Lono

The sign always came before the god did. Out past the horizon a bank of cloud would stack up dark and low over the water, dragging its own weather behind it, and the men watching from the shore read it the way another people might read a letter. Thunder folded inside it. Lightning banked and waiting. That thick, mineral heaviness in the air that means rain is finally coming to ground that has been cracking for months. This was Lono, arriving the only way he ever really arrived.

He is one of the four great akua of Hawaiʻi, and the one whose season you could feel on your skin. Kū held eight months of the year and held them hard, with war, with the strict tapu that propped up a ruling chief, with sacrifice that sometimes meant a man. Lono held the other four. In the prayers his signs are counted off like an inventory of everything the sky can do: thunder, lightning, earthquake, the dark cloud, the rainbow, wind and whirlwind, waterspouts, the red mountain streams running to the sea stained with the earth they have torn loose. The chant addressed to him at his return names his bodies as “a long cloud, a short cloud, a watchful cloud,” which is a strange and lovely way of saying that the god is the weather and the weather is watching you back.

Because his bodies were ordinary things, so was his worship. Every householder kept a food gourd in the mua, the men’s eating house, wrapped in wickerwork and hung by cords from a notched stick. Inside went food, fish and ʻawa, with a small piece of ʻawa tied to the handle outside. Morning and evening a pious man lifted it down, set it in the doorway, turned to face outward and prayed for the chiefs, for the commoners, for his own household, then ate what was in the gourd and sucked the bitter root. That was the whole rite. A gourd on a string, a man in a doorway, and a god who might send rain.

Where Lono came from is not tidy. One line of tradition, recorded in the nineteenth century by Abraham Fornander, sets him beside Kāne and Kū at the making of the world and of the first man and woman, Kumuhonua and Lalohonua. That account was written down after the missionaries landed and it shows: the breath into the nostrils, the woman taken from the sleeping man’s rib. Other evidence points the other way, suggesting Lono entered the Hawaiian orders of priesthood comparatively late, carried over from Maui, arriving as a god of peace and increase into a religious system already built around Kū. Martha Warren Beckwith noted the Tahitian Roʻo behind him, a messenger god who sets himself in the cloud, feeds on it, and travels on with it.

The story Hawaiians told about him is a domestic one that curdles. Lono sent two brothers out to find him a wife on earth, and they searched island to island until they came to Waipiʻo valley on Hawaiʻi, where the Hiʻilawe falls come down, and found Kaikilani in a breadfruit grove with the birds. Lono came down a rainbow and married her. They settled at Kealakekua and spent their days surfing. Then a chief of earth fell in love with her and stood on the cliff above the house singing a wooing song, and Lono heard it, and killed her with one blow before she could finish telling him she had done nothing and loved only him. What followed was grief with no floor under it. He carried her body to the temple and wailed over it, then walked the whole island out of his mind, challenging every man he met to box him. The people asked whether Lono had gone entirely mad. He said he was mad on her account, mad with the size of his love. He founded the games in her memory, built a canoe with a mast of ʻōhiʻa and a sail of Niʻihau matting, let forty men carry it to the water, and sailed away alone. He would come back, he said, but not in a canoe. He would come back on an island shaded with trees, covered over with coconuts, swarming with fowl and swine.

His season opened when Makaliʻi, the Pleiades, rose at dusk. Fires were lit along the beach and the people went into the sea to wash, a splashing, shouting business called hiʻuwai, and came out into fresh cloth. Then the long god was brought out. It was a straight pole ten to fifteen feet tall and about ten inches around, carved with joints along its length, with a figure at the top that one early observer took for a bird. A crosspiece some sixteen feet wide was lashed near the summit, hung with feather lei and with imitations of the skeleton of the kaupu bird, and from each end fell long streamers of white kapa that hung down past the foot of the pole and caught the wind like sail. The image went round the coast clockwise, land side to the right, at the pace of the men carrying it, and the circuit could take twenty days. A smaller god went the opposite way through the uplands. For five days the high priest wore a bandage over his eyes, and boxing, boasting and games filled the time.

