Kanaloa

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The canoe is finished. For the length of its making the builders prayed to Kāne — Kāne of the standing forest, whose koa tree was felled in the uplands, whose adze-work opened and hollowed the hull. Now the hull is carried down and set on the water, and the sail is raised, and the wind fills it; and at that moment the prayer changes hands. The men aboard call now on Kanaloa, into whose keeping the voyage has passed. One journey, divided clean along the line where the land ends: the forest and the shaping belong to the one god, the sea and the sailing to the other. The two are not rivals for the canoe. They share it, each taking the half that is his.

And there, past the reef, is the body the sea-god most often wears. A he’e, an octopus, pours itself into a seam in the coral and is gone — into the narrow places a diver’s arm cannot reach, boneless, changing color as it goes, at home in exactly the part of the ocean that keeps itself out of sight. Kanaloa is the akua of that ocean: the deep water beyond the reef, its currents and its winds, the creatures that move through it, and the long roads across it that only a canoe and a navigator can find.

A name carried across the ocean

The name is one of the oldest the Pacific keeps. It belongs to a single great naming that runs the length of the voyaging world: the Māori say Tangaroa, the Samoans Tagaloa, the Tongans Tangaloa, the Tahitians Ta’aroa, and the Hawaiians — whose tongue long ago let the older t soften toward k — say Kanaloa. The set is the standard evidence of comparative Polynesian religion, the linguistic fingerprint of peoples who carried the same sea-god with them as they settled island after island across ten thousand miles of open water. It is the same sound-shift that turns the wider Polynesian Tāne into the Hawaiian Kāne; and so the two gods who walk together in Hawai’i, Kāne and Kanaloa, are the same pair the whole ocean knows under its older names.

What the figure means, though, is not fixed across that distance. In the west, in Samoa and Tonga where the Polynesian world first cohered, Tagaloa is the supreme one, the creator who dwelt in the empty heavens before there was any land to stand on. In Tahiti, Ta’aroa makes the world from the inside of his own shell. Among the Māori of the far south he is one departmental son among many, the brother who took the sea when the children of the Sky and the Earth divided the world between them. In Hawai’i the emphasis falls differently again: here creation is Kāne’s — Kāne the god of life and of the fresh water — and Kanaloa is his companion, the second of a pair rather than a solitary maker. One name, then, holding faces that scarcely seem to belong to the same head, and the tradition is honest that the weight sits in different places from island to island. In the Hawaiian reckoning he is not the creator. He is the ocean, and he is the other half of the god of life.

Within the Hawaiian sacred world Kanaloa stands among the four great akua — Kāne, Kū, Lono, and Kanaloa — the powers named at the summit of the pantheon. Where Kū holds the war and the deep forest, Kāne the creation and the living water, and Lono the rain and the harvest peace, Kanaloa holds the far ocean. He reaches the written record the way all the akua do: named in the Kumulipo, the long genealogical chant of cosmic emergence, and carried in the mele and the mo’olelo — the chants and the tellings — that were held in memory and voice for centuries before they were ever set down. When they were set down, it was in the nineteenth century, by the first generation of Hawaiian scholars who took up the alphabet and wrote their own tradition: David Malo, whose Moolelo Hawaii is the earliest sustained account of the old order; Samuel Kamakau, whose newspaper serials form the largest single body of nineteenth-century Hawaiian history; and Kepelino Keauokalani, whose manuscript preserved a Catholic-schooled Hawaiian’s version of the beginnings. Their knowledge is the privileged witness. Around them the collectors gathered the tellings with all their island variants — most fully the ethnographer Martha Beckwith, whose Hawaiian Mythology of 1940 remains the standard synthesis and is read here with attention to its outsider vantage.

The god’s own island is Kaho’olawe, the small dry island south of Maui, whose older name is Kohemalamalama o Kanaloa and which is called, simply, Kanaloa. The whole island is held to be a kinolau, a body-form, of the sea-god. Off its western point lies a place named Kealaikahiki — ke ala i Kahiki, the road to Kahiki — where the channel opens toward the deep ocean and the ancestral homelands the chants call Kahiki, the far south from which the voyaging canoes had come and toward which, in the memory of the Tahitians and the Marquesans and all the seafaring peoples of that world, the star-paths ran. To bind the god to that western cape is to bind him to the sea-road itself.

