Pele

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The youngest island in the chain is also the only one still growing. On the southeast flank of Hawai’i, the largest of the islands, ground that did not exist a year ago cools black against the older black, and at the summit of Kilauea a pit crater holds a lake of fire that rises and falls and sometimes throws fountains of molten rock two hundred meters into the night. The pit is named Halema’uma’u. It is the house of a goddess, and the lava is her body. Where the fire comes up, that is Pele, arriving; where the new land hardens, that is Pele, having passed.

The voyage from Kahiki

Pele was born across the ocean, in the homeland the Hawaiian chants call Kahiki — the word cognate with Tahiti and with the wider Polynesian Hawaiki, the ancestral source-place of the eastern Pacific. Her parentage varies between the tellings, as the names of the high beings always do; the most widely cited line makes her a daughter of Haumea, the earth-mother who is herself a descendant of Papa, the earth, and Wakea, the sky, and of the father Kane-hoa-lani. She was one of a vast family. Her sisters were the many Hi’iaka, of whom the favorite, Hi’iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele — Hi’iaka in the bosom of Pele — would become the heroine of the longest chant-cycle in the tradition; her brother Kamohoali’i was a shark-god and the keeper of the water of life. And her elder sister was Namakaokaha’i, a goddess of the sea.

It was the sea-sister who set Pele on her road. The fire-natured daughter could not be kept in the homeland; her ambition, the tradition says, threatened to consume it, and Namakaokaha’i drove her out. Pele’s people put to sea in a great canoe — Honua-i-a-kea, the Great Expansive Earth — and steered north and east toward the empty edge of the ocean, and behind them, as they sailed, they could hear the waves of the pursuing sea. For the quarrel did not end at the shoreline. Namakaokaha’i followed her sister down the whole length of the archipelago.

Pele was looking for a home, and a home for a fire-goddess is a pit deep enough to hold her fires. She carried a digging-stick, the sacred staff Pa’oa, and on each island she came to she struck the ground with it and dug. She began in the northwest — at Ni’ihau, then Kaua’i — and on each island she opened a crater, and on each the sea broke in. Namakaokaha’i flooded every pit her sister dug; the salt water quenched the fire as fast as it was kindled. So Pele moved on, down the chain, island after island, fire against water the whole way, until she came at last to the great mountain at the southeastern end — to Kilauea, on the youngest and largest island. There she dug with Pa’oa, and the omens were good, and the pit she opened was deep enough and far enough inland that the sea could not reach it. That pit is Halema’uma’u, and there she stayed.

There is a quality in this story that the chants did not need geology to see, and that geology has since confirmed. The islands of the Hawaiian chain are older in the northwest and younger in the southeast, because the seafloor drifts slowly across a fixed plume of magma rising from deep in the earth, so that each island is built in turn, carried off the hot spot, and left to erode while the next one rises behind it. Pele’s journey runs in exactly that direction — from the worn old islands where her fires no longer burn to the one place where the ground is still being made. The order of her landfalls is the order of the islands’ ages. The goddess walked the hot spot.

“Madame Pele,” painted c. 1927 by David Howard Hitchcock; held by Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Public domain (published before 1931). Via Wikimedia Commons.

The body and the moods of the goddess

In the Hawaiian world the high gods, the akua, are not distant lawgivers but powers encountered through their kinolau — the many bodily forms, a plant or a stone or a fish or a weather, in which a god is sensibly, locally present. Pele’s kinolau is the volcano in all its expressions, and the lava is the most direct: it is not a thing she sends but the substance she is. When the pit lake rises and the fountains play and a flow advances over the highway and across the orchards toward the sea, that is the goddess in motion — her anger when she is crossed, her longing, her appetite for new ground. To watch an eruption is to watch a temperament.

The land she makes wears her name in its smallest pieces. When a lava fountain shears in the wind, the molten rock draws out into long fine filaments of golden-brown volcanic glass, light enough to drift and tangle in the lee of the vent; these are Pele’s hair, lauoho o Pele. The droplets that fall and freeze before they hit the ground — small black or amber teardrops of glass, sometimes with a thread of hair still trailing from them — are Pele’s tears, waimaka o Pele. Sheets of thin glassy bubble-skin spun off the spatter are her seaweed, limu o Pele. The vocabulary is exact and tender; the eruption is not only destruction but the goddess shedding parts of herself across the wind.

Pele’s hair (the glass filaments) and Pele’s tears (the dark droplets, technically achneliths), Kilauea. Photo James St. John, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is also why the great chant-cycle of the tradition is hers and her sister’s. In the Pele and Hi’iaka epic — set down most fully in writing by Nathaniel B. Emerson in 1915, from chanters who held it after the dances that carried it had been suppressed — Pele falls asleep at her crater and her spirit travels to Kaua’i, where at a hula gathering she meets and loves a mortal chief, Lohi’au. Waking, she sends her favorite sister Hi’iaka to fetch him, binding her with a deadline and with a charge not to touch him; Hi’iaka’s long and perilous journey there and back, and what she finds and what she does on her return, make up the body of the cycle. The drama is the tradition’s largest single literary structure, and it is woven entirely from chant and dance: Hi’iaka is the patron of the hula, and the mele composed within and around the cycle are still danced. Through it the goddess of the unanswerable fire is also the center of a long human story of love, jealousy, obligation, and betrayal.

