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The Kumulipo
This is Queen Liliuokalani's translation of the Hawaiian Creation chant, the Kumulipo. She translated this while under house arrest at Iolani Palace, and it was subsequently published in 1897. The Kumulipo's composition is attributed to one of Liliuokalani's eighteenth century ancestors, Keaulumoku, just prior to European contact. It is a sophisticated epic which describes the origin of species in terms that Darwin would appreciate. The Kumulipo moves from the emergence of sea creatures, to insects, land plants, animals, and eventually human beings. It describes a complicated web of interrelationships between various plants and animals. The most massive part of the chant is a genealogy which enumerates thousands of ancestors of the Hawaiian royal family.
156 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1951
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June 9, 2025
The Kumulipo, the creation chant of the ancient Hawaiians, lives on in the Hawaiian Islands, as a document that expresses the sensibilities of classical Hawaiian culture. It was not known at all to non-Hawaiians until the 18th century, and the various translations of the poem all have their potential issues; but the poem offers profound insights into the society and worldview of the Polynesian people of these islands, particularly as translated and edited by folklore scholar Martha Warren Beckwith for this University of Hawaii Press edition.
Beckwith, who grew up in the Hawaiian Islands, became an eminent folklorist; her book Hawaiian Mythology (1940) remains the definitive study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Hawaiian people. It makes sense, therefore, that Beckwith would take on the formidable task of translating this 2,000-line poem in a manner that would make it understandable for modern readers.
“Kumulipo” means “beginning in deep darkness.” Along with providing an account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of humankind, the chant also offers an elaborate genealogy of the ali’i or ruling chiefs of Hawaii. Meant to be recited by a court poet, the Kumulipo is officially a chant created in honour of Kalaninuiamamao, a long-ago ali’i nui or supreme ruler of the “big island” of Hawaii, who then passed it on to his daughter Alapaiwahine.
Still unresolved are questions like how much the setting-down of the chant may have been influenced by the presence in Hawaii of Christian missionaries who were, to say the least, fervent in their attempts to persuade the Hawaiians to abandon their old gods and embrace the Christian faith. There is also, as editor and translator Beckwith dutifully explains, the question of how much of the text of the chant may have been influenced by the machinations, the rising and falling, of rival princely families jockeying for power. What cannot be denied is the musicality of the poetry, along with the stark beauty of the stories contained in the Kumulipo.
Beckwith frames the prologue for the first section, a part of the poem that chronicles “The Birth of Sea and Land Life,” by explaining that “Kumulipo was the husband, Po’ele the wife. To them was born Pouliuli. This was the beginning of the Earth. The coral was the first stone in the foundation of the earth mentioned in the chant. It was the insect that made the coral and all things in the sea. This was the beginning of the period called the first interval of time” (p. 51). Beckwith’s commentary helps to illuminate the passage of the Kumulipo that follows:
Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po’ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth…
Born was his child…
Darkness slips into light… (pp. 54-56)
Myth scholars will enjoy comparing the archetypes that emerge, over the course of the Kumulipo, with what they might see in the mythological systems of other societies around the world.
As this account of light emerging from darkness might remind many readers of the first chapter of Genesis, so later chants of the Kumulipo might remind readers of what they have read in other parts of the Bible. Chant 11, for example, contains an account of a great flood:
Born was rough weather, born the current
Born the booming of the sea, the breaking of foam
Born the roaring, advancing, and receding of waves,
The rumbling sound, the earthquake
The sea rages, rises over the beach
Rises silently to the inhabited places
Rises gradually up over the land….
Dead is the current sweeping in from the navel of the earth:
That was a warrior wave
Many who came vanished, lost in the passing night…. (p. 122)
At the same time, Genesis and Noah aside, one cannot reflect that a flood narrative might have particular resonance in a land like Hawaii, where “Tsunami Hazard Zone” signs are nowadays a standard feature of everyday life.
Other readers, reading the flood narrative from Chant 11, might call to mind the flood that Zeus sent against Arcadia, leaving Deucalion and Pyrrha as the only surviving humans. Students of Greek mythology will also find it interesting that, just as Zeus is said to have given birth to Athena out of his head, the Kumulipo offers the story of Haumea, a shape-shifting goddess who “bore children through the fontanel/Her children came out from the brain” (p. 129).
