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and following campaigns and battles. Humbler temples were also maintained to fish, shark, lizard and other gods, where sacrifices of fish and fruits were offered.

      To the superstitious masses the land abounded in gnomes and fairies, and the waters in nymphs and monsters, whose caprices are themes of a bountiful store of folk-lore. With almost every stream, gorge and headland is connected some supernatural story, and the bards and musicians of old earned an easy support by keeping alive these legends of the people. To some supernatural powers were given, and malignant and beneficent spirits assumed human forms and flitted among the palms in the guise of birds.

      The people made their own household gods, and destroyed them when they failed to contribute to their success. For example, at Ninole, on the southeast coast of Hawaii, is a small beach called Kaloa, the stones of which, it was thought, propagated by contact with each other. From the large stones the people made gods to preside over their games. When a stone was selected for a god it was taken to the heiau where certain ceremonies were performed over it. It was then dressed and taken to witness some game or pastime. If the owner was successful it was accepted as a god; if unsuccessful more than once or twice, it was thrown away or wrought into an axe or adze. Sometimes a stone of each sex was selected, wrapped in kapa, and laid away. In time a small pebble was found with them. It increased in size, and was finally taken to the heiau and formally made into a god. Such is the story that is still told.

      The people believed that the spirits of the departed continued to hover around their earthly homes, and the shades of their ancestors were appealed to in prayer. The owl and a bird called the alae were regarded as gods, and scores of other deities, controlling the elements or presiding over the several industries and amusements of the masses, were recognized and placated with sacrifices when in unfavorable moods. They had a god of the winds, of the husbandman, the warrior, the canoe-maker, the hula dancer, the distiller, the orator, the doctor and the sorcerer, and many gods of the sailor and the fisherman.

      The services of the high-priest did not extend to these popular deities on any of the islands of the group. The heiaus over which he presided were dedicated either to the higher gods of the pantheon or to the war-god of the king or supreme chief. He was next to the king in authority, and always of distinguished blood. Surrounded by seers, prophets and assistants, and claiming to hold direct intercourse with the gods, he was consulted on all matters of state consequence, and the auguries of the temple were always accepted with respect and confidence. The high-priest sometimes had charge of the war-god of the king, and in such cases went with it to the field of battle.

      Hua, one of the ancient kings of Maui, defied the priesthood and slew his high-priest. As a warning to ruling chiefs, the story of the consequences of Hua's madness has come down with great conciseness through the chroniclers of the priesthood. Hua's kingdom became a desolation. Wherever he traveled all vegetation perished, and he finally died of famine on Hawaii, and his bones were left to whiten in the sun.

      There were several classes of priests, or kahunas, beside those who were connected with the temples. They were seers, doctors and dealers in enchantment, and subsisted by preying upon the people through their superstitions. All physical illness was attributed either to the anger of the gods, witchcraft, or the prayers of a malignant kahuna. The afflicted person usually sent for a. kahuna, whose first business was to discover the cause of the malady through incantation. This ascertained, an effort was made to counteract the spells or prayers which were wearing away the life of the patient, and sometimes with so great success that the affliction was transferred to the party whose malice had invoked it.

      The belief that one person might be prayed to death by another was universal with the ancient Hawaiians, and not a few of the race would turn pale to-day if told that one of priestly strain was earnestly praying for his death. In praying a person to death it was essential that the kahuna should possess something closely connected with the person of the victim—a lock of his hair, a tooth, a nail-paring, or a small quantity of his spittle, for example; hence the office of spittoon-bearer to the ancient kings was entrusted only to chiefs of some rank, who might be expected to guard with care the royal expectoration.

      The belief was general that the spirits of the dead might be seen and conversed with by the kilos, or sorcerers, and the spirits of the living, it was claimed, were sometimes invoked from their slumbering tabernacles by priests of exceptional sanctity. The spirit of the dead was called unihipili, while the disembodied and visible spirit of a living person was known as kahoaka.

      Of all the deities Pele was held in greatest dread on the island of Hawaii, where volcanic irruptions were frequent. With her five brothers and eight sisters—all representing different elemental forces—she dwelt in state in the fiery abysses of the volcanoes, moving from one to another at her pleasure, and visiting with inundations of lava such districts as neglected to cast into the craters proper offerings of meats and fruits, or angered her in other respects. One of her forms was that of a beautiful woman, in which she sometimes sought human society, and numerous legends of her affairs of love have been preserved. She was regarded as the special friend of Kamehameha I., and the suffocation of a portion of the army of Keoua, near the crater of Kilauea, in 1791, was credited directly to her.

      The last public recognition of the powers of Pele occurred as late as 1882 on the island of Hawaii. The village of Hilo was threatened. A broad stream of lava from Mauna Loa, after a devastating journey of twenty-five miles or more, reached a point in its downward course within a mile or two of the bay of Hilo. Its movement was slow, like that of all lava-streams some distance from their source, but its steadily approaching line of fire rendered it almost certain that the village, and perhaps the harbor, of Hilo would be destroyed within a very few days. Trenches were digged, walls were raised, and prayers were offered, but all to no purpose. Downward moved the awful avalanche of fire.

      Ruth, a surviving sister of the fourth and fifth Kamehamehas, was then living in Honolulu. She was a proud, stern old chiefess, who thought too little of the whites to attempt to acquire their language. The danger threatening Hilo was reported to her. "I will save the fish-ponds of Hilo," said the old chiefess. "Pete will not refuse to listen to the prayer of a Kamehameha." She chartered a steamer, left Honolulu for Hilo with a large number of attendants, and the next day stood facing the still moving flow of lava. Ascending an elevation immediately back of the village, she caused to be erected there a rude altar, before which she made her supplications to Pele, with offerings fed to the front of the advancing lava. This done, she descended the hill with confidence and returned to Honolulu.

      The stream of fire ceased to move, and to-day its glistening front stands like a wall around Hilo. "A remarkable coincidence," explained the whites. "The work of Pele," whispered the natives, although the last of the temples of that goddess had been destroyed sixty years before. Without discussing the cause—a natural one beyond a doubt—it may be remarked that the result has been something of a renewal with the natives of faith in the discarded gods of their fathers.

      All of the minor gods of the Hawaiians seem to have been independent and self-controlling. It is not claimed that they derived their powers from, were directed by, or were responsible to the supreme godhead. Hence the mythology of the Polynesians, strong though it be in individual powers and personations of the forces and achievements of nature, presents itself to us in a fragmentary form, like an incongruous patchwork of two or more half. developed or half-forgotten religious systems.

      One of the most noted of the independent deities of the group was Kalaipahoa, the poison-goddess of Molokai. Some centuries back she cam two or three of her sisters, from an unknown land, and left her mark in many localities. She entered a grove of trees on the island of Molokai, and left in them a poison so intense that birds fell dead in flying over their branches. The king of the island was advised by his high-priest to have a god hewn from one of the poisoned trees. Hundreds of his subjects perished in the undertaking, but the image was finally finished and presented to the king, wrapped in many folds of kapa. It came down the generations an object of fear, and was finally seized by the first Kamehameha, and at his death divided among his principal chiefs.

      Kuula was the principal god of the fishermen on all the islands of the

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