Kumulipo

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The structure and the meaning of the Kumulipo are open to varying interpretations by different readers or listeners. Three interpretations are particularly well known: The chant may be the straightforward story of the creation of the universe leading to the eventual rise of a particular family line; certain passages may be symbolic of the power struggles between various chiefly families; or the entire chant may be an extended metaphor for the conception, birth, and development of a child. The text is capable of being interpreted in these and other ways because the language used in it is somewhat archaic, including many puns, an abundance of symbolic language, and words that were no longer in use by the time of Kalakaua’s reign. Words with double meanings are used throughout, and the chant is rich in allusions to other songs and stories from Hawaiian mythology. This technique is common in Hawaiian poetry, requiring the reader to recognize the symbolism in order to grasp the underlying meaning, or kaona, of the text.

In the case of the Kumulipo, the best course is probably to follow Beckwith’s example and allow for the possibility that the chant has many hidden meanings. (One of Beckwith’s advisers on the translation, David Malo Kupihea, suggested that Kalakaua had adapted the original text so that it would have more relevance to the contemporary political situation of the late nineteenth century. Another adviser, Pokini Robinson, thought that the chant should be interpreted as a metaphor for a child’s development.) The archaisms and double meanings make the Kumulipo especially difficult to translate. Passages where there is uncertainty about what a word or phrase means are followed by a bracketed question mark. Bracketed words that fill in blanks in the text represent Beckwith’s best guess as to the Hawaiian word’s meaning. Bracketed words following Hawaiian terms are translations of the Hawaiian.

Of the 2,102 lines of the Kalakaua text, over half consist of paired male and female names; this may mean, as Beckwith suggests, that the Kumulipo as a whole incorporates several different family lines and strings them together with name songs and mythology. The vast majority of these pairs are not reproduced here (including all of Chant 12), but it should be clear from the remaining text that the pairing of opposites is an important structural element of the Kumulipo.

Each of the sixteen sections of the Kumulipo was called a wa, which Queen Lili‘uokalani translated as “era.” In other words, the sixteen divisions of the chant are said to represent the duration of time in which the events described in each chant take place. The first seven chants happen in darkness (po), while the rest take place in the light of day (ao). One possible interpretation of the division between light and dark is that light represents the emergence of human reasoning, technology, and culture, which follows the creation of animals and plants.

Chant 1

The “time of the rise of the Pleiades” is also the time of the Makahiki, the four lunar months spanning from approximately October to February. This is also the rainy season in Hawaii, during which the dry areas of the islands become green, so it is a particularly appropriate time for a chant about the generation of life to begin.

The first chant emphasizes the roles of the male, the female, and the divine in creating life. The repeated line “Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream” refers to the generation of various forms of life along the shoreline, where the land and the rivers meet the ocean. The pairs of land and sea plants that follow that repeated line are real species, but they are paired on the basis of what their names sound like rather than on any physical relationship. The word “Refrain” in the translation refers to the repetition of three lines: “Darkness slips into light / Earth and water are the food of the plant / The god enters, man cannot enter.” This may mean that although the male and female forces of generation are mentioned many times in the chant, only the gods—not humans—are able to make plants and animals grow and flourish. Humans, then, are always at the mercy of nature. Under Kupihea’s reading of the Kumulipo as a metaphor for social and political developments, however, the last part of Chant 1—the section in which the water on the roots of the plant allows the top of the plant to grow—represents the role of the commoners in supporting the chiefs.

Chant 2

The male and female forces in this chant are Pouliuli and Powehiwehi. Their names mean “murky” and “obscure,” respectively. The hilu is a type of brightly colored fish common in the waters around Hawaii. Its name means “elegant,” and it was used as a pet name for small children in order to compliment them indirectly, since a direct compliment might tempt bad luck. After listing some of the numerous sea animals that inhabit Hawaiian coastal waters along with the hilu, Chant 2 returns to the stream-pair-refrain sequence of Chant 1. This time the pairs consist of one sea creature and one land plant. Beckwith suggests that this is meant to reinforce the connection between the actual fish in the ocean and the human hilu in a secluded place where children of very high rank were brought up.