When I read Beckwith’s Hawaiian Mythology, I was particularly taken with her examination of the character of Maui – perhaps, in part, because I had recently watched the Disney film Moana, in which Maui plays an important role. The picture of Maui that emerges in Hawaiian Mythology is rather like what one sees in the film – a combination of Prometheus and Loki; a mischievous trickster who is also a bringer of great gifts.
In her translation of the Kumulipo, by contrast, Beckwith emphasizes Maui as a worker of a series of miraculous feats, rather like the labours of Heracles:
Maui fought, those guards fell
That was Maui’s first strife
He fetched the bunch of black lava of Kane and Kanaloa
That was the second strife of Maui
The third strife was the quarrel over the kava strainer
The fourth strife was for the bamboo of Kane and Kanaloa
The fifth strife was over the temple enclosure for images
The sixth strife was over the prayer tower in the heiau…
He seized the great mudhen of Hina
The sister bird
That was the seventh strife of Maui….
Kane and Kanaloa were shaken from their foundation
By the ninth strife of Maui….
Hina-ke-ka was abducted by Pe’ape’a
That was Maui’s last strife
He scratched out the eyes of the eight-eyed Pe’ape’a…. (p. 154)
In this account of the deeds of Maui – “The lawless shape-shifter of the island/A chief indeed” (p. 155) – one wonders if one may be seeing an indirect account of times when a new noble family rose up and challenged the existing royal order, as Maui challenges Kane (the creator god) and Kanaloa (the god of the underworld) and leaves these old gods “shaken from their foundation.”
In that connection, translator and editor Beckwith reminds us that “The Kumulipo chant in its present form is evidently a composite, recast from time to time as intermarriage brought in new branches and a fresh traditional heritage” (p. 200). She acknowledges that “Additions may have been made from time to time, even up to that of its late transcription. Parts are undoubtedly omitted or altered from their original form. Old symbols may be applied in new directions” (p. 202).
Still, she insists – and rightly so, I think – that “Such changes, however, cannot destroy the value of the text as a genuine example of the sacred creation story of a Polynesian people, true as it is to native poetic style...and reflecting old Hawaiian social life and philosophy in its treatment of the birth of life on earth and the myths of the gods” (p. 203).
Here in Hawaii, where I am posting this review, the Kumulipo also has much to do with modern Hawaiians’ sense of their own, more recent history. The first printing of the Kumulipo, at Honolulu in 1889, came from a manuscript copy owned by Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii. By the time of its publication, Kalakaua had already been forced, by American business interests, to sign what is still called the “Bayonet Constitution” – a document that made the Hawaiian monarch a powerless figurehead. One of the first translations of the document into English, in 1897, came from Kalakaua’s sister and successor as monarch – Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii, who worked on the document after her royal government was overthrown by “annexationists” who wanted to join Hawaii to the United States.
For both Kalakaua and Liliuokalani, their focus on the Kumulipo may have had an element of defiance to it – as if brother and sister, politically neutered king and deposed queen, were both saying to the Americans, “You may be able to use your power to take our lands under your control, but you will never be able to take away what makes us Hawaiian.”
The Kumulipo is a document of singular mythic power. It reminds any reader, from any background, that we all have our “beginning in deep darkness,” that we all spend our lives reaching out toward the light.
Beckwith, who grew up in the Hawaiian Islands, became an eminent folklorist; her book Hawaiian Mythology (1940) remains the definitive study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Hawaiian people. It makes sense, therefore, that Beckwith would take on the formidable task of translating this 2,000-line poem in a manner that would make it understandable for modern readers.
“Kumulipo” means “beginning in deep darkness.” Along with providing an account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of humankind, the chant also offers an elaborate genealogy of the ali’i or ruling chiefs of Hawaii. Meant to be recited by a court poet, the Kumulipo is officially a chant created in honour of Kalaninuiamamao, a long-ago ali’i nui or supreme ruler of the “big island” of Hawaii, who then passed it on to his daughter Alapaiwahine.
