Pele

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Set the digging stick against the northwest end of the archipelago and follow where it bites. At Ni’ihau it strikes and the sea rushes in and quenches the pit; at Kaua’i, the same; at O’ahu, at Moloka’i, at Maui, the same again — each new fire drowned as fast as it is dug, the goddess driven on. Only at the southeastern end, on the youngest and largest island, does the stick go deep and stay dry, and the pit it opens is Halema’uma’u, the fire-house at the summit of Kilauea. The staff is Pa’oa, and the hand is Pele’s, and the path she cuts runs oldest ground to youngest — which is to say that the tradition mapped the age of the islands, and the direction the earth is built, long before any survey named the reason.

The names and how she reaches the record

Her full sacred name is Pele-honua-mea, “Pele of the sacred earth” — honua, the land, and mea, a word that carries both the reddish color of raw volcanic ground and the quality of being set apart. Among her older epithets is Ka wahine ‘ai honua, “the earth-eating woman,” and the pairing holds the whole of her: she consumes the land and she is the land, the mouth that swallows the forest and the substance that hardens in its place.

Her genealogy does not resolve to a single line, and the tradition does not ask it to. In the version most often cited she is a daughter of Haumea, the earth-mother, and her father is named variously — Kuwaha’ilo in one telling, Kane-hoa-lani in another, Kane Milohai in a third — so that the parentage diverges by island and by the chanter who holds the mele. This is not confusion to be corrected but the ordinary condition of a knowledge carried in many trained memories across a chain of islands; the high beings wear different ancestries in different districts. What is constant is the family. Her elder sister is Namakaokaha’i, the sea, whose waters would pursue her the length of the ocean; her brother is Kamohoali’i, the shark god who guides voyaging canoes and keeps the water of life; and her youngest and most beloved sister is Hi’iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele, “Hi’iaka in the bosom of Pele,” whom she is said to have carried from the homeland as an egg held warm against her breast.

Pele is born across the water, in the ancestral southern homeland the mele call Kahiki — the word cognate with Tahiti and with the wider Polynesian Hawaiki, the source-place of the eastern Pacific. She comes to Hawai’i by canoe, one of a great migrating family of akua, and she comes carrying fire and the means to house it: the sacred digging stick Pa’oa, which in the tradition is given her by her fire-keeping uncle Lonomakua, the keeper of the flame. Down the chain she goes from the northwest, striking Pa’oa into each island in turn and opening a pit, and behind her comes Namakaokaha’i, flooding every fire her sister kindles, until the quarrel ends only where the sea cannot reach — inland and high, at Halema’uma’u, where Pele settles and stays.

The Hawaiian religion is an oral one, and Pele reaches the written record through that fact rather than around it. She lives first in the mele and the mo’olelo — the chants and the told narratives — held and performed, not inscribed. The earliest Hawaiian scholars to set the old knowledge down did so in the nineteenth century, after the religion’s public order had already fallen: David Malo, whose Moolelo Hawaii is the foundational native account; Samuel Kamakau, the great historian of the chiefs and the people of old; and Kepelino Keauokalani. Their testimony is privileged here because it is the tradition speaking of itself. Above all, Pele reaches the record through the epic of Pele and Hi’iaka, the largest single narrative structure in the whole Hawaiian repertoire. It was recorded by Nathaniel B. Emerson as Pele and Hiiaka: A Myth from Hawaii (1915), and far more fully by the writer under the name Ho’oulumahiehie, whose Hawaiian-language serial ran in the newspaper Ka Na’i Aupuni across 1905 and 1906 and was translated by M. Puakea Nogelmeier as The Epic Tale of Hi’iakaikapoliopele (2007) — the most extensive form of the story ever set down.

The goddess who is the land

Pele does not rule the volcano the way a sky god rules the weather, at a remove. She is the making of the islands, and the lava is not something she sends but the substance she is. With Pa’oa she opens the fire-pits; she stamps her foot and the ground shakes; she pours out the flow that hardens into new acreage, so that every part of Hawai’i Island is younger land she has raised. The ruin of a forest and the birth of a coastline are, in her, a single gesture — the earth-eating woman and the earth-maker are one goddess doing one thing. To watch an eruption, within the frame of the tradition, is to watch a temperament: her hunger, her anger when she is crossed, her arrival where there had been nothing.

She is met through her kinolau, the many body-forms in which an akua is sensibly present in the world. Pele’s are several, and one does not always know which she wears. She is the flame itself and the flowing rock. She is the beautiful young woman seen at the crater’s edge. She is the bent old woman who appears on a lonely road and asks a traveler for a small kindness — a ride, a light, a share of food — and is gone when he turns to look again, so that generosity to a stranger is generosity to the goddess, and refusal is refusal of her. She is the small white dog that walks with the old woman. Because she may be any of these, the etiquette of an encounter is an etiquette of not-knowing: the stranger on the road is treated as though she might be Pele, because she might.

“Madame Pele,” painted c. 1927 by David Howard Hitchcock; held by Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The land she makes carries her name in its smallest pieces. When a lava fountain shears in the wind, the molten rock draws out into fine straight filaments of golden-brown volcanic glass — strands whose diameter runs from about one to three hundred micrometers, well under half a millimeter, and which can reach two meters in length. These are lauoho o Pele, Pele’s hair. The little droplets that fall and freeze beside them, dark teardrops of glass sometimes trailing a thread of hair, are waimaka o Pele, Pele’s tears. The vocabulary is exact and tender: the eruption is not only destruction but the goddess shedding parts of herself across the wind, and the glass that scientists collect to read a magma’s temperature and path is, in the other register, her cast-off hair.

