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In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of other primitive and story-loving people. It includes primitive philosophy—stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth; primitive annals—migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of conquest and overrule. There is primitive romances—tales of competition, of vengeance, and of love; primitive wit—of drolls and tricksters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts. These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar to the Polynesian mind.

The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in fact, to Anaxagoras's sketch of the universe. Earth is a plain, walled about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, rise the confines of Kahiki, Kukulu o Kahiki.[1] From this point the heavens are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number varying in different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld, sometimes divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors and inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods[2]—the whole inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell.[3] Ordinarily the gods seem to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens. As in other mythologies, heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a reproduction or copy of earth and its ways. In heaven the gods are ranged by rank; in the highest heaven dwells the chief god alone enjoying his supreme right of silence, tabu moe; others inhabit the lower heavens in gradually descending grade corresponding to the social ranks recognized among the Polynesian chiefs on earth. This physical world is again the prototype for the activities of the gods, its multitudinous manifestations representing the forms and forces employed by the myriad gods in making known their presence on earth. They are not these forms themselves, but have them at their disposal, to use as transformation bodies in their appearances on earth, or they may transfer them to their offspring on earth. This is due to the fact that the gods people earth, and from them man is descended. Chiefs rank, in fact, according to their claim to direct descent from the ancient gods.[4]

Just how this came about is not altogether uniformly explained. In the Polynesian creation story[5] three things are significant—a monistic idea of a god existing before creation;[6] a progressive order of creation out of the limitless and chaotic from lower to higher forms, actuated by desire, which is represented by the duality of sex generation in a long line of ancestry through specific pairs of forms from the inanimate world—rocks and earth, plants of land and sea forms—to the animate—fish, insects, reptiles, and birds;[7] and the special analysis of the soul of man into "breath," which constitutes life; "feeling," located in the heart; "desire" in the intestines; and "thought" out of which springs doubt—the whole constituting akamai or "knowledge." In Hawaii the creation story lays emphasis upon progressive sex generation of natural forms.

Individual islands of a group are popularly described as rocks dropped down out of heaven or fished up from below sea as resting places for the gods;[8] or they are named as offspring of the divine ancestors of the group.[9] The idea seems to be that they are a part of the divine fabric, connected in kind with the original source of the race.

Footnotes to Section II, 2: Polynesian Cosmogony

[Footnote 1: In the Polynesian picture of the universe the wall of heaven is conceived as shutting down about each group, so that boats traveling from one group to another "break through" this barrier wall. The Kukulu o Kahiki in Hawaii seems to represent some such confine. Emerson says (in Malo, 30): "Kukulu was a wall or vertical erection such as was supposed to stand at the limits of the horizon and support the dome of heaven." Points of the compass were named accordingly Kukulu hikina, Kukulu komohana, Kukulu hema, Kukulu akau—east, west, south, north. The horizon was called Kukulu-o-ka-honua—"the compass-of-the-earth." The planes inclosed by such confines, on the other hand, are named Kahiki. The circle of the sky which bends upward from the horizon is called Kahiki-ku or "vertical." That through which, the eye travels in reaching the horizon, Kahiki-moe, or "horizontal."]

[Footnote 2: The Rarotongan world of spirits is an underworld. (See Gill's Myths and Songs.) The Hawaiians believed in a subterranean world of the dead divided into two regions, in the upper of which Wakea reigned; in the lower, Milu. Those who had not been sufficiently religious "must lie under the spreading Kou trees of Milu's world, drink its waters and eat lizards and butterflies for food." Traditional points from which the soul took its leap into this underworld are to be found at the northern point of Hawaii, the west end of Maui, the south and the northwest points of Oahu, and, most famous of all, at the mouth of the great Waipio Valley on Hawaii. Compare Thomson's account from Fiji of the "pathway of the shade." p. 119.]

[Footnote 3: White, I, chart; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 3, 4; Ellis,

III, 168–170.]

[Footnote 4: Gill says of the Hervey Islanders (p. 17 of notes): "The state is conceived of as a long house standing east and west, chiefs from the north and south sides of the island representing left and right; under chiefs the rafters; individuals the leaves of the thatch. These are the counterpart of the actual house (of the gods) in the spirit world." Compare Stair, p. 210.]

[Footnote 5: Bastian, Samoanische Schöpfungs-Sage; Ellis, I, 321; White, vol. I; Turner, Samoa, 3; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 1–20; Moerenhout I, 419 et seq.; Liliuokalani, translation of the Hawaiian "Song of Creation"; Dixon, Oceanic Mythology.]

[Footnote 6: Moerenhout translates (I, 419): "He was, Taaroa (Kanaloa) was his name. He dwelt in immensity. Earth was not. Taaroa, called, but nothing responded to him, and, existing alone, he changed himself into the universe. The pivots (axes or orbits), this is Taaroa; the rocks, this is he. Taaroa is the sand, so is he named. Taaroa is the day. Taaroa is the center. Taaroa is the germ. Taaroa is the base. Taaroa is the invincible, who created the universe, the sacred universe, the shell for Taaroa, the life, life of the universe."]

[Footnote 7: Moerenhout, I, 423: "Taaroa slept with the woman called Hina of the sea. Black clouds, white clouds, rain are born. Taaroa slept with the woman of the uplands; the first-germ is born. Afterwards is born all that grows upon the earth. Afterwards is born the mist of the mountain. Afterwards is born the one called strong. Afterwards Is born the woman, the beautiful adorned one," etc.]

[Footnote 8: Grey, pp. 38–45; Krämer, Samoa Inseln, pp. 395–400; Fison, pp. 139–146; Mariner, I, 228; White, II, 75; Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 48.]

[Footnote 9: In Fornander's collection of origin chants the Hawaiian group is described as the offspring of the ancestors Wakea and Papa, or Hina.]