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PREFATORY NOTE
Previous to the year 1906 the researches of the Bureau were restricted to the American Indians, but by act of Congress approved June 30 of that year the scope of its operations was extended to include the natives of the Hawaiian islands. Funds were not specifically provided, however, for prosecuting investigations among these people, and in the absence of an appropriation for this purpose it was considered inadvisable to restrict the systematic investigations among the Indian tribes in order that the new field might be entered. Fortunately the publication of valuable data pertaining to Hawaii is already provided for, and the present memoir by Doctor Emerson is the first of the Bureau's Hawaiian series. It is expected that this Bulletin will be followed shortly by one comprising an extended list of works relating to Hawaii, compiled by Prof. H.M. Ballou and Dr. Cyrus Thomas.
W.H. HOLMES,
Chief.
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CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXIII.
XXXIV.
XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXXVII.
XXXVIII.
XXXIX.
XL.
XLI.
XLII.
Introduction
The hula
The halau; the kuahu--their decoration and consecration
The gods of the hula
Support and organization of the hula
Ceremonies of graduation; debut of a hula dancer
The password--the song of admission
Worship at the altar of the halau
Costume of the hula dancer
The hula alá'a-papa
The hula pa-ipu, or kuolo
The hula ki'i
The hula pahu
The hula úliulí
The hula puili
The hula ka-laau
The hula ili-ili
The hula kaekeeke
An intermission
The hula niau-kani
The hula ohe
The music and musical instruments of the Hawaiians
Gesture
The hula pa-hua
The hula Pele
The hula pa'i-umauma
The hula ku'i Molokai
The hula kielei
The hula mú'u-mú'u
The hula kolani
The hula kolea
The hula manó
The hula ilio
The hula pua'a
The hula ohelo
Thehula kilu
The hula hoonaná
The hula ulili
The hula o-niu
The hula ku'i
The oli
The water of Kane
General review
Glossary
Index
Page
7
11
14
23
26
31
38
42
49
57
73
91
103
107
113
116
120
122
126
132
135
138
176
183
186
202
207
210
212
216
219
223
228
233
235
244
246
248
250
254
257
260
265
271
ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE I.II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
FIGURE 1.
2.
3.
Female dancing in hula costume
Íe-íe (Freycinetia arnotti) leaves and fruit
Hála-pépe (Dracaena aurea)
Maile (Alyxia myrtillifolia) wreath
Ti (Dracaena terminalis)
Ilima (Sida fallax), lei and flowers
Ipu hula, gourd drum
Marionettes (Maile-pakaha, Nihi-au-moe)
Marionette (Maka-kú)
Pahu hula, hula drum
Úli-ulí, a gourd rattle
Hawaiian tree-snails (Achatinella)
Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) flowers and leaves
Hawaiian trumpet, pu (Cassis madagascarensis)
Woman playing on the nose-flute (ohe-hano-ihu)
Pu-niu, a drum
Hawaiian musician playing on the uku-lele
Hala fruit bunch and drupe with a "lei"
Pu (Triton tritonis)
Phyllodia and true leaves of the koa Acacia koa)
Pala-palai ferns
Awa-puhi, a Hawaiian ginger
Hinano hala
Lady dancing the hula ku'i
Puíli, bamboo rattle
Ka, drumstick for pu-niu
Ohe-hano-ihu, nose-flute
Frontispiece
19
24
32
44
56
73
91
93
103
107
120
126
131
135
142
164
170
172
181
194
210
235
250
113
142
145
MUSICAL PIECES
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
Range of the nose-flute--Elsner
Music from the nose-flute--Elsner
The ukeké (as played by Keaonaloa)--Eisner
Song from the hula pa'i-umauma--Berger
Song from the hula pa-ipu--Berger
Song for the hula Pele--Berger
Oli and mele from the hula ala'a-papa--Yarndley
He Inoa no Kamehameha--Byington
Song, Poli Anuanu--Yarndley
Song, Hua-hua'i--Yarndley
Song, Ka Mawae--Berger
Song, Like no a Like--Berger
Song, Pili Aoao--Berger
Hawaii Ponoi--Berger
146
146
149
153
153
154
156
162
164
166
167
168
169
172
INTRODUCTION
This book is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian songs and poetic pieces that have done service from time immemorial as the stock supply of the hula. The descriptive portions have been added, not because the poetical parts could not stand by themselves, but to furnish the proper setting and to answer the questions of those who want to know. Now, the hula stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic 1 of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the oli; but it must be noted that in every species of Hawaiian poetry, mele--whether epic or eulogy or prayer, sounding through them all we shall find the lyric note.
