Kū

← Encyclopedia

A man who means to build a canoe goes up into the forest before light. He is looking for one tree — a tall koa, or an ʻōhiʻa-lehua sound to the heart and free of the borer — and when he finds it he does not simply cut it down. He makes an offering first, at the foot of the trunk, to the gods of the undergrowth and the standing timber: to Kū-pulupulu, the chipmaker, Kū of the low growth, and to Kū-ka-ʻōhiʻa-laka, who is the ʻōhiʻa-lehua itself. Only then does the adze go in. The chief who will one day raise a war-temple prays to a different Kū, and asks a harder thing of him; but it is the same god, and — the tradition is exact about this — it is often the same wood.

The many who stand

Kū is one of the four great akua of the Hawaiian sacred world, named in the same breath as Kāne, the creator and the water of life; Kanaloa, the god of the deep sea and Kāne’s other half; and Lono, the god of the rain, cultivation, and the Makahiki peace. But the tradition almost never speaks of Kū as a single figure. It speaks of nā Kū, “the Kū” — a whole company of gods who carry the name into nearly every domain a man’s life touches. The word itself says why. Kū means to stand, to rise up, to stand erect; and Kū is the standing-up, the upright and active force wherever it lifts itself in the world. He is often set against the goddess Hina, whose name carries the leaning-down and the fallen: Kū of the east and the rising sun, Hina of the west and the setting, the male principle to her female. The pairing is one of the oldest structural rhythms in the pantheon, and it is doubled everywhere in the chants, upland against seaward, standing against reclining.

Because Kū is the standing force and not a single character, he arrives in the record already multiplied. In the forest and at the canoe he is Kū-moku-haliʻi, “Kū spreading over the land,” reckoned the chief of the canoe-building gods; Kū-pulupulu of the undergrowth; and Kū-ka-ʻōhiʻa-laka of the ʻōhiʻa tree — invoked alongside Kupa-ai-keʻe, the adze-god, whom Martha Beckwith’s Hawaiian Mythology explains as “the adz which eats the superfluous parts,” and Kū-holoholo-pali, who steadies the canoe when it is carried down the steep places, and the “long-eared” and “short-eared” gods of the braces. In the sea he is Kūʻula, Kūʻula-kai, the god of the fishing-station and the abundance of fish, whose stone the fisherman keeps at his shore. On the farm he divides again: Kū-ka-ʻōʻō of the digging-stick, Kū-kuila of the dry planting, Kū-keolowalu of the wet. And in war he rises to his most terrible names — Kū-nui-ākea, the supreme and wide-spread; and above all Kū-kā-ʻili-moku, “Kū the snatcher of land,” the seizer of districts, the war-god of the ruling chiefs of Hawaiʻi island.

These forms are not tidy. They differ from island to island and from mele to mele, one district’s Kū-moku-haliʻi answering to another’s differently-named power, and no single list closes the account. What holds them together is the name and the gesture behind it: in each domain Kū is the thing that stands up and takes hold — the tree that rises, the fish that fills the station, the crop that lifts from the ground, the chief who seizes the land. The god of the deep forest and the god who sanctions a conquest are not two gods sharing a syllable. They are the one standing power addressed where it is met.

The scarlet blossom of the ʻōhiʻa-lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. From this wood the canoe was hewn and the temple image of Kū was carved. Jim Morefield, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How the many Kū reach the written record is itself a matter to mark. The fullest gatherings come from the nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholars — David Malo, whose Ka Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi set down the old ritual order from the inside; Samuel Kamakau, whose newspaper serials of the 1860s and 1870s remain the largest single body of Hawaiian historical writing; and Kepelino Keauokalani — and, gathering their work and the wider ethnography a generation later, Beckwith’s Hawaiian Mythology of 1940. These are to be weighed differently: Malo, Kamakau, and Kepelino carried the tradition; Beckwith, Abraham Fornander before her, and Valerio Valeri after arranged it through frames not its own. Read together and against one another, they preserve a religion of great structural intricacy — the standing gods ranked and named and assigned, each to his craft and station.