Still unresolved are questions like how much the setting-down of the chant may have been influenced by the presence in Hawaii of Christian missionaries who were, to say the least, fervent in their attempts to persuade the Hawaiians to abandon their old gods and embrace the Christian faith. There is also, as editor and translator Beckwith dutifully explains, the question of how much of the text of the chant may have been influenced by the machinations, the rising and falling, of rival princely families jockeying for power. What cannot be denied is the musicality of the poetry, along with the stark beauty of the stories contained in the Kumulipo.
Beckwith frames the prologue for the first section, a part of the poem that chronicles “The Birth of Sea and Land Life,” by explaining that “Kumulipo was the husband, Po’ele the wife. To them was born Pouliuli. This was the beginning of the Earth. The coral was the first stone in the foundation of the earth mentioned in the chant. It was the insect that made the coral and all things in the sea. This was the beginning of the period called the first interval of time” (p. 51). Beckwith’s commentary helps to illuminate the passage of the Kumulipo that follows:
Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po’ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth…
Born was his child…
Darkness slips into light… (pp. 54-56)
Myth scholars will enjoy comparing the archetypes that emerge, over the course of the Kumulipo, with what they might see in the mythological systems of other societies around the world.
As this account of light emerging from darkness might remind many readers of the first chapter of Genesis, so later chants of the Kumulipo might remind readers of what they have read in other parts of the Bible. Chant 11, for example, contains an account of a great flood:
Born was rough weather, born the current
Born the booming of the sea, the breaking of foam
Born the roaring, advancing, and receding of waves,
The rumbling sound, the earthquake
The sea rages, rises over the beach
Rises silently to the inhabited places
Rises gradually up over the land….
Dead is the current sweeping in from the navel of the earth:
That was a warrior wave
Many who came vanished, lost in the passing night…. (p. 122)
At the same time, Genesis and Noah aside, one cannot reflect that a flood narrative might have particular resonance in a land like Hawaii, where “Tsunami Hazard Zone” signs are nowadays a standard feature of everyday life.
Other readers, reading the flood narrative from Chant 11, might call to mind the flood that Zeus sent against Arcadia, leaving Deucalion and Pyrrha as the only surviving humans. Students of Greek mythology will also find it interesting that, just as Zeus is said to have given birth to Athena out of his head, the Kumulipo offers the story of Haumea, a shape-shifting goddess who “bore children through the fontanel/Her children came out from the brain” (p. 129).
When I read Beckwith’s Hawaiian Mythology, I was particularly taken with her examination of the character of Maui – perhaps, in part, because I had recently watched the Disney film Moana, in which Maui plays an important role. The picture of Maui that emerges in Hawaiian Mythology is rather like what one sees in the film – a combination of Prometheus and Loki; a mischievous trickster who is also a bringer of great gifts.
In her translation of the Kumulipo, by contrast, Beckwith emphasizes Maui as a worker of a series of miraculous feats, rather like the labours of Heracles:
Maui fought, those guards fell
That was Maui’s first strife
He fetched the bunch of black lava of Kane and Kanaloa
That was the second strife of Maui
The third strife was the quarrel over the kava strainer
The fourth strife was for the bamboo of Kane and Kanaloa
The fifth strife was over the temple enclosure for images
The sixth strife was over the prayer tower in the heiau…
He seized the great mudhen of Hina
The sister bird
That was the seventh strife of Maui….
Kane and Kanaloa were shaken from their foundation
By the ninth strife of Maui….
Hina-ke-ka was abducted by Pe’ape’a
That was Maui’s last strife
He scratched out the eyes of the eight-eyed Pe’ape’a…. (p. 154)
In this account of the deeds of Maui – “The lawless shape-shifter of the island/A chief indeed” (p. 155) – one wonders if one may be seeing an indirect account of times when a new noble family rose up and challenged the existing royal order, as Maui challenges Kane (the creator god) and Kanaloa (the god of the underworld) and leaves these old gods “shaken from their foundation.”
In that connection, translator and editor Beckwith reminds us that “The Kumulipo chant in its present form is evidently a composite, recast from time to time as intermarriage brought in new branches and a fresh traditional heritage” (p. 200). She acknowledges that “Additions may have been made from time to time, even up to that of its late transcription. Parts are undoubtedly omitted or altered from their original form. Old symbols may be applied in new directions” (p. 202).