Footnote 1:(return) It might be termed a handful of lyrics strung on an epic thread.
The most telling record of a people's intimate life is the record which it unconsciously makes in its songs. This record which the Hawaiian people have left of themselves is full and specific. When, therefore, we ask what emotions stirred the heart of the old-time Hawaiian as he approached the great themes of life and death, of ambition and jealousy, of sexual passion, of romantic love, of conjugal love, and parental love, what his attitude toward nature and the dread forces of earthquake and storm, and the mysteries of spirit and the hereafter, we shall find our answer in the songs and prayers and recitations of the hula.
The hula, it is true, has been unfortunate in the mode and manner of its introduction to us moderns. An institution of divine, that is, religious, origin, the hula in modern times has wandered so far and fallen so low that foreign and critical esteem has come to associate it with the riotous and passionate ebullitions of Polynesian kings and the amorous posturing of their voluptuaries. We must make a just distinction, however, between the gestures and bodily contortions presented by the men and women, the actors in the hula, and their uttered words. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." In truth, the actors in the hula no longer suit the action to the word. The utterance harks back to the golden age; the gesture is trumped up by the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is ofttimes a sealed casket.
Whatever indelicacy attaches in modern times to some of the gestures and contortions of the hula dancers, the old-time hula songs in large measure were untainted with grossness. If there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible for true reports of the doings and sayings of the Polynesians to reach us from that happy land--reports of their joys and sorrows, their love-makings and their jealousies, their family spats and reconciliations, their worship of beauty and of the gods and goddesses who walked in the garden of beauty--we may say, I think, that such a report would be in substantial agreement with the report that is here offered; but, if one's virtue will not endure the love-making of Arcadia, let him banish the myth from his imagination and hie to a convent or a nunnery.
If this book does nothing more than prove that savages are only children of a younger growth than ourselves, that what we find them to have been we ourselves--in our ancestors--once were, the labor of making it will have been not in vain'.
For an account of the first hula we may look to the story of Pele. On one occasion that goddess begged her sisters to dance and sing before her, but they all excused themselves, saying they did not know the art. At that moment in came little Hiiaka, the youngest and the favorite. Unknown to her sisters, the little maiden had practised the dance under the tuition of her friend, the beautiful but ill-fated Hopoe. When banteringly invited to dance, to the surprise of all,
Look, Puna is a-dance in the wind;
The palm groves of Kea-au shaken.
Haena and the woman Hopoe dance and sing
On the beach Nana-huki,
A dance of purest delight,
Down by the sea Nana-huki.
The nature of this work has made it necessary to use occasional Hawaiian words in the technical parts. At their first introduction it has seemed fitting that they should be distinguished by italics; but, once given the entrée, it is assumed that, as a rule, they will be granted the rights of free speech without further explanation.
A glossary, which explains all the Hawaiian words used in the prose text, is appended. Let no one imagine, however, that by the use of this little crutch alone he will be enabled to walk or stumble through the foreign ways of the simplest Hawaiian mele. Notes, often copious, have been appended to many of the mele, designed to exhaust neither the subject nor the reader, but to answer some of the questions of the intelligent thinker.
Thanks, many thanks, are due, first, to those native Hawaiians who have so far broken with the old superstitious tradition of concealment as to unearth so much of the unwritten literary wealth stored in Hawaiian memories; second, to those who have kindly contributed criticism, suggestion, material at the different stages of this book's progress; and, lastly, to those dear friends of the author's youth--living or dead--whose kindness has made it possible to send out this fledgling to the world. The author feels under special obligations to Dr. Titus Munson Coan, of New York, for a painstaking revision of the manuscript.
HONOLULU, HAWAII.
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LITERATURE OF HAWAII
By NATHANIEL B. EMERSON
I.--THE HULA
One turns from the study of old genealogies, myths, and traditions of the Hawaiians with a hungry despair at finding in them means so small for picturing the people themselves, their human interests and passions; but when it comes to the hula and the whole train of feelings and sentiments that made their entrances and exits in the halau (the hall of the hula) one perceives that in this he has found the door to the heart of the people. So intimate and of so simple confidence are the revelations the people make of themselves in their songs and prattlings that when one undertakes to report what he has heard and to translate into the terms of modern speech what he has received in confidence, as it were, he almost blushes, as if he had been guilty of spying on Adam and Eve in their nuptial bower. Alas, if one could but muffle his speech with the unconscious lisp of infancy, or veil and tone his picture to correspond to the perspective of antiquity, he might feel at least that, like Watteau, he had dealt worthily, if not truly, with that ideal age which we ever think of as the world's garden period.