Kāne’s other half

Kanaloa is the akua of the ocean, and the tradition is precise about which ocean. Not the shallows inside the reef where a child can stand, but the deep water beyond it — the open sea, its currents, the winds that drive a sail, the fish and the great creatures that live where the bottom drops away, and the long-distance voyaging, the ho’okele, that crosses it. When a canoe is sailed, the educators at Kumukahi note, it is Kanaloa, lord of the ocean winds, who is called. In many of the mo’olelo he is also an akua of healing, particularly the cures worked with seawater; the tradition holds him able to heal a person who has fallen under a sorcerer’s spell, and prayers survive that invoke him in exactly that character. These emphases shift from island to island and from chant to chant — in some tellings he is bound up as well with the spirits of the dead — and the tradition does not pretend otherwise.

His bodies are the creatures and substances of the deep. The most recognized is the he’e, the octopus or squid, whose vanishing into the unseen crevices of the reef makes a fitting form for a god of the hidden sea. But the sources name others: the nai’a, the porpoise or dolphin, and the koholā, the whale; salt and the limu, the seaweeds; the mai’a, the banana; and among the healing plants the ‘uhaloa, Waltheria indica, whose root the tradition still uses for a sore throat. Each of these kinolau is a form in which the god is sensibly, locally present — met in the hand and on the reef before he is ever named.

There is a teaching folded into the choice of the octopus. A god of the deep sea is a god of what cannot be seen from the surface or held in the hand — the drowned reef, the current under a flat calm, the fish that will not come to the shallows, the shore that lies below the curve of the horizon. The he’e pouring itself into the coral and the navigator who reads a landfall in the shape of a swell days before the island rises are answering to the same power: the knowledge of the ocean that is never quite given up. To cross the open water at all — to leave one island and find another with nothing overhead but the stars and nothing below but the moving deep — was among the highest of the arts, and it belonged to him. The wayfinding that carried the voyaging peoples across the Pacific without chart or compass, reading the stars and the swells and the flight of land-seeking birds, is Kanaloa’s knowledge kept in the hands of the living.

But the heart of Kanaloa is that he is almost never alone. Again and again the chants and tellings name him in a single breath with Kāne — Kāne-a-me-Kanaloa, Kāne-and-Kanaloa — as though the two were one two-part power rather than two gods. They are drawn as complementary: the god of life and the god of the ocean, the fresh water and the salt, the shaping and the sailing. One modern Hawaiian description names Kanaloa “the subconscious to Kāne’s conscious” — the hidden half of a single mind. Their complementarity was ritual as well as poetic, and the clearest instance is the canoe, where a single undertaking is split cleanly between them: Kāne is called during the building, when the tree is a thing of the forest and the hull is being shaped; Kanaloa is called when it takes the water and sails, when the same object has passed out of the forest’s keeping and into the sea’s. Some accounts extend the division to the sky itself, giving Kāne the northern edge of the sun’s yearly road and Kanaloa the southern.

The pairing is at its fullest in the great cycle of tellings in which the two gods travel the islands together. They came, the mo’olelo say, from Kahiki, and once ashore they walked the land as the water-finders. Where they reached dry country and wanted water, Kāne would thrust in his staff — cut, the legends say, from the heavy close-grained kauila wood — and the rock would open and a spring leap up where none had run before. Beckwith’s account of Kāne and Kanaloa follows the pair through the back country of Maui, into the steep land behind Ke’anae, and names the sweet waters they are said to have opened. Kanaloa is the inseparable companion through all of it, marking the places; the striking is Kāne’s, and the water that answers bears Kāne’s name. And what the two gods drank of the water they had found was ‘awa — the kava, the sacred infusion of the pounded root of Piper methysticum. They are remembered as the ones who brought the ‘awa from Kahiki and planted it across the archipelago, the mythical first cultivators and the first drinkers of the gods’ own drink, the water-finders who were also the awa-makers. Here the logic of the pair completes itself: the god of the fresh water and the god of the far ocean travel as one, and where they pass together the dry land is made to drink. The ocean and the spring are two halves of a single whole, and so are the gods who hold them.

