Pele

The floor of Halemaumau breathes. Heat comes off the black crust in columns solid enough to see, bending the air until the far wall of the crater ripples like something underwater, and the wind that crosses the pit carries sulfur sharp enough to sting the back of the throat. Rain falls on the crust and leaves as steam before it lands. Hawaiian tradition does not say that a goddess lives down there. It says that what is down there is her.

Her family came from Kahiki, the ancestral land across the water, though the accounts disagree on almost every particular of her birth and disagree loudly. One version gives her parents as Haumea and Moemoe and counts her among thirteen children. Another names Kane-hoa-lani. A stranger telling makes her father the man-eater Kuwahailo of the far heavens and has Haumea bear her out of her own thighs while an older sister, Namakaokahai, comes from the breasts. Why she left is disputed in the same way. Either she kept such close company with Lonomakua the fire keeper that she set the homeland burning, or she took her sister’s husband, and Namakaokahai, who is the sea, drove her out. Both reasons amount to the same accusation. She could not be kept near anything she might ignite.

Before any of that, there was a lesson in a lava tube. Her uncle Lonomakua took her down into the dark and spent months on the movements of the world, the sun and the moon, the tides, the winds and the kinds of rain, the way fresh water runs off the mountain through one rock and not another. Then he laid a block of soft aunaki wood on the ground, told her to hold it steady, and worked the hard aulima stick against it, chanting. The ground began to shake. A spark caught in the groove, and she fed it until the flame stood up and lit the roof of the cave. That was the moment she understood the fire was hers to keep.

She sailed north in the canoe Honua-i-a-kea with her brother Kamohoalii and a crew of relatives, carrying her youngest sister under one arm in the form of an egg, which is how Hiiakaikapoliopele got the name that means Hiiaka in the bosom of Pele. She came at the island chain from the northwest and began to dig. On Niihau she drove her stick into the rock and struck water. On Kauai the same. Oahu, Molokai, Maui, each pit filled and each was abandoned, and the old chant that recounts the journey is a list of failures with a rhythm to it. Only on the island of Hawaii did she cut down deep and stay dry, and there she took the crater for a house. Read the route on a map and something uncomfortable emerges: she moves from the oldest, most eroded islands in the northwest to the youngest volcanic ground in the southeast, which is the order in which the archipelago was actually built.

Namakaokahai followed her the whole way. They met at last in Kahikinui on Maui, and the sea tore Pele’s body apart there. The fragments were heaped into a hill near Kauiki that is still called Kaiwiopele, the bones of Pele. Her spirit went on to Hawaii without them. In that telling she does not survive the fight so much as stop needing a body.

The long story, and the one Hawaiians have told at greatest length, begins with her asleep. Following the sound of a nose flute across the water, her spirit reaches a hula on Kauai in the shape of a beautiful woman and wins a young chief named Lohiau. She leaves on the third night with a promise to send for him and wakes in her own body at the crater. Hiiaka volunteers for the errand, and the terms are exact: forty days, and no embracing the man. What follows is an epic of monster killing across five islands, moo lizard spirits fought off cliffs and out of rivers, a false bridge made of a tongue, a chief’s second soul dashed against a rock. By the time Hiiaka reaches Kauai, Lohiau has died of grief and been hidden in a cave high on the Kalalau cliff. She climbs to him and chants for ten days until his spirit consents to come back.

The forty days are long gone. From a ridge on Oahu, Hiiaka looks across the channel toward home and sees her own lehua groves burning and her friend Hopoe caught in the lava, and she keeps walking anyway. At the crater rim, with Pele watching, she takes Lohiau in her arms in full view. Pele calls on her sisters to burn him and they refuse, pitying his looks. She calls on her gods and they blow the flame away and tell her she is being unjust, so she banishes them, and they leave the islands to become canoe makers elsewhere. Then she does it herself. Hiiaka, who has been given a divine body, is untouched. Lohiau burns.

She is not subtle, and she does not lose. What she can do follows from what she is: open the ground, throw fountains of molten rock, shake a district, walk out of her sleeping body and take a human shape convincing enough to court a chief. Her by-name, the eater of the land, is descriptive rather than poetic. Villages, forests and roads have gone under her flows in living memory.

Her limit is water, and it is the only one that matters. Every pit she dug on the way down the chain failed because the sea got into it, her sister is the ocean, and the fight that ended her body was with salt water. The islands where she could not settle are the wet, worn-down ones. Two of the strangest things she makes carry her name and both are made of the same weakness resolving: golden fibers of volcanic glass drawn out fine as hair when lava is stretched in the wind, and small black droplets that harden in flight before they hit the ground. Pele’s hair and Pele’s tears, the geologists call them, having borrowed the terms from the people who were there first.

One thing told about her is not old at all. The belief that carrying a lava rock off the islands brings bad luck, usually called Pele’s Curse, appears to be a twentieth-century invention, credited variously to an irritated park ranger tired of tourists pocketing stones and to bus drivers tired of cleaning grit out of their vehicles. It has been repeated so often as ancient kapu that Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and the Hilo post office receive parcels of returned rock every year, sent by people apologizing to a goddess for breaking a rule she never made. The genuine practice is quieter and older. In Puna and Kau she is family, addressed by chant, given offerings, asked before a person walks through her country. In December 1824 the chiefess Kapiolani descended into the crater, ate the ohelo berries sacred to Pele without the customary prayer, and prayed to Jehovah instead. The berries still grow on the rim.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pele in Hawaiian mythology?

Pele is the Hawaiian deity of volcanoes and volcanic fire, known also as Pelehonuamea. She is understood to be embodied in lava and eruption rather than merely to control them, and she makes her home in Halemaumau crater at the summit of Kilauea on the island of Hawaii.

Why did Pele leave her homeland?

Accounts differ. In one, Pele kept such close company with the fire keeper Lonomakua that she set the ancestral land of Kahiki alight and was expelled. In another, she took the husband of her older sister Namakaokahai, the sea, who then drove her out and pursued her across the ocean.

Where does Pele live?

Pele’s home is Halemaumau, the fire pit at the summit caldera of Kilauea, on the island of Hawaii. She reached it by digging a pit on each island in turn from the northwest of the chain southeast, abandoning every one that filled with water, until the ground on Hawaii finally let her cut deep and stay dry.

What happened between Pele, Hiiaka and Lohiau?

Pele sent her youngest sister Hiiaka to fetch the Kauai chief Lohiau, allowing forty days and forbidding her to embrace him. The journey ran long, and Pele burned Hiiaka’s beloved lehua groves and her friend Hopoe in revenge. Hiiaka then embraced Lohiau on the crater rim in full view of her sister, and Pele consumed him in flame.

Is Pele’s Curse a real Hawaiian tradition?

No. The idea that taking lava rock from Hawaii brings bad luck appears to date from the twentieth century, attributed variously to a park ranger and to tour bus drivers discouraging souvenir collecting. Genuine practice around Pele involves chant, offerings and asking permission to enter her land, and treats her as an aumakua or deified ancestor rather than as a source of curses.

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