The Hawaiians, it is true, were many removes from being primitives; their dreams, however, harked back to a period that was close to the world's infancy. Their remote ancestry was, perhaps, akin to ours--Aryan, at least Asiatic--but the orbit of their evolution seems to have led them away from the strenuous discipline that has whipped the Anglo-Saxon branch into fighting shape with fortune.
If one comes to the study of the hula and its songs in the spirit of a censorious moralist he will find nothing for him; if as a pure ethnologist, he will take pleasure in pointing out the physical resemblances of the Hawaiian dance to the languorous grace of the Nautch girls, of the geisha, and other oriental dancers. But if he comes as a student and lover of human nature, back of the sensuous posturings, in the emotional language of the songs he will find himself entering the playground of the human race.
The hula was a religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology into cords through which the race maintained vital connection with its mysterious past. Interwoven with these, forming the woof, were threads of a thousand hues and of many fabrics, representing the imaginations of the poet, the speculations of the philosopher, the aspirations of many a thirsty soul, as well as the ravings and flame-colored pictures of the sensualist, the mutterings and incantations of the kahuna, the mysteries and paraphernalia of Polynesian mythology, the annals of the nation's history--the material, in fact, which in another nation and under different circumstances would have gone to the making of its poetry, its drama, its opera, its literature.
The people were superstitiously religious; one finds their drama saturated with religious feeling, hedged about with tabu, loaded down with prayer and sacrifice. They were poetical; nature was full of voices for their ears; their thoughts came to them as images; nature was to them an allegory; all this found expression in their dramatic art. They were musical; their drama must needs be cast in forms to suit their ideas of rhythm, of melody, and of poetic harmony. They were, moreover, the children of passion, sensuous, worshipful of whatever lends itself to pleasure. How, then, could the dramatic efforts of this primitive people, still in the bonds of animalism, escape the note of passion? The songs and other poetic pieces which have come down to us from the remotest antiquity are generally inspired with a purer sentiment and a loftier purpose than the modern; and it may be said of them all that when they do step into the mud it is not to tarry and wallow in it; it is rather with the unconscious naiveté of a child thinking no evil.
On the principle of "the terminal conversion of opposites," which the author once heard an old philosopher expound, the most advanced modern is better able to hark back to the sweetness and light and music of the primeval world than the veriest wigwam-dweller that ever chipped an arrowhead. It is not so much what the primitive man can give us as what we can find in him that is worth our while. The light that a Goethe, a Thoreau, or a Kipling can project into Arcadia is mirrored in his own nature.
If one mistakes not the temper and mind of this generation, we are living in an age that is not content to let perish one seed of thought or one single phase of life that can be rescued from the drift of time. We mourn the extinction of the buffalo of the plains and of the birds of the islands, rightly thinking that life is somewhat less rich and full without them. What of the people of the plains and of the islands of the sea? Is their contribution so nothingless that one can affirm that the orbit of man's mind is complete without it?
Comparison is unavoidable between the place held by the dance in ancient Hawaii and that occupied by the dance in our modern society. The ancient Hawaiians did not personally and informally indulge in the dance for their own amusement, as does pleasure-loving society at the present time. Like the Shah of Persia, but for very different reasons, Hawaiians of the old time left it to be done for them by a body of trained and paid performers.
This fact, which we find paralleled in every form of communal amusement, sport, and entertainment in ancient Hawaii, sheds a strong light on the genius of the Hawaiian. We are wont to think of the old-time Hawaiians as light-hearted children of nature, given to spontaneous outbursts of song and dance as the mood seized them; quite as the rustics of "merrie England" joined hands and tripped "the light fantastic toe" in the joyous month of May or shouted the harvest home at a later season. The genius of the Hawaiian was different. With him the dance was an affair of premeditation, an organized effort, guarded by the traditions of a somber religion. And this characteristic, with qualifications, will be found to belong to popular Hawaiian sport and amusement of every variety. Exception must be made, of course, of the unorganized sports of childhood. One is almost inclined to generalize and to say that those children of nature, as we are wont to call them, in this regard were less free and spontaneous than the more advanced race to which we are proud to belong. But if the approaches to the temple of Terpsichore with them were more guarded, we may confidently assert that their enjoyment therein was deeper and more abandoned.
II.--THE HALAU; THE KUAHU--THEIR DECORATION
AND CONSECRATION
THE HALAU
In building a halau, or hall, in which to perform the hula a Hawaiian of the old, old time was making a temple for his god. In later and degenerate ages almost any structure would serve the purpose; it might be a flimsy shed or an extemporaneous lanai such as is used to shelter that al fresco entertainment, the luau. But in the old times of strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to lift his hand and the entire population of a district ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles, beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, did not allow the divine art of Laka to house in a barn.