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

The first plant to take hold on her raw new rock is sacred to her. The ‘ohelo (Vaccinium reticulatum), a low shrub of the high volcanic country whose bell-flowers ripen to round berries of saffron and magenta, is among the first colonizers of fresh lava, and the tradition holds it as Pele’s own — in one telling an incarnation of her sister Ka’ohelo. The old practice was that no one ate the first fruit without giving it to her: a branch of berries offered toward the pit before any was tasted. Practitioners today caution that offering is not a casual act and that untrained approach to it is discouraged; it is described here at the distance of the public record, not prescribed.

There is a correspondence in her migration story that later knowledge only sharpened, and it belongs to a different register than the goddess herself. The tradition’s memory that Pele fled southeast — from the old, deeply eroded islands where her fires had gone cold toward the one still-forming ground — encodes what the geology of the Hawai’i hotspot would confirm: the chain grows younger from northwest to southeast as the seafloor drifts across a fixed plume of magma, Kaua’i more than five million years old and worn down, the Big Island under a million and still rising. Hawaiians read this from erosion, soil, and the states of the volcanoes long before it was surveyed; when James Dwight Dana carried out the first formal geological study of the islands in 1880 and 1881, he confirmed an age progression the Pele legends had already preserved. Two knowings meet at the same fact — one held in chant, one in stratigraphy — and it is worth keeping them distinct rather than collapsing the older into a footnote to the newer.

Lohi’au and the burning of the forest

The great epic turns the goddess of the unanswerable fire into the center of a human story of desire, fidelity, and betrayal. In it Pele sleeps at her crater and her spirit travels — in the fullest tellings to Kaua’i — where at a hula gathering she meets and loves the mortal chief Lohi’au. Waking, she sends her youngest sister Hi’iaka to fetch him, binding her to return within forty days, and Hi’iaka sets a condition of her own: that in her absence Pele spare her lehua groves and protect her dear friend Hopoe, the woman who taught her the dance. Pele agrees. But the forty days stretch, jealousy works in the goddess, and she breaks her word — pouring fire over the lehua and turning Hopoe to stone on the shore, where in some tellings the rock still rocks in the surf like a woman dancing. The journey there and back, the trials Hi’iaka meets and the price of the broken promise, make up the body of the cycle. It is woven entirely from chant and dance, for Hi’iaka is the patron of the hula and the mele composed within the story are performed still; through it the fire that gives new ground is also the fire that takes a friend and a forest, the two never separable in Pele.

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

The goddess declared defeated, and served still

When the missionaries arrived in 1820 they came into a kingdom that had already, the year before, abolished the kapu system from within — the eating-tabu broken at a public feast in late 1819, the temples and images ordered destroyed. Into that opening the mission preached against what it called idolatry, and it wanted a demonstration. It got one, or thought it did. In late 1824 the high chiefess Kapi’olani, newly Christian, walked some sixty miles over lava to the rim of Halema’uma’u, and descended toward the lava lake, and ate the ‘ohelo berries sacred to Pele without offering any, and cast stones into the fire. A guardian of Pele warned her that to break the custom was to be killed. She told the crowd, in the account the mission preserved, that if she perished by Pele’s anger they should fear Pele, but if the Christian God protected her they should fear Jehovah. She survived, with bruised feet. The Reverend Joseph Goodrich and the mission proclaimed it proof the goddess had no power; decades later Alfred, Lord Tennyson made a poem of it.

The claim built on that day — that Pele had been broken forever — is a missionary frame, and it should be named as one and set aside, because it was simply wrong. The abolition of the kapu and the mission’s long campaign against the old akua did not end Pele’s devotion. She was served after 1824, and she is served now: not as a survival grudgingly persisting past its time, but as a living relationship with a goddess whose acts are visible on the ground and reported on the news. This is the point at which the three registers must be held apart. That the kapu fell in 1819, that the mission arrived in 1820, that Kapi’olani descended into the crater in 1824 — these are matters of documented history. That Pele is the land and meets a traveler on the road is tradition-internal. And the verdict that the one disproved the other belongs to neither: it is a colonial reading of the events, adopted here by no one.

A second distortion is more recent and more easily disposed of. Visitors are told that carrying off a lava rock brings “Pele’s Curse,” a run of misfortune that lifts only when the stone is mailed back — and every year the national park receives packages of returned rocks, sometimes with letters of apology. But the curse in this tourist form is a twentieth-century invention, generally traced to the 1940s and credited to a park ranger, or in another version to tour drivers, who wanted to stop the steady carrying-off of stones and warned that the goddess would punish it. It is not a traditional kapu, and it should not be dressed as one. What is true, and older than any ranger’s warning, is that this is Pele’s land, that taking from it is not a neutral act, and that the care owed the land is the offering that matters — a principle the packaged curse both borrows from and cheapens.

What continues is not a museum piece. At the rim of Halema’uma’u practitioners bring ho’okupu — offerings of lei, of ti-leaf bundles, of ‘awa — and deliver prepared chant, and hula is danced in the goddess’s honor. Her name is spoken when Kilauea works: in the 2018 lower Puna eruption, when a flow buried about 35.5 square kilometers (roughly 14 square miles) of the island’s southeast and built some eight hundred and seventy-five acres of new coastline while the summit caldera collapsed by more than five hundred meters; and again in the episodic summit eruptions that resumed on 23 December 2024, when twin fountains returned to the floor of the fire-house. For the Kanaka Maoli, the living Native Hawaiian people whose language and ceremony carried the tradition through the near-loss of both, Pele stands among the akua as the one whose cult never needed a temple that could be pulled down — her temple is a working volcano, and it is still open. Where the other high gods — Kane the creator and the fresh water, Kanaloa the deep ocean, and their kin across the wider Polynesian world — are approached through chant and inference, Pele’s work is a coastline that is longer this year than last, cooled black against the older black, with the maker still at home in the crater above it.

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