The ancient religion of the Hawaiians, of which the tabu formed
an essential feature, was a theocracy of curious structure. It
was a system of idolatrous forms and sacrifices engrafted without
consistency upon the Jewish story of the creation, the fall of man,
the revolt of Lucifer, the Deluge, and the repopulation of the earth.
The legends of the Hawaiians were preserved with marvellous
integrity. Their historians were the priests, who at intervals met in
council and recited and compared their genealogical meles, in order
that nothing might be either changed or lost. How did the Hawaiian
priesthood become possessed of the story of the Hebrew genesis? It was
old to them when the Resolution and Discovery dropped their anchors
in Kealakeakua Bay; old to them when one or more chance parties of
Spanish sailors in the sixteenth century may have looked in upon
them for a moment while on their way to the Spice Islands; and it was
probably old to them when the Hawaiians found their present home in
the sixth century, and when the Polynesians left the coast of Asia
four hundred years earlier.
One theory is that the story was acquired through Israelitish contact
with the ancestors of the Polynesians while the latter were drifting
eastward from the land of their nativity. But the more reasonable
assumption seems to be that the Hawaiian theogony, so strangely
perpetuated, is an independent and perhaps original version of a
series of creation legends common in the remote past to the Cushite,
Semite and Aryan tribes, and was handed down quite as accurately as
the Jewish version before it became fixed in written characters. In
fact, in some respects the Hawaiian seems to be more complete than
the Jewish version.
From the beginning, according to Hawaiian story, a trinity of gods
existed, who were the sole and all-pervading intelligences of chaos,
or night--a condition represented by the Hawaiian word Po. These
gods were:
Kane, the originator;