lies against bluish and blackish soil, and there Kāne drew a likeness of the gods in the dirt, with a head and a body and hands and legs. The head was white clay fetched from the seas of the four directions, the body red earth worked with spittle. Kāne and Kū breathed into the nostrils, Lono into the mouth. I have shaped this dirt, Kāne said, and I am going to make it live, and the other two answered, live, live. The figure got up onto its knees. They called him Kumuhonua, earth beginning, and made him a woman out of his own side while he slept, and he named her for the shadow that had been following him about.

Kanaloa, watching, made a figure of his own, and it stayed stone. He was angry about it. He cursed the living man to die, made all the poisonous things, and eventually rebelled and was thrown down into the underworld to rule the dead. In the same cycle Kumuhonua is given a garden and a law, breaks the law, and is driven out by a great white albatross; Kāne goes up to heaven to live, and man, left behind on the earth that was made for him, becomes subject to death.

These creation accounts reached paper in the nineteenth century, written by Hawaiian antiquarians who were also by then Christians, and the resemblance to Genesis is not subtle: the clay man, the woman from the rib, the forbidden fruit, the lost garden. Martha Beckwith, who laid the versions side by side in 1940, judged that familiarity with the Bible had coloured and emphasised traditions that were genuinely native rather than manufactured them, and she pointed south for support, where Tāne makes his woman out of sand and no missionary is required to explain it. The safest thing to say is that the story we have is old and has been handled.

What is not in doubt is what he did for people. He brought the food plants: the pig, the coconut, the breadfruit, the awa and the wauke whose bark becomes cloth, and the heiau called Ka-mau-ai at Keauhou marks where the cultivated plants are said to have landed. Offerings to him were a farmer’s offerings, laid down with a farmer’s prayer. Here is the taro, here are the bananas, here is the sugarcane, the awa; give life to us and our family, life for the parents feeble with age, life for all in the household. He was worshipped in an enormous scatter of names, thirty aumakua forms listed by Kamakau alone, one for every kind of work a family might need done, all of them the same god. Beneficent spirits called awa-iku carried his messages, drove off malevolent ones, and managed the winds and the rains. In the guise of an owl he thrust at his worshippers’ enemies with wings and talons and turned their weapons aside.

His limits were the ones his nature imposed. Ua kapu ke ola na Kāne, life is sacred to Kāne, and his rites were plain: no elaborate machinery, no victims. Kāne asked for no blood. The luakini, the war temple, the man snared for the altar, the eyeball of the sacrifice swallowed down in a cup of awa by Kāhoaliʻi, all of that belonged elsewhere in the pantheon, to Kū, and the god who was highest was not the god the state most needed. Nor could he undo what the broken law had done. He had breathed into the nostrils of a thing made of dirt and made it stand up, and he could not take dying back out of it once it was in. He went up. The water is still down here, at the eastern gate, in the black cloud, deep in the ground in the gushing spring, and the chant that finds it in every corner of the world ends by asking for the one thing the god withheld. E ola no, e-a. Life. Give us this life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kāne in Hawaiian mythology?

Kāne is the highest of the great Hawaiian gods, the deity of creation, light, procreation and fresh water. He was worshipped as the ancestor of both chiefs and commoners, and in the creation accounts he forms the heavens and the earth and fashions the first human being, assisted by Kū and Lono.

How did Kāne create the first man?

At Mololani on the Mokapu peninsula of Oʻahu, Kāne drew a likeness of the gods in the ground, using white clay for the head and red earth mixed with spittle for the body. Kāne and Kū breathed into its nostrils and Lono into its mouth, and the figure rose to its knees. He was named Kumuhonua, meaning earth beginning, and a woman was made from his side while he slept.

What is the water of Kāne?

The water of Kāne is fresh, life-giving water in all its forms, celebrated in a famous chant from Kauaʻi that asks where it can be found and answers that it is in the east, in the sea, on the mountains, in rain and rainbow and cloud, and deep underground in the gushing spring. Kāne and Kanaloa were said to travel the islands opening springs, and at Keanae on Maui Kāne drove his kauila staff into a cliff and brought water out of the rock.

Was Kāne given human sacrifice?

No. The worship of Kāne was simple, without human sacrifice or elaborate ritual, and the saying attached to him was ua kapu ke ola na Kāne, life is sacred to Kāne. Human victims belonged to the war temples of Kū. Families worshipped Kāne at a single upright stone called the Pōhaku-o-Kāne, offering a pig, awa and prayer.

What is the relationship between Kāne and Kanaloa?

Kanaloa is Kāne’s constant companion in the culture-hero stories, travelling with him from Kahiki, planting, drinking awa and finding water, with Kanaloa prompting and Kāne acting. In the creation legends the two are set against each other, Kanaloa making a rival man out of stone that will not live, cursing humanity with death, and finally rebelling and being cast down to rule the underworld.

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Kū, Lono, Pele, Mōʻo, Menehune, Nawao, Nightmarchers, Kupua, Māui, Tāne, Tangaroa, Ranginui and Papatūānuku, Makemake