The severest of Kū’s rites — the strict order of the luakini war-temple and the coming of human sacrifice into his worship — Hawaiian tradition credits to a priest named Paʻao, said to have voyaged from Kahiki, the ancestral homeland whose name is cognate with Tahiti. He is remembered as the builder of the first luakini, Wahaʻula (“red mouth”) in Puna, and of Moʻokini in Kohala, and as the founder of a new priestly line that raised the chiefs’ rank and stiffened the kapu. This origin is genuinely contested. The Paʻao narrative implies a second migration — a Tahitian wave arriving to conquer an older Marquesan-descended stratum and impose a stratified order — and modern archaeology finds no evidence for such a wave and has abandoned the two-migration model. Some scholars read the “Kahiki” of the story not as the geographic island but as the divine realm past the horizon, a way of giving the chiefs and their sacrifices a source beyond the sea. Yet many Kānaka ʻŌiwi hold Paʻao a historical man, and the temples said to be his still stand. The tradition, the contest, and the stones are all part of the record, and none cancels the others. (For the Tahitian stratum and its disputed second voyage, see the Tahitians.)

What stands up in the world

To the tradition Kū is not “the war-god” in the narrow sense the outside eye first reaches for. He is the erect, active, seizing force wherever it stands up — which is exactly why the same god presides over the forest and the deep, the canoe and the fishhook, the planted field and the male generative power, as well as the battlefield. The distinction the moʻolelo keep is not one of which Kū but of who prays to him. The Kū gods of the forest, Beckwith records in her chapter on the Ku gods, “were worshiped not by the chiefs but by those whose professions took them into the forest or who went there to gather wild food in time of scarcity.” The canoe-builder who fells his ʻōhiʻa first offers to Kū-pulupulu and Kū-ka-ʻōhiʻa-laka; the fisherman tends a Kūʻula stone at his station; the planter turns his ground under Kū-ka-ʻōʻō. Kū-kā-ʻili-moku, the snatcher of land, is another matter — he belongs to the aliʻi, the ruling chiefs, and to war. One name reaches from the woodcutter to the paramount chief, but the god is met at each rank in the work of that rank.

Kū is present, too, in his kinolau — the many bodily forms in which an akua is sensibly, locally there. Among the animals these include the shark, the Hawaiian hawk, and the dog; among the plants, the breadfruit, the ʻulu, and the coconut. As with every akua, the lists vary by island and by chant, and are not to be flattened into a single catalog. The god is not represented by these things so much as encountered through them: where the hawk stands on the wind, where the breadfruit stands heavy on the branch, Kū is at hand.

His made images take two great forms, and both were vessels, not portraits. The first is the akua hulu manu, the feather-god: a wickerwork head sheathed in the red and yellow feathers of forest birds, with eyes of mother-of-pearl and teeth of dog, and a crested ridge of feathers over the crown. Kamakau, describing these gods as they were carried in Kamehameha’s day, wrote of the figure as sticks of wood below, draped in folds of kapa, with a very fine feather at the head; and he told how, when the god was consulted, the feather “stood straight up, whirling about like a waterspout as if full of electricity,” a sign that the god would help and bless the chief in war. The upright, whirling feather is Kū being exactly what his name says — the thing that stands.

A feathered image (akua hulu manu) of the god Kū, sheathed in the red and yellow feathers of forest birds, held by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu. jericl cat, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The second form is the carved kiʻi of ʻōhiʻa-lehua wood set up in the luakini — the great war-temple that only an aliʻi ʻai moku, a chief who “eats the district,” could raise and dedicate. The three that survive are massive, open-mouthed figures with flexed limbs and a crown of stylized heads. The British Museum’s example, in the Kona style, stands four feet three inches high and carries four rows of small pig or dog heads running from the bridge of the nose over the brows and across the top of the skull; scholars describe it, in the language of Smarthistory’s account, as “not so much a representation of the god as a vehicle for the god to enter.” The open mouth is not a snarl for its own sake but an aperture — the image made ready to be filled. What the outside record long labeled an “idol” was nothing of the kind: it was a consecrated vessel of a great Polynesian religion, and the missionary word for it is a distortion to be named and set aside.

