Lono

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In the middle of November, when the sun has swung far to the south and the nights have grown long, a knot of small stars lifts out of the eastern sea just after dark. The Hawaiians call it Makaliʻi, the little eyes — the cluster the rest of the world names the Pleiades — and its rising at dusk is a sign read the length of the archipelago. What it sets moving is a procession. A tall image sheathed in white barkcloth is raised at a shore and begins to travel, sunwise, around the whole rim of its island, district by district; and wherever it passes the ordinary order of the world is suspended — the war-temples shut, the heavy labor set down, and the spear, by law, laid on the ground. Only when the image is walking and the weapons are down is it fully the season of the god whose it is. He is Lono.

The god who was before the world

Lono is one of the four great akua of the Hawaiian sacred world, named in one breath with Kāne, the creator and the water of life; Kū, the god of the forest and the war; and Kanaloa, the god of the deep ocean and Kāne’s other half. The tradition, as the reference accounts gather it, holds these four to have existed before the world itself was made — present at and within its making rather than born out of it. This is why his “genealogy” is not, in the ordinary sense, a descent. He does not reach the world down a line of parents. He stands among the primordial powers from the beginning, and what the chants preserve is less an ancestry than a rank: one of the four before whom the ordered cosmos took shape.

He is known, like all the high akua, under a fan of compound names, each fixing one of his powers or one of his works. He is Lono-i-ka-makahiki, Lono of the Makahiki, the god of the turning year. He is Lono-makua, rendered “Lono the provider” or Lono the father, the giver of increase and rain. And in the healing lineage he is Lono-puha, the patron of the lāʻau lapaʻau, the Hawaiian medicine of plants. The tradition tells that Lono-puha came to the art through his own wounding — that he drove something into his own flesh, into the puhā, the opened sore, and learned the cure from the one who healed him, and so became the first of the kāhuna who diagnose by the laying-on of fingers. The stories vary, as the moʻolelo always do, on who the healer was; the domain does not vary. Where a bone is set or an herb is bound, Lono is the god addressed.

Here the record demands a care that the tradition itself keeps. There are three figures the name gathers, and they are not to be run together. There is the akua, the great god, who is the subject of everything said so far. There is the epithet-cluster — Lono-i-ka-makahiki, Lono-makua, Lono-puha — the god met under his working titles. And there is a historical man: a chief named Lono-i-ka-makahiki of the ruling ʻUmi line of Hawaiʻi island, a flesh-and-blood aliʻi whom the Hawaiian historians keep distinct from the god who shares his name. The chief is remembered in the annals of the chiefs; the akua is worshiped in the season. The record of the old knowledge does not let the two collapse into one, and neither should any account of it.

How Lono reaches the written page is the same fact that holds for the whole pantheon: the religion is an oral one, carried in the mele and the moʻolelo — the chants and the told narratives — held in trained memories and performed, not inscribed. The god was set down only after the old public order had already fallen, by the first generation of Hawaiian scholars who took up the alphabet in the nineteenth century: David Malo, whose Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi is the foundational native account of the old ways; Samuel Kamakau, the great historian of the chiefs and the people; and Kepelino Keauokalani. Their testimony is privileged because it is the tradition speaking of itself. Around and after them the collectors gathered — Abraham Fornander, and a generation later Martha Beckwith, whose Hawaiian Mythology of 1940 remains the standard synthesis and must be read with attention to its outsider vantage. It is in Beckwith’s compilation that one finds the tellings of a Lono who once walked the earth as a man — who instituted the games and the annual tribute, then departed across the water to Kahiki, the ancestral homeland past the horizon, with the promise that he would come again by sea, borne on the canoes. That promise is not idle in the tradition. The Makahiki re-enacts it every year: the god goes, and the god returns.

The increase of the land and the season of peace

Within the Hawaiian world Lono is the god of the increase of the land — of hoʻoulu ʻai, the making-grow of food — and of the rain that carries it. His domains, as the Hawaiian educators set them out, are agriculture and fertility, rainfall, music, and, above all and decisively, peace. He belongs to hoʻoilo, the wet winter season, and he is met in its weather: the great Kona storms that come out of the southwest in the cold months and pour their rain onto the leeward slopes that the ordinary trade winds leave dry, greening the lee of the mountains and filling the terraces. The return of the rain is the return of Lono, and it is the return of abundance.

