In Hawaiian religion, the Kumulipo is the creation chant, first recorded in the 18th century. It also includes a genealogy of the members of Hawaiian royalty and was created in honor of Kalaninuiamamao and passed down orally to his daughter Alapaiwahine.

Creation chant

In the Kumulipo the world was created over a cosmic night. This is not just one night, but many nights over time. The ancient Hawaiian kahuna and priests of the Hawaiian religion would recite the Kumulipo during the makahiki season, honoring the god Lono. In 1779, Captain James Cook arrived in Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii during the season and was greeted by the Hawaiians reciting the Kumulipo. Some stories say Cook was mistaken for Lono, because of the type of sails on his ship and his pale skintone. In 1889, King Kalākaua printed a sixty-page pamphlet of the Kumulipo. Attached to the pamphlet was a 2-page paper on how the chant was originally composed and recited. Years later Queen Liliuokalani described the chant as a prayer of the development of the universe and the ancestry of the Hawaiians. Liliuokalani translated the chant under house arrest in Iolani Palace. The translation was published in 1897, then republished by Pueo Press in 1978. The Kumulipo is a total of 2,102 lines long, in honor of Kalaninuiamamao, who created peace for all when he was born. There was a lot of fighting between his ʻI and Keawe family, who were cousins so his birth stopped the two from feuding. The Kumulipo is a cosmogonic genealogy, which means that it relates to the creation of the universe and the descent of humans and other entities. Out of the 2102 lines, it has 16 "wā" which means era or age. In each wā, something is born whether it is a human, plant, or other creature.

Divisions

The Kumulipo is divided into sixteen wā, sections. The first seven wā fall under the section of pō (darkness), the age of spirit. The Earth may or may not exist, but the events described do not take place in a physical universe. The words show the development of life as it goes through similar stages as a human child. All plants and animals of sea and land, earth and sky, male and female are created. Eventually, it leads to early mammals. These are the first twelve lines of the Kumulipo, in Hawaiian, in Liliuokalani's English translation and in Bastian's German translation. Two other significant English translations - Rock's translation of Bastian and Beckwith's translation - appear in Beckwith's 1951 book The Kumulipo. ! Hawaiian language ! English (Liliuokalani) ! German (Bastian) The second section, containing the remaining nine wā, is ao and is signaled by the arrival of light and the gods, who watch over the changing of animals into the first humans. After that is the complex genealogy of Kalaninuiamamao that goes all the way to the late 18th century.

Births in each wā

The births in each age include: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists Adolf Bastian and Roland Burrage Dixon interpreted a recurring verse of the Kumulipo as describing the octopus as the sole survivor of a previous age of existence. In her 1951 translation of the Kumulipo, ethnographer Martha Warren Beckwith provided a different translation of the verse, although she does discuss the possibility that "octopus" is the correct translation and describes the god Kanaloa.

Comparative literature

Comparisons may be made between marital partners (husband and wife often have synonymous names), between genealogical and flora-fauna names, and in other Polynesian genealogies.

Cultural impact

The supermassive black hole M87*, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, was informally given the Hawaiian name "Pōwehi", a poetic description of generative darkness or the spirit world taken from the Kumulipo. In 2009, the poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio performed her poem, Kumulipo, at a poetry event at the White House.