Still, she insists – and rightly so, I think – that “Such changes, however, cannot destroy the value of the text as a genuine example of the sacred creation story of a Polynesian people, true as it is to native poetic style...and reflecting old Hawaiian social life and philosophy in its treatment of the birth of life on earth and the myths of the gods” (p. 203).
Here in Hawaii, where I am posting this review, the Kumulipo also has much to do with modern Hawaiians’ sense of their own, more recent history. The first printing of the Kumulipo, at Honolulu in 1889, came from a manuscript copy owned by Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii. By the time of its publication, Kalakaua had already been forced, by American business interests, to sign what is still called the “Bayonet Constitution” – a document that made the Hawaiian monarch a powerless figurehead. One of the first translations of the document into English, in 1897, came from Kalakaua’s sister and successor as monarch – Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii, who worked on the document after her royal government was overthrown by “annexationists” who wanted to join Hawaii to the United States.
For both Kalakaua and Liliuokalani, their focus on the Kumulipo may have had an element of defiance to it – as if brother and sister, politically neutered king and deposed queen, were both saying to the Americans, “You may be able to use your power to take our lands under your control, but you will never be able to take away what makes us Hawaiian.”
The Kumulipo is a document of singular mythic power. It reminds any reader, from any background, that we all have our “beginning in deep darkness,” that we all spend our lives reaching out toward the light.
May 10, 2016
Wonderful, wonderful chant of Hawaiian cosmogony, unlike anything I've read before – moody and pelagian and full of a strange sort of internal dream-logic. You can practically hear the midnight waves lapping at the beach as you read it. The poem itself covers barely sixty pages, with the rest of this sizeable book given over to Martha Warren Beckwith's awe-inspiring explanation of her translation methods, verse by verse, along with a sensitive discussion of possible interpretations which represents the distillation of a lifetime's study of Polynesian society, language and mythology. It's the sort of readable, erudite piece of mid-century philology (published 1951) that you never seem to get anymore. All that, plus an appendix which gives the whole chant in the original Hawaiian (albeit a somewhat outdated orthography).
Kumulipo is a compound word from kumu ‘beginning’, and lipo ‘deep darkness’; the chant thus means literally ‘the origin of (or from) deep darkness’, and it begins with a rich evocation of nothingness:
You can see from the Hawaiian how melodic and driving the original must sound when recited aloud. Hawaiian is a language with a very small phonological inventory – just eight consonants and five vowels (though these can be short or long – but compare this to English, with perhaps twenty-four consonants and around a dozen vowels, excluding diphthongs). Among other things, this means that Hawaiian has a huge scope for wordplay, assonance and rhyme. This was brought home to me on O‘ahu when I took part in a traditional canoe-blessing ceremony (don't ask) led by a Hawaiian kahuna, whose chanting, I thought, had an amazing power to it which came from this cumulative build-up of alliterative flourishes and repeating syllables and vowel-sounds. You can see this all the way through the Kumulipo – reading it out loud to yourself is great fun, if a little disconcerting to those around you.
Beckwith takes great pains to convey the effect of such linguistic playfulness to those readers whose Hawaiian is a little rusty. Discussing one section, about an adulterous scandal, for instance, she tells us:
Though (as the introduction to this edition points out) she does a pretty fine job:
I quickly found myself putting complete faith in her choices, and letting myself sink into the logic of the chant itself, which leads you on a journey through the creation of life to gods, heroes, and finally simple men. There is an interesting tendency to link things together in thematic pairs – people, creatures, concepts. So when, out of the ‘deep darkness’, simple and then more complex life-forms begin to appear, they are always given in twos, a sea creature ‘guarded’ by a land creature. These pairs are marked off by the recurring refrain O kane ia Wai‘ololi, o ka wahine ia Wai‘olola, a sexual-geographical metaphor which Beckwith translates as ‘Man is for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream’. A brief sample:
And so on, at exhaustive but strangely riveting length. As another reviewer has pointed out, it does make you wonder which sea creature humans are supposed to be guarding…
The notes and commentary are full of anthropological insight and detail which you would never work out from the chant alone. References to ‘the woman who sat sideways’, for example, play on a Hawaiian figure of speech for someone who took a second husband; similarly the complex system of taboo is given full discussion, right up to the highest grade of chief, the offspring of a noble brother and sister, who was considered so sacred that he could only go out at night because otherwise his shadow would make everything it touched holy and thus unusable. One seemingly innocuous line gets the following delightful explanation:
I love this! This particular version of the poem was preserved by Kalākaua, the penultimate Hawaiian monarch, and it includes various genealogical details designed to reflect the lineage of a specific family; different versions were, presumably, once in circulation in other communities. Reading the sometimes disjointed myths still surviving in here, you find yourself wishing there had been some Hawaiian Elias Lönnrot who could have done for these legends what was done for the Finnish Kalevala; alas, during that period at the end of the nineteenth century when everyone else was busy getting into literary nationalism, Hawaii was preoccupied with being annexed by the United States.