He is met, as every akua is, through his kinolau — the many bodily forms in which a god is sensibly present in the world. Lono’s are the forms of the wet, growing, fruitful earth. He is the ʻuala, the sweet potato, the crop that carries a household through the leeward dry; the puaʻa, the pig; and the ipu, the bottle-gourd. Above these he is the rain-cloud itself, and the tradition reads him across the whole vault of the winter sky: in the ao, the piled cloud; in the hekili, the thunder; in the uila, the lightning; in the ua, the rain that falls; and in the ānuenue, the rainbow — the bright arc on which, one moʻolelo tells, Lono once came down from the heavens to take the goddess Laka to wife. To watch a Kona storm build over the leeward coast, within the frame of the tradition, is to watch the god arriving in his bodies.

What makes Lono singular among the four akua is not a power the others lack. It is a calendar. For roughly four lunar months the whole religious and political order of the islands is handed over to him, and the handing-over is exact and public. The season opens when Makaliʻi, the Pleiades, rises in the east at dusk — about the seventeenth of November — and the festival begins with the crescent moon that follows, running on through the wet months toward February. For that stretch the luakini rites of Kū are set aside; the tall war-temples, open to the standing god for the other eight months of the year, are shut. The aliʻi’s ordinary levies and the heaviest labor are lifted. And kaua — war itself — is made kapu, forbidden by the law of the season. The land is given to Lono. (The alternation is the frame of the whole Hawaiian year, and it belongs as much to the war-god’s calendar as to this one; it is treated from Kū’s side in the entry for Kū.)

The season is made visible in a single walking image. This is the akua loa, the “long god” — so called because it takes the long way, the full circuit of the island. It is a tall staff crowned with a small carved head, and lashed near the top a crosspiece, and from the crosspiece, as the Kaʻiwakīloumoku cultural center describes it, hang a square of white kapa, the barkcloth banner that is the god’s own sign, together with lengths of pala fern, lei of feathers, and the pelts of the kaʻupu, the albatross of the open sea. The image is carried sunwise — clockwise, keeping the land always to the right — around the whole mokupuni, the island, by Lono’s priests. At the boundary of each ahupuaʻa, the wedge of land running from the uplands to the sea that was the basic division of the country, the procession halts at the ahu, the boundary altar that gives the land-unit its name, and there each district lays down its hoʻokupu — its tribute of pigs and sweet potatoes, of kapa and feathers — gathered up for the aliʻi nui of the island. A second, smaller image, the akua poko or “short god,” made only a short circuit and turned back; the long god went the whole way around. Where the akua loa passes, the sword is down. Its slow clockwise walk along the shoreline of the island is the peace-season made into a thing the eye can follow — the god walking the rim of his own land to renew it.

Kealakekua Bay — Ke-ala-a-ke-kua, “the pathway of the god” — with the village of Kaʻawaloa, drawn by John Webber, the artist of Cook’s third voyage, in 1779. Honolulu Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Because it is a season of peace and abundance, the Makahiki is also a season of celebration, and the celebrating is itself a religious act. With the temples of war shut and the levies lifted, the people give themselves to hoʻoikaika kino, the making-strong of the body, and to games. There is mokomoko, the boxing, and hākōkō, the wrestling; heihei kūkini, the foot-racing of trained runners; heʻe hōlua, the sledding of long narrow sleds down grassed and stone-laid tracks on the mountain slopes; heʻe nalu, the riding of the surf; kōnane, the board game of black and white stones; and everywhere the hula and the telling of moʻolelo. To play, to race, to dance, and to feast in the god’s season is to keep it. The abundance Lono gives is met with the joy the season is for.

It closes as the year turns back toward Kū. The final rite, handled here at the distance of the public record and no closer, is the kaliʻi: the aliʻi nui comes ashore from a canoe, and a company of warriors casts spears that he must parry, a proving of the chief’s fitness to rule before the god departs. Then the long god’s circuit ends, the akua loa is taken apart and put away, and the war-temples of Kū reopen for the eight months of his season. The god of peace goes; the standing god returns; the rain gives way to the dry. The Hawaiian year is built as this alternation, and Lono holds one half of it entire.

