Kāne

← Encyclopedia

At a spring in the uplands a hand lowers a gourd into the moving water, and the gourd fills. Nothing in the gesture announces a god. But the water that runs clear over the stones and answers the weight of the vessel is not, in the Hawaiian reckoning, merely the thing a god provides. It is one of the bodies the god wears. To dip flowing fresh water — wai — is already to have touched Kane, for the water is his kinolau, a form in which he is sensibly, locally present. Before the theology of a life-giving creator comes the plain fact of the substance: the cold water in the hand, the taro standing in the flooded terrace, the single upright stone at the edge of the house-lot. Kane is met in these before he is named.

The god of many bodies and many names

The word is the ordinary Hawaiian noun for man, for the male — kane — and the great akua who bears it is the Hawaiian form of a god the whole ocean knows. Across the Polynesian triangle the same figure appears as Tane, the Tane-mahuta of Aotearoa who is lord of the forest and of the light, the one who set his shoulders against the darkness and thrust apart the Sky-father and the Earth-mother so that day could enter the world between them. The Hawaiian tongue, having let the older t soften into k, calls him Kane; and the same sound-shift that turns Tane into Kane turns the wider Polynesian ocean-god Tangaroa into Kanaloa, the companion who is never far from Kane’s side. The kinship is a matter of language and descent, not of a single shared local god: the Kane of the islands is his own akua, with his own domains and his own tellings, met in his own waters.

Within the Hawaiian sacred world Kane is one of the four great akua — Ku, Kane, Lono, and Kanaloa — and, with Kū and Lono, one of the three most widely worshiped of all the gods. Where Ku governs the war and the deep forest and Kanaloa the far ocean, Kane holds creation and life itself: the dawn and the sun, the sky, the standing forest, and above all the wai, the living, moving fresh water. He belongs to the east and the rising sun. He is invoked under a great fan of compound names, each fixing one of his powers or one of his places — Kane-i-ka-wai-ola, Kane of the water of life; Kane-hekili, Kane of the thunder; and many more, island by island and chant by chant. The tradition holds these not as separate gods but as the one great akua known through his many bodies and his many names, so that the mo’olelo, the tellings, differ from place to place while the god beneath them is single. This is how the high akua are met at all: not as remote lawgivers but through their kinolau, the plants and stones and weathers and creatures in which a god is present to the senses, and through the aumakua, the family guardian-ancestors who mediate between a lineage and the great powers. A household did not so much contemplate Kane as live among his bodies and pray to its own dead at his stone. The abstraction of a single creator-god of life is real in the tradition, but it is reached from below, through the water and the taro, not handed down from above.

He reaches the written record chiefly through the first generation of Hawaiian scholars who set the old knowledge down after their people took up the alphabet: David Malo, whose Moolelo Hawaii is the earliest sustained account of the pre-Christian order; Samuel Kamakau, whose long newspaper serials form the largest single body of nineteenth-century Hawaiian history; and Kepelino Keauokalani, whose manuscript preserved a Catholic-educated Hawaiian’s version of the creation. These are the privileged witnesses. Around and after them the collectors gathered — Abraham Fornander, who married into the chiefly class and assembled a vast comparative archive; Nathaniel Emerson, who translated Malo and recorded the chants; and Martha Beckwith, whose Hawaiian Mythology of 1940 remains the standard synthesis, to be read with attention to its outsider vantage. Behind all of them stands the Kumulipo, the two-thousand-line genealogical chant of cosmic emergence, in which the high akua are named among the powers present at the beginning of the world.

The water of Kane and the elder brother

Fresh water is counted the very body of Kane, and it is not his only one. The kalo, the taro, is his; so are the bamboo, the ohe; the ti, the ki; the sugarcane, ko; the coconut, niu; and the pig. Each of these kinolau, as the Kumukahi educators put it, is a form through which the god gives the people something they need — food, medicine, building material, the stuff of ceremony. To plant taro and to drink from a spring is to live among the bodies of the god. But it is the water that is most exactly and most tenderly his, and the tradition tells at length how it came to run in the islands at all.