Still, what's here is great, and this needs a proper modern printing pronto. I can't quite believe this darkly beautiful, idiosyncratic creation chant has just thirty ratings here on Goodreads. That's outrageous! It deserves a thousand times as much – or as the Hawaiians once said, ‘forty thousand, four hundred thousand, and four thousand’.
Kumulipo is a compound word from kumu ‘beginning’, and lipo ‘deep darkness’; the chant thus means literally ‘the origin of (or from) deep darkness’, and it begins with a rich evocation of nothingness:
The intense darkness, the deep darkness
Darkness of the sun, darkness of the night
Nothing but night.
O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo
O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po
Po wale ho–'i
You can see from the Hawaiian how melodic and driving the original must sound when recited aloud. Hawaiian is a language with a very small phonological inventory – just eight consonants and five vowels (though these can be short or long – but compare this to English, with perhaps twenty-four consonants and around a dozen vowels, excluding diphthongs). Among other things, this means that Hawaiian has a huge scope for wordplay, assonance and rhyme. This was brought home to me on O‘ahu when I took part in a traditional canoe-blessing ceremony (don't ask) led by a Hawaiian kahuna, whose chanting, I thought, had an amazing power to it which came from this cumulative build-up of alliterative flourishes and repeating syllables and vowel-sounds. You can see this all the way through the Kumulipo – reading it out loud to yourself is great fun, if a little disconcerting to those around you.
Beckwith takes great pains to convey the effect of such linguistic playfulness to those readers whose Hawaiian is a little rusty. Discussing one section, about an adulterous scandal, for instance, she tells us:
The reaction upon outsiders and then that upon the injured husband is indicated by playing first upon the k sound to express precise forms of inarticulate disapproval in the head-shaking and cluck-clucking of the court gossips, then upon sounds in m combined with u to give the mood of sulky silence preserved at first by the husband when he begins to suspect the truth of the matter. The passage is impossible to render in English, certainly not literally.
Though (as the introduction to this edition points out) she does a pretty fine job:
There was whispering, lip-smacking and clucking
Smacking, tut-tutting, head-shaking
Sulking, sullenness, silence
Kane kept silence, refused to speak
Sullen, angry, resentful…
I quickly found myself putting complete faith in her choices, and letting myself sink into the logic of the chant itself, which leads you on a journey through the creation of life to gods, heroes, and finally simple men. There is an interesting tendency to link things together in thematic pairs – people, creatures, concepts. So when, out of the ‘deep darkness’, simple and then more complex life-forms begin to appear, they are always given in twos, a sea creature ‘guarded’ by a land creature. These pairs are marked off by the recurring refrain O kane ia Wai‘ololi, o ka wahine ia Wai‘olola, a sexual-geographical metaphor which Beckwith translates as ‘Man is for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream’. A brief sample:
Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream
Born is the Okea living in the sea
Guarded by the Ahakea tree living on land
Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream
Born is the Wana [sea-urchin] living in the sea
Guarded by the thorny Wanawana plant living on land
Man for the narrow stream, woman for the broad stream
Born is the Nene shellfish living in the sea
Guarded by the Manene grass living on land
And so on, at exhaustive but strangely riveting length. As another reviewer has pointed out, it does make you wonder which sea creature humans are supposed to be guarding…
The notes and commentary are full of anthropological insight and detail which you would never work out from the chant alone. References to ‘the woman who sat sideways’, for example, play on a Hawaiian figure of speech for someone who took a second husband; similarly the complex system of taboo is given full discussion, right up to the highest grade of chief, the offspring of a noble brother and sister, who was considered so sacred that he could only go out at night because otherwise his shadow would make everything it touched holy and thus unusable. One seemingly innocuous line gets the following delightful explanation:
The line reading No ka aunaki kuku ahi kanaka is an allusion to the common method of starting a fire by means of two firesticks. One, the hard-grained aulima, is held upright in the hand (lima) and rubbed back and forth upon the hollowed surface of the other, the softer aunaki, to produce the spark, the action being a perfectly understood sex symbol among Hawaiians. Hence the line is to be literally translated, “From the female firestick comes the fire that makes man.” In other words, woman, impregnated by the male, nurses the spark of life that develops into a living man.