Cook, the argument, and the god who returns

The single most freighted episode in Lono’s long afterlife arrived by sea, in the god’s own season, on ships the islands had never seen. On the seventeenth of January 1779, in the middle of the Makahiki, the Resolution and Discovery under Captain James Cook stood into Kealakekua Bay on the leeward coast of Hawaiʻi island. The name of the bay is Ke-ala-a-ke-kua, “the pathway of the god.” The priests led Cook ashore and up onto the Hikiau heiau, a shrine of the coast associated with Lono, and there received him with chant and with prostration. Cook’s ships sailed out on the fourth of February as the season was closing; but a gale sprung the Resolution’s foremast, and the expedition was forced back into the bay on the eleventh to make repairs — returning, now, when the Makahiki was over and the coast had passed back under the sign of Kū. The mood on the shore had changed. Thefts multiplied; a ship’s boat was taken; and on the morning of the fourteenth of February 1779 Cook went ashore with a party of marines meaning to hold the aliʻi nui Kalaniʻōpuʻu hostage against the boat’s return. The attempt failed on the beach. In the fighting that broke out Cook was struck down and killed at the water’s edge, with four of his marines and many more Hawaiians.

Whether the Hawaiians received Cook as Lono, or in the manner owed the returning god, became one of the most famous quarrels in the history of anthropology, and it is genuinely unsettled. Marshall Sahlins, in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) and Islands of History (1985), argued that Cook’s visit had fallen onto the Makahiki script almost point for point — the arrival in the god’s season at the god’s bay, the reception at his shrine, the departure as the season closed, and then the fatal return out of season, when the frame that had protected him no longer held. Gananath Obeyesekere answered in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1992) that this was itself a European myth — the old colonial conceit of the “native” who mistakes the white man for a god — and that Hawaiians were far too practical to have made any such error. Sahlins replied at book length in How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (1995), defending his reading of the Hawaiian sources. Most specialists in the Pacific judged Sahlins’s command of the Hawaiian record the stronger, while granting the force of Obeyesekere’s warning about the reflex of colonial projection; the debate has stood ever since as a byword for the question of whether an outsider can read another people’s world at all. Kanaka Maoli scholars have made a sharper observation about the whole exchange: that two outsiders argued at length over what Hawaiians believed without much centering what Hawaiians themselves said. The historian Samuel Kamakau had recorded, from within the tradition, that whatever the priests made of Cook, the notion did not last; and later Native scholarship has suggested that the name Lono may have been fixed on him for reasons as plain as that his ship recalled a moʻolelo, or that “Cook” was a word the language could not easily say.

What is not in question is that the Makahiki outlived the whole encounter, and outlived far more than the encounter. The old public order of temple and kapu was set aside from within a generation later, in the ʻai noa of 1819 — dismantled by the ruling chiefs themselves, a year before the first missionaries landed — and the mission that followed recast the akua through a borrowed frame of “idolatry” and “superstition.” That frame is an outsider’s imposition, and it is rejected here; the akua were never idols, and the religion was never superstition. The fuller story of that fall and of the long recovery belongs to the living people who carried it, and is told in the entry for the Kanaka Maoli. What belongs to Lono is the season, and the season did not die. Its games and its ceremonies are kept again among the Kanaka Maoli today; its ethic of peace, of tribute and reciprocity, of the land renewed by the god who walks its shoreline, has been taken up afresh as part of the Hawaiian Renaissance and of a living relationship with the god. Every November Makaliʻi still climbs out of the eastern sea at dusk, and the reckoning it opens is once more observed.

The arrival of Lono opens a present-day Makahiki, organized by the Oʻahu Council of Hawaiian Civic Clubs, October 2011. The season and its ceremonies are kept again among the living Kanaka Maoli. U.S. Navy photo by Dustin W. Sisco. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Across the wider ocean the same god is known by other names — Rongo in Aotearoa and the Cook Islands, Roʻo elsewhere in the eastern Pacific, the peace-and-cultivation god of the whole Polynesian family — but the Hawaiian Lono is his own akua, with his own season and his own island shoreline to walk. He is not the god of a single power set against the rest. He is the god of the year’s other half: of the rain that comes when the war is put away, of the food that grows under it, of the games and the chants that meet the abundance, and of the peace that the walking image makes law. When the little eyes rise in the east and the long god starts its slow turn around the island, the standing world of Kū steps back, and the land, for four months, is Lono’s to renew.

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