Chant 3

The names of the male and female in this chant, Po‘ele‘ele and Pohaha, mean “time of darkness” and “night breaking into dawn,” hinting at the Kumulipo’s gradual progression toward daybreak. According to Kupihea’s theory, the different parts of the taro plant at the beginning of Chant 3 may symbolize different branches in the chiefly family to which the Kumulipo belonged. After the mention of the taro, the creatures in this chant are all birds or flying insects (except for the stingray, which does appear to swim by flapping its wings); they inhabit the trees and other plants that grew in the second chant. Robinson’s theory of the Kumulipo as a metaphor for a child’s growth suggests that the series of plants and animals in Chants 2 and 3, which all move about in some way by air or water, are meant to evoke the waving limbs of an infant.

Chant 4

The male name in this chant, Popanopano, is a composite of po (night) and pano (dark or black). The female name, Polalowehi, combines the words for night, depth, and adornment or decoration. According to Kupihea’s theory, the “crawlers” may symbolize the migration of families; according to Robinson’s theory, they represent the movements of a child learning to crawl. The creatures in this chant live on the shore, and some, including the turtles, make the transition from sea to land and back. This makes the chant an effective bridge between the creatures living in the sea and in the trees (in Chants 2 and 3) to those living on land (beginning with Chant 5).

Chant 5

The female name here, Polalouli, means “depth of night”; the male name, Pokanokano, which Beckwith translates as “Night-digger” after the first line, has strong sexual connotations. The pig is also associated with male sexuality, because of its role in plowing up the ground and making it ready for crops. The “pig child” in this verse may be the demigod Kamapua‘a, who was born to a goddess in the shape of a pig and could shift between pig and human forms at will; he is one of the most popular figures in Hawaiian legend, where he is famous as a fighter and as a lover. The theme of crops and fertility continues with the “children of Lo‘iloa” toward the end of the chant; Lo‘iloa was the legendary planter of taro, so his children are the different varieties of taro plant. “Oma,” in the fourth line from the end of Chant 5, is the word for the leading official at a chief’s court; here it refers to the Night-digger, which gives weight to the theory that all the different kinds of people listed in this chant are representatives of different groups and classes coming to pay their respects to the newborn chief whom the Kumulipo honors.

Chant 6

Rats have an ambiguous place in Hawaiian religion. They are believed to be descended from the night gods, and it is said that human spirits can return from the spirit world into rat bodies. However, comparing a person or a thing to a rat or a rat’s nest is a bad omen. They “mark the seasons” by migrating to the shore when food becomes scarce in the mountains, and they eat the crops that grew in Chant 5. Kupihea’s theory is that their migration symbolizes the development of the aupuni structure and the different levels of chiefs, each of which takes a tax on the crops of the level below.

Chant 7

Chant 7 strikes a tone of reverence after the pragmatic description of the habits of rats (and possible playful allusions to the practices of chiefs). It lists some of the ways that a person could violate religious law, or taboo (kapu in Hawaiian), including approaching sacred places if one was not a priest or leaving garbage on the paths or in the sacred areas. The brindled dog in the middle of the chant is considered part of the family of the volcano goddess Pele and could not be eaten like other kinds of dogs. (Note that chiefs and other high-ranking men ate dog meat on special occasions.) The “hairless ones” in the same section are the ‘Olohe—a name shared by a group of warriors who shaved and oiled their bodies for maximum effectiveness in wrestling and by a supernatural company of dog-headed warriors. The one “without a garment” who is “on the way to Malama” may be the spirit of a dead man making the journey to the afterlife, which in Hawaiian tradition follows a specific geographical path—even though, at this point in the creation myth, humans do not yet exist.

Chant 8

With the birth or arrival of humans in Chant 8, day breaks. Human sexuality reappears with the repetition of “man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream.” Chants 8 to 11 deal with variations on the ancestry of the first humans, beginning here with the goddess La‘ila‘i and her two siblings and sexual partners: the god Kane, whose name means “male,” and the human Ki‘i, whose name means “image.” As the firstborn, La‘ila‘i has power over her brothers. Beckwith suggests that La‘ila‘i’s name, “calmness,” evokes the calm before the storm, the storm being human procreation. The expression “the woman sat sideways“ refers to a married woman who takes a second man as a husband.