Kane and Kanaloa crossed the sea together from the homeland the chants call Kahiki, and once ashore they traveled the islands as the water-finders. Where the two came to dry country and lacked water, Kanaloa would mark the place and Kane would thrust in his staff — cut, the legends say, from the heavy close-grained kauila wood — and the rock would open and the spring would flow. In the tradition gathered by Beckwith, the two gods walk the steep windward land of Maui behind Ke’anae, opening springs where they thirst — at Waihe’e, at Kahakuloa, and the water called Waikane, which is simply “the water of Kāne.” The named springs are still there, and they are still remembered as his gift. Kanaloa is present throughout as the inseparable companion, the other half of the pair; the water is Kane’s.

Beyond every earthly spring lies the greatest of the waters. Ka-wai-ola-a-Kane, the water of life of Kane, is said to rest on a hidden floating land, Kane-huna-moku, that drifts unseen off the edge of the islands between the sea and the sky. It heals every sickness; it restores the aged to youth; sprinkled on the dead, it brings them back to life. This is the aspiration at the center of the whole complex, and it is carried most beautifully in the chant Emerson set down as The Water of Kane in his Unwritten Literature of Hawaii of 1909 — a mele from Kaua’i, the island that held longest to the old mysteries. Six times the chant puts the same question, Where is the water of Kane?, and six times it answers in a pair of opposites that together box the whole world: at the eastern gate where the sun comes in, and in the west with the setting sun; in the uplands and in the deep sea; in the rain-cloud overhead and in the ground far below, at the fountain of life. The water is everywhere fresh water can be, and the last of it — the water that can call a dead man back — lies deepest and hardest to reach. The chant is not a museum piece. It is learned and sung today.

A lo’i kalo — a flooded taro terrace fed by fresh running water — at Hanalei, Kaua’i. To grow kalo in moving wai is to tend two of Kane’s bodies at once. Photo Forest and Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 US, via Wikimedia Commons.

That the taro should be Kane’s body, and the water that feeds it, is not an accident of botany. The kalo is held to be the elder sibling of the Hawaiian people themselves. In the genealogy of Wakea, the sky-father, and his daughter Ho’ohokukalani, the first child was stillborn; buried at the corner of the house and watered — by rain, by a mother’s tears — it sent up a green shoot with a trembling heart-shaped leaf, and this first taro was named Haloa-naka, the long trembling stalk. The second child was born living and named Haloa after his elder brother, and from him descend all the people. So the taro is quite literally the first-born, the kua’ana, the elder to whom the younger owes care; and the relation runs both ways, for as the elder brother in the terrace feeds the people, the people are bound to feed and tend him. To eat poi from the pounded root is to be nourished by kin. The intimacy of Kane with humankind is written into the staple food.

Kane’s worship answers to this gentleness. He was served not at the great walled temples of sacrifice but at the pohaku o Kane, the stone of Kane — a single upright conical stone, plain or lightly worked, standing anywhere from a foot to some eight feet tall and planted about with ti, that a household kept as a family altar. There the family prayed to its guardian ancestors, its aumakua, and there a person came to ask forgiveness for a broken kapu. His rites, as Beckwith records in The Kane Worship, asked no human sacrifice and no laborious ceremony; offerings of taro, of fish, of awa, and of coconut sufficed at his open shrines. This is precisely why he is remembered as the highest and most benevolent of the four — the akua whose approach did not require blood, whose body was the water everyone drank and the plant everyone ate.

The image of red earth

The fullest creation narrative attached to Kane is also the most contested, and it must be handled as what it is. In the telling gathered under the name of Kumuhonua, Kane forms the first man from red earth — lepo ‘ula, or ‘alaea — moistened with the spittle of the gods; and when the earthen image is ready, Kane with Ku and Lono breathes into its nose and calls on it to rise, and it becomes a living being named Kumuhonua. The first woman is made afterward from a rib of the sleeping man. In a companion motif that marks Kane out as the supreme giver of life, Kanaloa tries to imitate the feat and molds a man of his own from clay, but he cannot make it breathe; his image stays cold and lifeless, and in his anger, some versions say, he curses the living man to die. Only Kane can give life.

