Kumulipo

The story

The Kumulipo is the creation chant of Hawaiian religion, first recorded in the 18th century. It is also a genealogy of Hawaiian royalty. It was made in honour of the chief Kalaninuiamamao and passed down orally to his daughter Alapaʻiwahine. According to one account, his birth brought peace between the ʻI and Keawe families, cousins who had been feuding.

The chant runs to 2,102 lines in sixteen wā, eras or ages; in each wā something is born. The first seven wā belong to pō, darkness, the age of spirit, in which the world is created over a cosmic night of many nights: sea urchins and seaweed, fish, birds and insects, creeping creatures, taro, the rat and the dog, each sea creature with a relative on land born to protect it. The remaining nine wā belong to ao, the coming of light and of the gods, who watch over the changing of animals into the first humans. Then come the lineages of Wākea, whose son Hāloa is the ancestor of all people, of Papahānaumoku, of Māui and his adventures, and finally forty-four generations down to Piʻilani, ruler of Maui, and on to the late 18th century.

Priests (kahuna) of the Hawaiian religion recited the Kumulipo during the makahiki season, which honoured the god Lono. When Captain James Cook arrived in Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaiʻi in 1779, during that season, he was greeted by Hawaiians reciting it; some accounts say Cook was taken for Lono.

In 1889 King Kalākaua printed the chant as a sixty-page pamphlet, with a two-page paper on how it had been composed and recited. Queen Liliʻuokalani later described it as a prayer of the development of the universe and of the ancestry of the Hawaiians. She translated it into English while held under house arrest in ʻIolani Palace; the translation was published in 1897 and republished by Pueo Press in 1978. Adolf Bastian made a German translation, and the ethnographer Martha Warren Beckwith published her own English translation in 1951, in a book that also includes Rock's English version of Bastian. Bastian and Roland Burrage Dixon read a recurring verse as describing the octopus as the sole survivor of an earlier age; Beckwith translated it differently, while discussing that reading and the god Kanaloa.

The chant remains a living source. In 2009 the poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio performed her poem "Kumulipo" at a poetry event at the White House, and the supermassive black hole M87*, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, was informally given the Hawaiian name Pōwehi, a phrase from the Kumulipo describing generative darkness or the spirit world.

What it says

The Kumulipo is a cosmogonic genealogy: it tells the birth of the world out of a long darkness and the descent of every living thing, from the smallest creatures of the sea to gods and humans, age by age. By carrying that descent unbroken to the chiefly line of Kalaninuiamamao, it ties the ruling family to the origin of the world itself. It is a sacred text, recited in ritual.

The words