At every chief’s place the bearers were fed, the chief’s wife tied a fresh kapa girdle round the god and the chief clasped an ivory ornament to it. Hail to Lono, the people called, while the priest prayed and pointed out the clouds coming in from Kahiki. And at every stop the offerings were counted. It was a tax. If the pile looked thin the god simply stayed the night until more was found, and the overseer of that land was likely to lose it; in Kamehameha’s day the pole would be lowered and the whole following turned loose to strip the district of whatever they fancied, and the moment it was set upright again the licence ended and a thief was a thief.

When the long god came home the ruling chief put out in a canoe to meet it. Coming ashore he was met by a company of spearmen. One threw a spear at him, which he or his attendant knocked aside, and another stepped in and touched him with the point, and then a mock battle broke out over the whole beach. That night he offered a pig at the heiau. Later the great net of Maoloha, packed with vegetable food, was shaken out over the ground, and everyone watched to see whether anything stayed caught in the mesh. Nothing clinging meant a fat year coming.

The promise to return on a floating island is the reason Lono’s name is tangled up with James Cook, who anchored in Kealakekua Bay during Makahiki with sails the size of kapa banners. Whether Hawaiians actually received Cook as Lono has been fought over for forty years, Marshall Sahlins arguing that the encounter ran along the grooves of the Makahiki ritual and Gananath Obeyesekere replying that the apotheosis was a European invention, a myth of conquest handed to Hawaiians after the fact. The argument is not settled, and it was conducted largely between two outsiders.

What Lono can do follows from what he is. He brings water in every form it takes, swells the sweet potato and the gourd, fattens the pig, and answers prayers for health as readily as for harvest, and he does it without ever asking for a human life. What he cannot do is hold the year. His authority runs four months and no further; the wickerwork frame goes out to sea to carry him back to Kahiki, an unpainted canoe runs back and forth in the shallows, the tapu on pork and on the aku are lifted in their proper order, and Kū’s eight months start again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lono in Hawaiian mythology?

Lono is one of the four great akua of Hawaiʻi, the god of rain, agriculture, fertility, healing and peace. His presence is read in cloud formations, thunder, lightning, rainbows and storms, and his bodily forms include the gourd, the sweet potato, the pig, the cloud and the rain itself. He is set against Kū, the god of war, whose season occupies the other eight months of the year.

What is the Makahiki festival?

Makahiki is the four-month season dedicated to Lono, beginning when the Pleiades rise at dusk and running through the wet months. War and ordinary work stopped, the people bathed ceremonially and held boxing matches, sledding and board games, and an image of Lono called the long god was carried clockwise around the island collecting tribute from every district.

What did the image of Lono look like?

The Makahiki image, known as the long god or Lonomākua, was a carved wooden pole roughly ten to fifteen feet tall and ten inches in circumference, with a figure at the top that early observers described as a bird. A crosspiece about sixteen feet across was tied near the summit and hung with feather garlands, imitation seabird skeletons and long white bark-cloth streamers that fell below the base of the pole.

Why did Lono leave Hawaiʻi?

In the best-known story Lono married Kaikilani, overheard another chief singing a love song to her, and killed her in a jealous rage before she could convince him of her innocence. Maddened with grief, he founded the games in her memory, then built a canoe and sailed away alone, promising to return not by canoe but on an island covered with trees, coconuts, fowl and swine.

Did Hawaiians believe Captain Cook was Lono?

This is genuinely disputed. Cook arrived at Kealakekua Bay during Makahiki, and Marshall Sahlins argued that Hawaiians received him within the ritual frame of Lono’s return; Gananath Obeyesekere argued that the story of Cook’s deification was European mythmaking imposed after the event. Decades of debate have not settled it.

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