Chant 9

Chant 9 offers further descriptions of the relations between La‘ila‘i, Ki‘i, and Kane, with the references to volcanic activity symbolizing their sexuality and the birth of their children. The line about using sticks to make a fire is also symbolic of sex (the harder stick is held upright and rubbed against the hollowed softer stick in order to generate a spark). It is important to note that Ki‘i is always mentioned before Kane as La‘ila‘i’s sexual partner.

Chant 10

This chant continues the story of La‘ila‘i, Ki‘i, and Kane, mentioning more of their children by name and bringing in the conflict between the two males. High-ranking women in traditional Hawaiian society had the freedom to choose their sexual partners after marriage, but virginity before marriage was very important, so that there could be no question that the woman’s first child was her husband’s. In Chant 10, it appears that La‘ila‘i’ is Kane’s wife but that Ki‘i is the father of her first child. This means that Ki‘i’s descendants are the senior branch of the family, while Kane’s are the junior branch.

Chant 11

Chant 11 gives even more detail to the story: It names about eight hundred pairs of La‘ila‘i’s descendants with Ki‘i and Kane, beginning with Ki‘i’s son Kamaha‘ina and Kane’s daughter Hali‘a. Chant 12 (not reproduced here) consists of eighty-three more pairs of descendants. In the last part of the twelfth chant, Wakea is mentioned with a rooster on his back; he reappears in Chant 13. The rooster, in the context of the Kumulipo, represents a powerful chief who does not belong to the main branch of his family but who makes his own branch the dominant one and whose descendants are ruling chiefs.

Chant 13

The first part of Chant 13 tells the story of Haumea, which is picked up again in Chant 15; the second part turns to the story of Wakea and Papa, his female counterpart. The nine women at the beginning of Chant 13 are all Haumea in different forms. Haumea is a goddess associated with fertility, childbearing, and wild-food plants. She is portrayed variously in Hawaiian mythology as a sister of the gods Kane and Kanaloa and sometimes, as here, as the wife of Kanaloa. She is sometimes identified with La‘ila‘i (both described as paha‘oha‘o, or “shape-shifters”), sometimes with Papa, and sometimes with her daughter, the volcano goddess Pele.

Papa and Wakea are the legendary couple most commonly referred to as the ancestors of the Hawaiian people (and of many other Polynesian cultures, allowing for some language variations), but they do not seem to play a major role in the Kumulipo. Beckwith speculates that their story was a slightly later addition, added to the Kumulipo when the popularity of these particular figures increased. In some legends, Papa and Wakea are a human couple whose descendants are the chiefs, while Wakea’s two brothers are the fathers of the priests and the commoners. The sequence of taboos in Chant 13 is established by Wakea as a cover story so that he can have an affair without making Papa suspicious.

Chant 14

Wakea’s affair with Hina is separate from the affair in Chant 13. The significance of the rooster on the ridgepole is that since anyone inferior in rank who allowed his or her shadow to fall on a taboo chief (one whose interactions were governed by sacred laws) could be punished with death, the rooster must be the highest-ranking individual in the area. The rooster also appears elsewhere in Hawaiian poetry as a symbol for a high chief.

Chant 15

The first half of Chant 15 tells us that Haumea (from Chant 13) made herself into a young human woman many times over out of jealousy over her husband’s second wife. There are many variations on the story of Haumea in Hawaiian mythology, but they agree that she turned herself into or passed through the trunk of a breadfruit tree so that she and a human husband could escape from a vengeful chief. Chant 15 then launches into a discussion of Maui, one of the most popular demigods in Polynesia, who is sometimes compared to Achilles or Hercules in Greek mythology because of his many superhuman accomplishments. In most stories, he is too clever for his own good, but his actions, such as slowing down the sun to make the days longer and fishing the Hawaiian islands up from the seafloor, are beneficial to humans.

Chant 16

This last section of the Kumulipo is the dedication, a final genealogy leading from Maui to Lono-i-ka-makahiki (Ka-‘i-‘i-mamao). In other words, it explains the reason for the composition of the entire chant.