The choice of a site was a matter of prime importance. A formidable code enunciated the principles governing the selection. But--a matter of great solicitude--there were omens to be heeded, snares and pitfalls devised by the superstitious mind for its own entanglement. The untimely sneeze, the ophthalmic eye, the hunched back were omens to be shunned.
Within historic times, since the abrogation of the tabu system and the loosening of the old polytheistic ideas, there has been in the hula a lowering of former standards, in some respects a degeneration. The old gods, however, were not entirely dethroned; the people of the hula still continued to maintain the form of divine service and still appealed to them for good luck; but the soul of worship had exhaled; the main study now was to make of the hula a pecuniary success.
In an important sense the old way was in sympathy with the thought, "Except God be with the workmen, they labor in vain that build the house." The means for gaining divine favor and averting the frown of the gods were those practised by all religionists in the infantile state of the human mind--the observance of fasts and tabus, the offering of special prayers and sacrifices. The ceremonial purification of the site, or of the building if it had been used for profane purposes, was accomplished by aspersions with sea water mixed with turmeric or red earth.
When one considers the tenacious hold which all rites and ceremonies growing out of what we are accustomed to call superstitions had on the mind of the primitive Hawaiian, it puzzles one to account for the entire dropping out from modern memory of the prayers which were recited during the erection of a hall for the shelter of an institution so festive and so popular as the hula, while the prayers and gloomy ritual of the temple service have survived. The explanation may be found, perhaps, in the fact that the priests of the temple held position by the sovereign's appointment; they formed a hierarchy by themselves, whereas the position of the kumu-hula, who was also a priest, was open to anyone who fitted himself for it by training and study and by passing successfully the ai-lolo 2 ordeal. After that he had the right to approach the altar of the hula god with the prescribed offerings and to present the prayers and petitions of the company to Laka or Kapo.
Footnote 2:(return) Ai-lolo. See pp. 32, 34, 36.
In pleasing contrast to the worship of the heiau, the service of the hula was not marred by the presence of groaning victims and bloody sacrifices. Instead we find the offerings to have been mostly rustic tokens, things entirely consistent with light-heartedness, joy, and ecstasy of devotion, as if to celebrate the fact that heaven had come down to earth and Pan, with all the nymphs, was dancing.
During the time the halau was building the tabus and rules that regulated conduct were enforced with the utmost strictness. The members of the company were required to maintain the greatest propriety of demeanor, to suppress all rudeness of speech and manner, to abstain from all carnal indulgence, to deny themselves specified articles of food, and above all to avoid contact with a corpse. If anyone, even by accident, suffered such defilement, before being received again into fellowship or permitted to enter the halau and take part in the exercises he must have ceremonial cleansing (huikala). The kumu offered up prayers, sprinkled the offender with salt water and turmeric, commanded him to bathe in the ocean, and he was clean. If the breach of discipline was gross and willful, an act of outrageous violence or the neglect of tabu, the offender could be restored only after penitence and confession.
THE KUAHU
In every halau stood the kuahu, or altar, as the visible temporary abode of the deity, whose presence was at once the inspiration of the performance and the luck-bringer of the enterprise--a rustic frame embowered in greenery. The gathering of the green leaves and other sweet finery of nature for its construction and decoration was a matter of so great importance that it could not be intrusted to any chance assemblage of wild youth, who might see fit to take the work in hand. There were formalities that must be observed, songs to be chanted, prayers to be recited. It was necessary to bear in mind that when one deflowered the woods of their fronds of íe-íe and fern or tore the trailing lengths of maile--albeit in honor of Laka herself--the body of the goddess was being despoiled, and the despoiling must be done with all tactful grace and etiquette.
It must not be gathered from this that the occasion was made solemn and oppressive with weight of ceremony, as when a temple was erected or as when a tabu chief walked abroad, and all
The following adulatory prayer (kánaenáe) in adoration of Laka was recited while gathering the woodland decorations for the altar. It is worthy of preservation for its intrinsic beauty, for the spirit of trustfulness it breathes. We remark the petitions it utters for the growth of tree and shrub, as if Laka had been the alma mater under whose influence all nature budded and rejoiced.
It would seem as if the physical ecstasy of the dance and the sensuous joy of all nature's finery had breathed their spirit into the aspiration and that the beauty of leaf and flower, all of them familiar forms of the god's metamorphosis--accessible to their touch and for the regalement of their senses--had brought such nearness and dearness, of affection between goddess and worshiper that all fear was removed.