The resemblance to the first chapters of Genesis — the earth-man, the divine breath, the rib-born woman, the garden and the fall, the flood in the fuller versions — is plain, and it has been argued over since the nineteenth century. There is one thread in this creation that runs deeper than the borrowed frame and is worth holding apart from it: the breath. What Kane gives the earthen image is ha, the breath, the same word that lives inside the everyday greeting aloha — understood in the tradition as the meeting and exchange of the breath of life. To breathe is to hold, for a while, the gift of the god of life; and the sharing of breath, face near face, is the sharing of that gift between people. The image of the life-giver who breathes on the shaped earth need not be borrowed from anywhere. It sits at the heart of what Kane is.

The soberest scholarship reads most of the rest of it as a late reworking. Dorothy Barrère’s study, The Kumuhonua Legends, traces these stories to the second half of the nineteenth century, to Hawaiian scholars — Kepelino among them, writing for the Catholic fathers, and Fornander’s circle — who were consciously braiding genuine old genealogy together with the biblical account they now also held. The load-bearing Genesis parallels, on this reading, are post-contact syncretism rather than an unaltered pre-Christian witness. This does not make the telling false or worthless; it makes it a document of a particular moment, when Hawaiian thinkers set their own creation beside the one the missionaries brought and found the two could be spoken together. It is cited here as an attested Hawaiian telling of Kane the life-giver, not as bedrock of the pre-contact religion.

After the temples fell

When Captain Cook’s ships reached the islands in the winter of 1778–79, it was Lono, not Kane, whom the season and the ceremony seemed to fit — a reception argued over ever since, and treated where it belongs, with Lono and the Makahiki. Kane’s part in the changed world was quieter and, in the end, more durable. The public temple system did not fall to foreign guns; it was set aside from within. In 1819 the eating kapu was deliberately broken — the ‘ai noa, the free eating, carried through by the chiefess Ka’ahumanu and the young king Liholiho — and the institutional order of the great heiau came down before a single missionary had preached. The first Calvinists landed the following year, in 1820, and pressed on the akua the missionary charge of “idolatry” — a charge that the shape of Kāne’s worship was peculiarly placed to withstand.

Of the four, Kane’s cult weathered the change best, and for the reason already given: a worship that asked no sacrifice and no temple, that lived at a family’s upright stone and in the water of its own spring, had less to lose when the state temples were abandoned. The pohaku o Kane did not depend on a king’s priesthood. The water did not stop being his body because an eating kapu had fallen. And so the domains of Kane never left the living memory of the Kanaka Maoli. The chant of the water of Kane went on being sung; the taro went on being the elder brother; the springs the water-finders opened went on bearing his name.

Fresh water falling in Waimea Canyon, Kaua’i — the island whose chants held longest to the water of Kane. Photo dronepicr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

With the Hawaiian Renaissance from the 1970s, the honoring of Kane’s domains grew open again. The revival of ‘Olelo Hawai’i, the Hawaiian language, carried his names back into daily use; the restoration of the lo’i kalo, the flooded taro terraces gone to weed under a century of plantation agriculture, put people back into the mud beside the elder brother, tending Haloa in the moving water. And the long modern struggles over wai — over who may divert a stream, over whether the water taken for sugar and for resorts is returned to the taro and the people below — have made Kane’s central teaching a matter of law and of daily politics. Fresh water is his body; to take a river from the people who live along it is not, in this frame, a neutral act. The Kanaka Maoli are a living people with a living language and a revived tradition, and Kane — akua of the fresh water and of the taro that is their elder brother — is named among them still, at the spring and in the terrace, in the present tense.

→ Related: Pele · Ku Hawaiian · Lono · Kanaloa · Kilauea · Haleakala · Puuhonua O Honaunau · Puukohola Heiau · The Marquesans · The Tahitians · The Kanaka Maoli