Hawaiian Mythology: Part One: The Gods: IV. The Kane Worship

This is a scholarly ethnographic survey of Kane, the chief deity in pre-contact Hawaiian religion, drawn from multiple 19th-century native informant accounts (Fornander, Kepelino, Kamakau, Westervelt) and analyzed within the broader Polynesian comparative tradition. The text presents four distinct creation narratives in which Kane, working with the gods Ku and Lono as a divine triad, fashions the heavens, earth, and humanity — with the first man molded from red earth and animated by the gods' breath, and the first woman made from his side, before both are expelled from a sacred garden for violating a divine command. The author explicitly addresses the striking parallels to Genesis, arguing that indigenous tradition was likely "colored" by missionary-era biblical familiarity rather than wholesale invented from it, and draws comparisons to cognate Tahitian and southern Polynesian myths to support the traditions' genuine Polynesian roots. A distinctive claim is that Kane's worship was unusually mild — no human sacrifice, no elaborate ritual — centered instead on simple family stone altars and prayers invoking a vast taxonomy of personal ancestral Kane-gods (aumakua), with the god conceptually linked to procreation and life itself. The text is most useful for anyone studying Polynesian comparative mythology, Hawaiian religious practice, or the methodological problem of disentangling pre-contact indigenous belief from post-contact Christian influence.

Hawaiian Mythology: Part One: The Gods: IV. The Kane Worship

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