He kánaenáe no Laka
A ke kua-hiwi, i ke kua-lono,
Ku ana o Laka i ka mauna;
Noho ana o Laka i ke po'o o ka ohu.
O Laka kumu hula,
5Nana i a'e ka tvao-kele, 3
Kahi, kahi i moli'a i ka pua'a,
I ke po'o pua'a,
He pua'a hiwa na Kane. 4
He kane na Laka,
10Na ka wahine i oni a kelakela i ka lani:
I kupu ke a'a i ke kumu,
I lau a puka ka mu'o,
Ka liko, ka ao i-luna.
Kupu ka lala, hua ma ka Hikina;
15Kupu ka laau ona a Maka-li'i, 5
O Maka-lei, 6 laau kaulana mai ka Po mai. 7
Mai ka Po mai ka oiaio--
I ho-i'o i-luna, i o'o i-luna.
He luna au e ki'i mai nei ia oe, e Laka,
20E ho'i ke ko-kua 8 pa-ú;
He la uniki 9 e no kaua;
Ha-ike-ike 10 o ke Akua;
Hoike ka mana o ka Wahine,
O Laka, kaikuahine,
25Wahine a Lono i ka ou-alii. 11
E Lono, e hu' 12 ia mai ka lani me ka honua.
Nou okoa Kukulu o Kaniki. 13
Me ke ano-ai 14 i aloha, e!
E ola, e!
Footnote 3:(return) Wao-kele. That portion of the mountain forest where grew the monarch trees was called wao-kele or wao-maukele.
Footnote 4:(return) Na Kane. Why was the offering, the black roast porkling, said to be for Kane, who was not a special patron, au-makúa, of the hula? The only answer the author has been able to obtain from any Hawaiian is that, though Kane was not a god of the hula, he was a near relative. On reflection, the author can see a propriety in devoting the reeking flesh of the swine to god Kane, while to the sylvan deity, Lâkâ, goddess of the peaceful hula, were devoted the rustic offerings that were the embodiment of her charms. Her image, or token--an uncarved block of wood--was set up in a prominent part of the kuahu, and at the close of a performance the wreaths that had been worn by the actors were draped about the image. Thus viewed, there is a delicate propriety and significance in such disposal of the pig.
Footnote 5:(return) Maka-li'i (Small eyes). The Pleiades; also the period of six months, including the rainy season, that began some time in October or November and was reckoned from the date when the Pleiades appeared in the East at sunset. Maka-li'i was also the name of a month, by some reckoned as the first month of the year.
Footnote 6:(return) Maka-léi. The name of a famous mythological tree which had the power of attracting fish. It did not poison, but only bewitched or fascinated them. There were two trees bearing this name, one a male, the other a female, which both grew at a place in Hilo called Pali-uli. One of these, the female, was, according to tradition, carried from its root home to the fish ponds in Kailua, Oahu, for the purpose of attracting fish to the neighboring waters. The enterprise was eminently successful.
Footnote 7:(return) Po. Literally night; the period in
Footnote 8:(return) Kokúa. Another form for kakúa, to gird on the pa-ú. (See Pa-ú song, pp. 51-53.)
Footnote 9:(return) Uníki. A word not given in the dictionary. The debut of an actor at the hula, after passing the ai-lolo test and graduating from the school of the halau, a critical event.
Footnote 10:(return) Ha-íke-íke. Equivalent to ho-íke-íke, an exhibition, to exhibit.
Footnote 11:(return) Ou-alii. The Hawaiians seem to have lost the meaning of this word. The author has been at some pains to work it out somewhat conjecturally.
Footnote 12:(return) E Lono, e hu' ia, mai, etc. The unelided form of the word hu' would be hui. The final i is dropped before the similar vowel of ia.
Footnote 13:(return) Kukúlu o Kahíki. The pillars of Kahiki. The ancient Hawaiians supposed the starry heavens to be a solid dome supported by a wall or vertical construction--kukulu--set up along the horizon. That section of the wall that stood over against Kahiki they termed Kukulu o Kahiki. Our geographical name Tahiti is of course from Kahiki, though it does not apply to the same region. After the close of what has been termed "the period of intercourse," which, came probably during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and during which the ancient Hawaiians voyaged to and fro between Hawaii and the lands of the South, geographical ideas became hazy and the term Kahiki came to be applied to any foreign country.
Footnote 14:(return) Áno-ái. An old form of salutation, answering in general to the more modern word aloha, much used at the present time. Ano-ai seems to have had a shade of meaning more nearly answering to our word "welcome." This is the first instance the author has met with of its use in poetry.
[Translation]
A Prayer of Adulation to Laka