Pāoa

Also Known As: also written Paoa and Pa-oa; one Hawaiian informant of Nathaniel Emerson’s held that the word should be pahoa, a dagger or short club
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Hawaiian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A digging staff that both tests ground for a fire pit and excavates it, rejecting any site the sea can reach from below.
Role in Mythos: It is the instrument by which Pele’s company searches the Hawaiian chain from Nihoa down to Kīlauea for a home her fires can hold.
Relation to Humans: Mortals never handle it, and what people live on and around are the craters it opened and rejected. Its last act was to take root at Panaʻewa and become a tree, and Emerson’s informant said sticks cut from that tree were still to be had, though he had never seen the trunk itself.

The first trial landed on Nihoa, eight hundred feet of bare rock standing alone in the northern sea, and the answer came back wrong. Pele’s company had crossed from Kahiki with a staff aboard the canoe, and the staff was the entire method: drive it into the ground, read what the ground gives back, sail on if the reading is bad. On Nihoa the reading was bad. They sailed.

The Pāoa was a digging stick that answered questions. Nathaniel Emerson, who set the Pele cycle down in 1915 with Hawaiian informants at his elbow, called it a divining rod and then stated the test in one flat clause: the land must be proof against the entrance of sea water. That is the whole specification. Fire cannot live where the sea gets in, so the staff was not looking for shelter, or good ground for taro, or a view. It was looking for somewhere deep enough and dry enough to hold a furnace.

On Oʻahu the party left the canoe and worked the coast on foot, trying the staff over and over. Alia-pāʻakai, where the pit it opened filled with brine and became Salt Lake. Puʻowaina, the hill above what is now Honolulu. Lēʻahi, the ridge people climb at sunrise for the view of Waikīkī. Makapuʻu at the island’s eastern corner, where the road runs out against the cliffs. Every excavation steamed, threw up sand and rock, and drowned.

The tellings do not agree about whose hand was on it. The chant Emerson prints gives the staff to Ka-moho-aliʻi, the shark brother steering the canoe: he turns the prow, he sets out the wizard staff, he tries Kauaʻi and finds nothing there. Westervelt, publishing a year later, hands it to Pele outright and has her carry the magic spade from island to island, striking the earth wherever they land. Martha Beckwith, whose synoptic account of the whole cycle is still the standard one, never names the tool at all. The hula chant she prints has the spade rattling in the cleft below and a voice asking which god is digging, and the answer comes back that it is Pele, digging a pit on Niʻihau, and the spade stays anonymous.

That silence is worth noticing. H. Arlo Nimmo, who worked through forty-eight English-language versions of Pele’s journey published across a hundred and sixty years, found the digging built into the structure of nearly all of them and took the name itself from Emerson, citing him by page. He also found the tellings thinning as they got newer, place names dropped for unfamiliarity, minor brothers and sisters quietly cut. The Pāoa survived that trimming because it does the one thing no summary can afford to lose. It explains why the goddess kept moving.

Nothing describes it. Not the wood, not the length, not a lashing or a carving or a chant cut into the shaft. What the stories give instead is behaviour: light enough to carry in a canoe across an open ocean, hard enough to break new rock, and it goes into the ground point first. Nor does any older telling say where it came from. It is simply aboard when the canoe leaves Kahiki. Modern retellings sometimes present it as a gift to Pele from Lono-makua, the fire-keeper of her family, but that gift is not in Emerson, not in Westervelt, not in Beckwith, and not in Nimmo’s survey of the forty-eight.

Its power is narrow and it is absolute. It finds fire-ground and it opens fire-ground, and the craters strung down the archipelago from Nihoa to Haleakalā are its working notes, each one a place where the answer was no. Its limit is that it cannot argue with water. Every failure in the story is the same failure, the sea coming in at the bottom of a fresh pit, and in some versions the sea is not weather but a person, Nāmaka-o-Kahaʻi, Pele’s elder sister, following the smoke from island to island to put the fires out. The staff has no answer to her. It can only tell the truth about the ground and let the family get back in the canoe.

When the ground finally answered, it answered at dawn. They had come ashore at Puakō on Hawaiʻi, walked inland to the place they named Moku-ʻāweoweo where the great caldera now yawns, and slept. In the morning, when the elepaio uttered its note, they rose and used the Pāoa. The omens were favourable. Pele stopped travelling. The staff was then planted at Panaʻewa, and it took root and became a living tree, and the tree multiplied itself until it was a forest.

There is a second Paoa in the same cycle, and he is not a stick. He is Lohiʻau’s closest friend, sitting at the chief’s right hand with a drum between his knees on the night the beautiful stranger walked into the hula on Kauaʻi. When Lohiʻau was found dead in the empty house with his malo around his neck, this Paoa stripped off his own loincloth, stood there in the garb of nature, and swore he would not gird himself again until he had kindled a fire in Pele’s face and pounded it as one pounds a taro. In another telling it is Lohiʻau’s own drifting spirit that crosses to Kauaʻi to send him after her. Two Paoa in one story: the instrument that dug her house, and a man who promised to burn her out of it.

The staff has not been retired. In 2021 the Hawaiʻi Board on Geographic Names took the survey label Lōʻihi off the seamount rising nineteen miles southeast of Hawaiʻi island and replaced it with Kamaʻehuakanaloa, the reddish child of Kanaloa, a name recovered from nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers. Writing about the change afterwards, Bobby Camara set the reasoning down without ornament: Pele used Pāoa as she looked for suitable dwellings along the islands, so it seems entirely reasonable that she is still out there testing ground, three thousand feet down, where nobody can watch her work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Pāoa in Hawaiian mythology?

The Pāoa is the digging staff, sometimes called a divining rod or a magic spade, used by Pele’s family to search the Hawaiian Islands for a place to build a fire pit. Driven into the ground, it revealed whether a site could hold volcanic fire or whether sea water would flood in from below. It both tested the ground and dug the crater.

Who actually carried the Pāoa, Pele or Ka-moho-aliʻi?

The sources disagree. The migration chant printed by Nathaniel Emerson in 1915 has Pele’s brother Ka-moho-aliʻi setting out the staff from the canoe as they try Kauaʻi and Oʻahu. Westervelt’s 1916 retelling gives it to Pele herself, carrying it ashore and striking the earth at each landing, and Beckwith’s summary of the cycle does not name the tool at all.

Why did the Pāoa keep failing before Kīlauea?

Every pit the Pāoa opened on the smaller and older islands struck water. The test it performed was specifically whether the land was proof against the entrance of sea water, and the craters at Salt Lake, Punchbowl, Diamond Head and Makapuʻu all filled or exploded into steam and sand. Only on Hawaiʻi island, at the site the party named Moku-ʻāweoweo, did the omens come back favourable.

What happened to the Pāoa at the end of Pele’s journey?

It was planted at Panaʻewa on Hawaiʻi island and became a living tree, which multiplied until it was a forest. Emerson recorded an informant who said sticks cut from that tree were still to be had in his own lifetime, though the man had never seen the living trunk.

Is the Pāoa the same as Paoa, the friend of Lohiʻau?

No. They share a name and nothing else. Paoa the man is the Kauaʻi chief Lohiʻau’s closest companion, who after Lohiʻau’s death swore he would not put his malo back on until he had kindled a fire in Pele’s face, while the Pāoa is the staff Pele’s company used to find her home.