I love this! This particular version of the poem was preserved by Kalākaua, the penultimate Hawaiian monarch, and it includes various genealogical details designed to reflect the lineage of a specific family; different versions were, presumably, once in circulation in other communities. Reading the sometimes disjointed myths still surviving in here, you find yourself wishing there had been some Hawaiian Elias Lönnrot who could have done for these legends what was done for the Finnish Kalevala; alas, during that period at the end of the nineteenth century when everyone else was busy getting into literary nationalism, Hawaii was preoccupied with being annexed by the United States.
Still, what's here is great, and this needs a proper modern printing pronto. I can't quite believe this darkly beautiful, idiosyncratic creation chant has just thirty ratings here on Goodreads. That's outrageous! It deserves a thousand times as much – or as the Hawaiians once said, ‘forty thousand, four hundred thousand, and four thousand’.
Read
July 1, 2022I'm going to leave this unrated as it is a religious and cultural text I don't understand nearly enough about to make any commentary on. The following is just a description of the experience of reading it as a person with no prior background in the topic.
On the whole this was an interesting read, certainly like not much else I've ever read before. It most closely resembled the "genealogy" portion of the Old Testament of the Bible which those who grew up in Christian traditions may be familiar with. The specific edition I read did not contain any footnotes or explanatory sections which made it a bit difficult to parse. In the future I intend to do a bit more research on the side as I am reading this or find a copy that has a bit more context.
On the whole this was an interesting read, certainly like not much else I've ever read before. It most closely resembled the "genealogy" portion of the Old Testament of the Bible which those who grew up in Christian traditions may be familiar with. The specific edition I read did not contain any footnotes or explanatory sections which made it a bit difficult to parse. In the future I intend to do a bit more research on the side as I am reading this or find a copy that has a bit more context.
August 15, 2020
Essential to understanding genealogical power structure in pre- and post- contact Hawai’i. Definitely enriched my perspective of contemporary land claims/disputes. Additionally, it gives a good contextual understanding of place in Maui and how much things have changed.
A lot of jumping back and forth. Be prepared with a highlighter and a pen/notepad if you really want to follow the translated text & author’s analysis.
A lot of jumping back and forth. Be prepared with a highlighter and a pen/notepad if you really want to follow the translated text & author’s analysis.
December 30, 2020
A very difficult book - a gift from Liliuokalani
Kumulipo means creation, but this book is not so much a creation myth as a primer of Hawaiian Lord presented as a kind of genealogy. Queen Liliuokalani translated much of it while in captivity, but many of the Hawaiian names remain untranslated and the looks of vestiges of a true creation story remain very unclear. I recommend this only for those studying the Hawaiian language or ancient culture, but the Queen deserves great credit for this English translation and this contribution to the preservation of Hawaiian culture.
Kumulipo means creation, but this book is not so much a creation myth as a primer of Hawaiian Lord presented as a kind of genealogy. Queen Liliuokalani translated much of it while in captivity, but many of the Hawaiian names remain untranslated and the looks of vestiges of a true creation story remain very unclear. I recommend this only for those studying the Hawaiian language or ancient culture, but the Queen deserves great credit for this English translation and this contribution to the preservation of Hawaiian culture.
Read
August 28, 2023It would feel very strange to rate a text like this, so I won't! There were some beautiful passages of poetry here, and I definitely want to read Queen Liliuokalani's autobiography at some point.
It would also feel strange to write content notes, but I want to briefly mention that as with many texts of this kind there are non-graphic references to murder, violence, and incest.
It would also feel strange to write content notes, but I want to briefly mention that as with many texts of this kind there are non-graphic references to murder, violence, and incest.