The seat that was never his

After the ships came — Cook’s in the winter of 1778–79, then the first Calvinist missionaries in 1820 — Hawaiian antiquarians and their foreign interlocutors set about mapping the akua onto a Christian grid, and in the mapping a distortion took hold at the center of Kanaloa. The four great gods were recast to resemble a Christian pattern: three of them made over into something like a Trinity, and Kanaloa pressed into the empty fourth seat as its opposite — a rebel, a spirit of evil, a Hawaiian Satan set against Kāne, leader of a band of insurgent spirits who are cast down and shut into the underworld for their revolt. It is under just this reading that the reference books still sometimes file him: the god of the sea remade into a god of the dead and of dark magic, the companion turned into the adversary.

The reading cannot be squared with the tradition it claims to describe. In the mo’olelo, Kanaloa and Kāne share the same devotees, the same journeys, the same paired invocation; the man who calls on one calls on the other in the next breath. There is no war between them — there is a canoe they build and sail between them, a country they cross together, a drink they share. To make the ocean-god the enemy of the god of life is to sever a bond the whole tradition insists on. And the underworld was never his to begin with. In the pre-contact reckoning the akua of the land of the dead was Milu, ruler of Lua-o-Milu, whose spirit-catchers gather the wandering ghosts — a name that answers the Miru known to other Polynesian peoples far to the south. The realm of the dead had its own god, and he was not Kanaloa. The scholarly record, Beckwith among others, marks the demonized Kanaloa for what it is: a post-contact overlay, the residue of an attempt to force a coherent religion into a borrowed shape. It is named here in order to be set aside. The ocean-god is Kāne’s other half, not his enemy, and the fourth seat at the head of the pantheon was his by right and not by rebellion.

The people who hold this correction are not a memory. The Kanaka Maoli — the Native Hawaiians — are a living people with a living language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, and a religious tradition that was driven near to death and carried back. The blow fell hardest after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and the years that followed, when the language was pushed to the edge of extinction; the long labor of return, from the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s onward, is told in full with the Kanaka Maoli themselves. What belongs here is that Kanaloa came back with the rest — honored again in his own right, the ocean-god and not the devil the missionary century had made of him.

His island tells the same story in miniature. Kaho’olawe — Kohemalamalama o Kanaloa, the body of the sea-god — was taken by the United States military in 1941 and used for four decades as a bombing and gunnery range, shelled from ships and aircraft, cratered by live fire. From 1976 the Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana, out of the Aloha ‘Āina movement, landed on the island and pressed for its return, framing the fight as a matter of love for a sacred land rather than of real estate. Live-fire training was ordered to end in 1990, and the Navy conveyed the island back to the State of Hawai’i on 9 May 1994, to be used only for Native Hawaiian cultural, spiritual, and subsistence purposes. It is cared for now as a wahi pana, a storied and sacred place, of the god whose name it bears. Off its western cape the channel of Kealaikahiki still opens toward the deep, and the revived voyaging canoes — sailing again by the stars and the swells, without instruments, the way the first navigators crossed this ocean — still take their bearing there on the old road toward Kahiki. The prayer that changes hands as a hull first meets the water has not fallen silent. When the sail fills, it is Kanaloa who is called, and the sea he holds is the same sea it always was.

The waʻa kaulua Hōkūleʻa — a double-hulled voyaging canoe — sailing off Honolulu. When a canoe takes the water and the sail fills, it is Kanaloa, lord of the ocean winds, who is called. Photo HongKongHuey, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Kahoʻolawe from the air — Kohemalamalama o Kanaloa, the island held to be a body-form of the sea-god, used as a military bombing range until its return to Hawaiʻi in 1994. Photo Forest and Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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