The Hawaiian Romance of Laieikawai | Page 8

Nineteen Tears in Polynesia, pp. 238-242; Ibid., Samoa, pp. 23-77; Ellis, I, 334; Gracia, pp. 41-44; Kr?mer (Samoa Inseln, p. 22) and Stair (p. 211) distinguished akua as the original gods, aiku as their descendants, the demonic beings who appear in animal forms and act as helpers to man; and kupua as deified human beings.]
[Footnote 2: When a Polynesian invokes a god he prays to the spirit of some dead ancestor who acts as his supernatural helper. A spirit is much stronger than a human being--hence the custom of covering the grave with a great heap of stone or modern masonry to keep down the ghost. Its strength may be increased through prayer and sacrifice, called "feeding" the god. See Fornander's stories of Pumaia, and Nihoalaki. In Fison's story of Mantandua the mother has died of exhaustion in rescuing her child. As he grows up her spirit acts as his supernatural helper, and appears to him in dreams to direct his course. He accordingly achieves prodigies through her aid. In Kuapakaa the boy manages the winds through his grandmother's bones, which he keeps in a calabash. In Pamano, the supernatural helper appears in bird shape. The Fornander stories of Kamapua'a, the pig god, and of Pikoiakaalala, who belongs to the rat family, illustrate the kupua in animal shape. Malo, pp. 113-115. Compare Mariner, II, 87, 100; Ellis, I, 281.]
[Footnote 3: Bird-bodied gods of low grade in the theogony of the heavens act as messengers for the higher gods. In Stair (p. 214) Tuli, the plover, is the bird messenger of Tagaloa. The commonest messenger birds named in Hawaiian stories are the plover, wandering tattler, and turnstone, all migratory from about April to August, and hence naturally fastened upon by the imagination as suitable messengers to lands beyond common ken. Gill (Myths and Songs, p. 35) says that formerly the gods spoke through small land birds, as in the story of Laieikawai's visit to Kauakahialii.]
[Footnote 4: With the stories quoted from Fornander may be compared such wonder tales as are to be found in Kr?mer, pp. 108, 116, 121, 413-419; Fison, pp. 32, 49, 99; Grey, p. 59; Turner, Samoa, p. 209; White I, 82, etc.]

4. THE EARTHLY PARADISE; DIVINITY IN MAN AND NATURE
For according to the old myth, Sky and Earth were nearer of access in the days when the first gods brought forth their children--the winds, the root plants, trees, and the inhabitants of the sea, but the younger gods rent them apart to give room to walk upright;[1] so gods and men walked together in the early myths, but in the later traditions, called historical, the heavens do actually get pushed farther away from man and the gods retreat thither. The fabulous demigods depart one by one from Hawaii; first the great gods--Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa; then the demigods, save Pele of the volcano. The supernatural race of the dragons and other beast gods who came from "the shining heavens" to people Hawaii, the gods and goddesses who governed the appearances in the heavens, and the myriad race of divine helpers who dwelt in the tiniest forms of the forest and did in a night the task of months of labor, all those god men who shaped the islands and named their peaks and valleys, rocks, and crevices as they trampled hollows with a spring and thrust their spears through mountains, were superseded by a humaner race of heroes who ruled the islands by subtlety and skill, and instead of climbing the heavens after the fiery drink of the gods or searching the underworld for ancestral hearth fires, voyaged to other groups of islands for courtship or barter. Then even the long voyages ceased and chiefs made adventure out of canoe trips about their own group, never save by night out of sight of land. They set about the care of their property from rival chiefs. Thus constantly in jeopardy from each other, sharpening, too, their observation of what lay directly about them and of the rational way to get on in life, they accepted the limits of a man's power and prayed to the gods, who were their great ancestors, for gifts beyond their reach.[2]
And during this transfer of attention from heaven to earth the objective picture of a paradise in the heavens or of an underworld inhabited by spirits of the dead got mixed up with that of a land of origin on earth, an earthly paradise called Hawaiki or Bulotu or "the lost land of Kane"--a land about which clustered those same wistful longings which men of other races have pictured in their visions of an earthly paradise--the "talking tree of knowledge," the well of life, and plenty without labor.[3] "Thus they dwelt at Paliuli," says Haleole of the sisters' life with Laieikawai, "and