May 21, 2017
Beautiful! Hawaii's creation myth -- magical, vivid, incatatory.
July 11, 2018
Some parts are slightly hard to follow, mainly at the beginning, but the general gist can be easily figured out by the end.
July 19, 2021
really beautiful & has a lot of thorough analysis including aspects from other nations in oceania
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September 3, 2022not rated as this is a cultural and religious text - very lovely to read though
Read
April 24, 2024This was a really interesting creation story. My only wish is that I’d read an annotated edition for better comprehension.
November 15, 2021
The study and appreciation of ancient Hawaiian poetry is made difficult by the lack of a written language (before the 1820s) but enhanced by the tradition of persons specialized in writing, chanting and memorizing poetry. Martha Warren Beckwith (1871-1959) was an anthropologist drawn to the creation and genealogical chants of the Polynesian people. This breadth of perspective allowed her to compare the Hawaiian chant "Kumulipo" with parallel chants from other islands, especially Tahiti. While appreciating the differences, she demonstrates the similarities. The "Kumulipo" is the sort of chant which would be performed as part of the celebration of the birth of a first-born male child in succession to become a high chief. It begins before time, before the creation of the earth, before any living thing. It proceeds to describe the creation of everything: the sky, the land and the sea. It describes the birth of all manner of life: vegetable and animal. It is crowned by the birth of gods and people. The succession of lengthy genealogies (very much like those in the Old Testament Book of Numbers) is to emphasize the continuity between the first human and the child just now born. My knowledge of the Hawaiian language is poor at best but Dr. Beckwith constantly supplies commentary, alongside her translation, which is a short-course in the language itself. I chose to read this book while on the Island of O'ahu thinking that there might be something in the air, the water, the sunshine, the music, the flowers, or the people which would help me better understand the Hawaiian story of the creation.
January 31, 2009
Imagine that in the beginning water and night and void were indistinguishable; what is left of this space is our ocean, home to everything that is not yet fully real. Bare fragments have emerged fully into the world of solid matter, like islands and creatures. Though these creatures are small and frail in comparison, each guards a twin that exists in the ocean, only partially emerging into something real. Write poetry about this. Add eerie Darwinian parallels, morally ambivalent deities, intense mythic resonances with both the Rig Veda and Ovid's Metamorphoses, sophisticated indigenous systems of natural history, self-serving chieftains, and lots and lots of sex. And then ask the question: if everything solid is here to guard its underwater twin, what are humans here to guard?
Enormous potential in the setup, and then this question is never more than implicitly addressed--here is the basic mystery of human existence, and since we can't answer it, we'll distract ourselves with practically everything else. In execution, this produces a series of chants that are chillingly powerful, frustratingly veiled, and yet amount to a denouemont. (Think initial reactions to, say, the character of Tom Bombadil.)
Slightly clunky translation, excellent supplemental materials. Bonus points for including full text in the original language.
Enormous potential in the setup, and then this question is never more than implicitly addressed--here is the basic mystery of human existence, and since we can't answer it, we'll distract ourselves with practically everything else. In execution, this produces a series of chants that are chillingly powerful, frustratingly veiled, and yet amount to a denouemont. (Think initial reactions to, say, the character of Tom Bombadil.)
Slightly clunky translation, excellent supplemental materials. Bonus points for including full text in the original language.
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July 2, 2024Keaulumoku (b Kohala, Hawaii, 1716; d Kauhola, Hawaii, 1784). created it in honor of Kalaninuiamamao (1675–1754). Orally transmitted
Queen Liliʻuokalani edition 1897
Martha warren Beckwith 1951
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/ku/in...
http://www.ulukau.org/elib/cgi-bin/li...
Queen Liliʻuokalani edition 1897
Martha warren Beckwith 1951
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/ku/in...
http://www.ulukau.org/elib/cgi-bin/li...
December 21, 2020
Impressive knowledge of the genealogy and history of Hawaiian royalty. It isn’t easy reading but even if you don’t try to keep track of details it is interesting.
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December 24, 2025Unrated due to historical/religious/cultural text. It provided a fascinating introspection into Hawaiian history and culture.
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September 5, 2018Read the edition that was translated and edited (and had commentary by) Martha Beckwith. Very useful, respectful, accessible, and informative piece on such an interesting set of chants.
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