Fire against ice on the white mountain

To the north of Kilauea rises Mauna Kea, the white mountain, tallest peak in the Pacific and, measured from its base on the seafloor, the tallest mountain on earth. Its summit catches snow in winter, and snow is the body of another goddess — Poli’ahu, counted the most beautiful of the akua and one of the goddesses of the cold who are, every one of them, enemies of Pele. The two summits face each other across the saddle of the island, fire on the one and ice on the other, and the tradition holds that this is no accident of weather but the standing record of a rivalry.

In the best-known telling, Poli’ahu and her companions are racing the holua — the long wooden sled that runs at terrifying speed down a paved track on the mountain’s slope and launches into the surf at the bottom. A stranger joins them, a woman who gives the name Keahilele and claims to come from the hot southern end of the island. She is fast; as she races she seems to trail flame. But Poli’ahu beats her, and the stranger’s temper breaks: she throws off the human shape and is Pele, and she sends fire down the mountain after the snow-goddess. Poli’ahu answers with her snow, chilling and hardening each river of lava as it runs, until she has driven the fire back down into the depths of the mountain. Mauna Kea and the northern half of the island have not erupted since. The southern half, where Pele kept her ground, is where the island still grows. The myth is, among other things, an account of why one mountain is cold and quiet and the other hot and alive — and why the dormant white peak and the working black one are spoken of as two wills that fought to a border.

Snow on the summit of Mauna Kea, the seat of Poli’ahu. International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Randrup, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What may be taken and what may not

A goddess who is the land lays an etiquette over the land. The mountain is hers, and what grows and lies upon it is in some measure her substance, so that taking from it is never a neutral act. The ‘ohelo berry that grows on the new ground near the crater is sacred to her; the older practice was to offer the first handful to Pele before eating, casting them toward the pit. Offerings are carried to the rim of Halema’uma’u and left there for her — and the etiquette is precise about what is fitting and what is presumption, a distinction that the living cult still negotiates today.

It is worth marking the source situation plainly, because the Hawaiian religion is an oral one. The genealogies and the chants, the mele and the prayers, were held in trained memory and performed, not written; the written record begins with the explorers and the missionaries, and the first generation of Hawaiian scholars who set the old knowledge down — David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and others trained at the mission school — did so in the nineteenth century, after the religion’s public structure had already fallen. The kapu system, the sacred code of prohibitions that ordered Hawaiian life, was abolished from within in late 1819, when the high chiefs sat to a public feast that broke the eating-tabu; the first Christian missionaries arrived the following year. Much of what is written about Pele therefore comes through that double filter of conversion and ethnography, and some of it through early missionary hostility. The figure who survived that filter most completely is Pele — partly because her cult never required a temple that could be torn down. Her temple is a working volcano.

The goddess who did not die

When the old religion lost its public order, most of the akua receded into chant and memory. Pele did not. Her worship continued — quietly, and then openly again — and it continues now, which makes her unusual among the gods of a suppressed tradition: a living deity with a living cult, attended at a site anyone can drive to.

The most widely told sign of her presence is an encounter. Pele appears on a lonely road, in some versions a beautiful young woman in red and in others an old woman walking with a small white dog, and she asks a traveler for help — a ride, a cigarette, a small kindness. Those who give it are blessed or spared; those who refuse the old woman come to grief, and when the traveler turns to look again she is gone. The legend is told across the islands with the seriousness of a thing that has happened to a friend of a friend, and it carries a plain moral logic: the goddess walks among people, and how one treats a stranger is how one treats her.

Against this stands the most famous modern story attached to her name, and the one that most needs careful handling. Visitors are told that carrying off a piece of lava rock from the islands brings Pele’s curse — a run of misfortune that lifts only when the stone is sent back. Every year the national park and the post offices of Hawai’i receive packages of returned rocks, sometimes thousands of pounds of them, often with letters of apology addressed to the goddess; the park keeps the returns in piles, because the stones cannot simply be put back where they came from. The belief is sincerely held, and the practice it drives is constant. But the specific “curse” in its tourist form is, by the best account, a twentieth-century invention: it is generally traced to around the 1940s and attributed to a park ranger — or, in another version, to tour-bus drivers — who wanted to stop the steady carrying-off of rocks and warned that Pele would punish anyone who took her stones. The deterrent worked, and then outgrew its author. What complicates the story further is that many Native Hawaiians do hold that taking from Pele’s land is a genuine offense against her, on grounds far older than any ranger’s warning — so that the curse in its packaged form is a recent overlay on a real and serious traditional principle, and the two should not be confused.

A lava fountain at the summit of Kilauea, September 2023 — Pele in motion. Photo James St. John, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For the Hawaiians, Pele has become more than one goddess among the akua. Through the twentieth-century revival of Hawaiian language, hula, and identity, she stands as a figure of the land itself and of its refusal to be tamed — the deity whose cult outlasted the missionaries because her acts are visible, repeatable, and beyond appeal. The other gods of the Polynesian world must be approached through chant and inference, the same way Tangaroa the sea or Tane the forest is approached, as powers known by their works. Pele’s work is on the news. When a flow takes a subdivision and the residents gather at its edge, some bring offerings, and the question of whether to fight the lava or yield to it is asked, by people who would not call themselves religious, in the goddess’s own terms. The ground keeps arriving. There is no clearer demonstration of a deity who makes and unmakes the world than a coastline that is longer this year than last, built out of cooled fire, with the maker still at home in the crater above it.

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