The luakini rites were the sternest in the Hawaiian order, and alone among the akua’s worship they could include human sacrifice — at the public record’s distance, an offering of a lawbreaker or a captive taken in war, bound to the authority of the aliʻi and to the sanctioning of a campaign. This belonged to Kū-kā-ʻili-moku and to the ruling chiefs, not to Kāne or Lono or Kanaloa, and not to the forest and fishing Kū of the common people. It was held within the ritual and legal order of a deeply stratified society and its kapu, and it was never a spectacle. The temple that admitted it was the pivot of the chief’s power, the place where the seizing of land was ratified before the god who was that seizing.

Even Kū’s dominion, terrible as it was, was not the whole year. For eight months the luakini stood open to Kū under his strict kapu; for the remaining four, at the turning of the year, the temples of Kū closed and the land was given over to Lono for the Makahiki, when war was forbidden, unnecessary labor set down, and the seizing god yielded to the god of rain, harvest, and peace. The Hawaiian year was built as an alternation between the two — the standing-up of Kū and the resting of the Makahiki — so that the god of the snatched district ruled by season and not without limit.

The god thrown down, and standing again

The war-form of Kū is bound to the founding of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Kū-kā-ʻili-moku was the inherited guardian akua of the ruling line of Hawaiʻi island, a feather image handed down the chiefly succession; Kamehameha received it from his uncle, the high chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Tradition holds that when a prophet named Kapoukahi told him he would master the islands if he built a great temple to the god at Kawaihae, Kamehameha raised the immense luakini of Puʻukoholā — “the hill of the whale” — in 1790 and 1791, dedicating it to Kū-kā-ʻili-moku. After it he completed the conquest of Hawaiʻi island and, by 1810, the unification of the whole archipelago under one rule; the god’s feather image was carried, tradition says, crying out in the front of battle. Kamehameha built further temples to Kū in the Kona district, at his Hōlualoa complex and at his Kamakahonu residence, according to the National Park Service, each raised to seek the god’s aid in the wars still ahead.

That order fell within a decade of the unification, and it fell from within. Kamehameha died in 1819; months later his son Liholiho, ruling as Kamehameha II, with the powerful chiefesses Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani and the assent of the high priest Hewahewa, sat publicly to eat with the women in the ʻai noa, the “free eating,” breaking the deepest kapu of the old law in the open. Hewahewa ordered the heiau burned and the images thrown down across the kingdom. Not everyone consented: Liholiho’s cousin Kekuaokalani, who kept the feather image of Kū-kā-ʻili-moku, rose in arms to defend the god and the old religion and was defeated and killed at the battle of Kuamoʻo before the year was out. The temples of Kū were cast down a full year before the first American Calvinist missionaries reached the islands in 1820 — a sequence Hawaiian and academic historians alike stress, since the old order was dismantled by its own rulers, not by the mission. (The wider story of the ʻai noa, the overthrow of 1893, and the twentieth-century revival belongs to the living Hawaiian people; it is carried in the entry for the Kanaka Maoli.)

What the mission found, it misnamed. Its record read the carved kiʻi as “idols” and the rites as “superstition,” and that frame — repeated for a century and sold on again by a tourist trade that turned the akua into “tiki” ornament — is a distortion this account marks and refuses. These were the sacred images of a sophisticated religion, and the god they held is not a curiosity of a vanished past.

Of the great ʻōhiʻa temple figures of Kū, only three are known to survive the burning. One is held by the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, one by the British Museum in London, and one by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts — carried off, dispersed, and separated for the better part of two centuries. In 2010 the three were brought together again in the Bishop Museum’s newly restored Hawaiian Hall, in an exhibition titled E Kū Ana Ka Paia — a line drawn from the prophetic chant of Kapihe, rendered “the walls shall stand firm.” The two that had crossed the ocean stood beside the one that never left, the three faces of the same god together for the first time in nearly two centuries. For a people whose language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, came near to death after the fall of the Kingdom and has been carried back into daily life since the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, the reunion was not a museum event but a homecoming. The walls that the chant said would stand are the walls of the temple and of the nation both. Kū, who is the standing-up of things, is worshiped again by Hawaiians who count him not a memory but a god still rising.

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