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Paper presented at the South Seas Symposium, Published as part of the Occasional Papers Series, for the proceedings of the Easter Island Foundation, February 1998 Rima Aruluen Morrell, MA Cantab, All rights protected.
Just One Mysterious Polynesian Island? Easter Island, or Rapanui, is famous for many reasons. Its remoteness, its giant statues, its environmental destruction. Perhaps it is ultimately famous for its mysteries. Mysteries such as the enigmatic Moai statues, the cryptic Rongorongo script, the unexpected ecological disaster, have fascinated the western world since Easter Island was “discovered.” Blockbuster movies such as the 1994 film Rapa Nui, directed by Kevin Reynolds and starred in by Jason Scott Lee, fanned the public interest and added to the island’s mystique. Rapanui lies thousands of miles to the south of the islands of Hawai’i. Hawai’i, which forms the northernmost apex of the “Polynesian triangle,” is known as “America’s back yard.” Hawai’i consists of islands of palm trees and beating surf, islands of the hot sand and even hotter hula dancers. There were no statues on the scale of Easter Island, the secrets of the culture were never traditionally recorded in an alphabet-type script, the ecological disasters were precipitated within living memory. But this does not explain why many people claim that Hawaiian culture was all in the past, and even worse, use words such as “limited” to describe it, such as anthropologist Valerio Valeri did (Valeri 1985: p. 33). Was Easter island the flower of a culture so sophisticated that its allure persists today, and were the northern islands of Hawai’i merely a rough tillage with no culture to speak of? I do not believe so, they share a common Polynesian language and culture. The difference lies in our perception of them. What we see is informed by our theory or what we believe, and we are particularly aware of that as the twentieth century draws to a close. Many academics, in disciplines ranging from Quantum Physics to Geography, no longer believe in the possibility, even the desirability, of “objectivity.” One of the most famous exponents of the newly-shifting paradigms wrote: (Clifford and Marcus 1986: p. 2): “We ground things now on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to represent the world. Mountains are in constant motion. So are islands: for one cannot occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world from which to journey out and analyze other cultures.” Islands cannot remain “is.lands,” quantities that can be measured, described and definitively studied. They are not static, but come in and out of sight according to the horizon of the observer. The position of the academic is being re-negotiated and there is an increasing awareness that he or she must try to traverse new terrain. It may be literally and metaphorically, as in Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki expedition; it should be accomplished metaphorically at least. Edward Said wrote in ‘Identity, authority and freedom: the potentate and the traveler’ (Transition 54 1991 quoted in Thomas 1994: p. 18): “Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals ... the traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a realistic sense of the terrain is, I believe, a kind of academic freedom at its highest.” That “dedication and love” is actually very difficult to achieve, not only requiring the academic to open up to a new world, but to question the values of the “old world” he or she is a product of. One may experience what anthropologist Victor Turner called (Turner and Bruner 1986: p. 203): “a true psychological passage from one way of seeing and understanding to another, a passage not vouchsafed to those who hold hard to the values, meanings, goals and beliefs they have grown up with to think of as reality.” The experience itself is not enough. We must also be open to the meaning, or even meanings, of that experience. As William Clarke wrote on his study of an indigenous knowledge system in New Guinea (in Waddell and Nunn 1994: p. 266): “Our most vital task is to pause long enough to avoid the fate that T.S. Eliot depicted in The Dry Salvages: ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning.’”
The Constitution of an Island The meaning(s) of an island may be explored by looking at the constitution of a mythical island, let us say Bali Hai, in the film South Pacific. The tremendous popularity of the film has ensured the island has come to represent Polynesia for millions of viewers. As the mixed-race trader known as “Bloody Mary” sings about Bali Hai to Lieutenant Joe Cable, we glimpse a compelling island of high, crimson pinnacles wreathed in smoking clouds, adrift in a pink sea (Bartlett 1996: 8). Joe-from-Kansas is mesmerized as Bloody Mary continues to croon: “Most people live on a lonely island/ Lost in the middle of a foggy sea/ Most people long for another island/ One where they know they would like to be.” However, when Joe finally sneaks away to visit Bali Hai, lack-of-distance lends familiarity. And the island is familiar, to western viewers at least, for Joe frolics in a fantasy-Polynesia. In a haunting rockpool by a waterfall, Joe and his new love Liat, virginal yet willing, sing to each other about happiness. Then the story moves on and does not return to the island. We are left with the sense that the “hidden island” has been discovered and fulfills our wildest dreams. It may fulfill the dreams other representations have created, yet has it really been “discovered?” The seductive pinnacles of Bali Hai, if they really existed, would perhaps be studied by geologists. They would say the island rock, despite its unidimensional appearance from that familiar viewpoint, is really composed of layers, each layer obscuring the one beneath. An island is made up of many levels, whether these levels are of rock or of culture, and we must not mistake the alluring vision for the underlying constitution. Yet this very mistake has often been made in representing Polynesia, perhaps because the vision itself is so seductive to a jaded western palate, which longs to “do a Gauguin” and ride off into a Tahitian sunset on a wild white horse along a pink sand beach. But the experience of many people shows that there are many kinds of understanding, many kinds of knowledge, and that the Polynesian culture is incredibly complex and sophisticated. I will use the example of the Hawaiian islands to demonstrate my point, because they are the island group I am most familiar with. As I have already mentioned, Hawaiians did not traditionally encode their knowledge in writing, nor did they build giant structures like the Ancient Egyptians and the pyramids, or the Easter islanders and the Moai. In other words, the Hawaiians did not have some of the indices we traditionally think of as representing “civilization” in the developmental “line” we put societies on, a single line which goes from “primitive” to “civilized.” Therefore the dimensions of Hawaiian society have not often been “seen.” In this paper I look at “the hidden secrets of Hawai’i” in two ways, through the language and through the dance. Any human language is capable of interpretation in different ways; but as far as my experience allows me to conclude, the Polynesian language is particularly densely packed with meaning and ripe for a range of possible understandings. There are many possible ways of interpreting the “Hawaiian code.” Hawaiians have told me they include breaking the word down into separate words, looking for words within the words and examining individual syllables. Additionally, the syllables and vowels may be doubled, vowels added to the individual syllables and the word treated as an anagram. Therefore each word has an enormously wide semantic range. It is also worth noting that the ancient Hawaiians traditionally spoke in metaphors, and the situation of the metaphor give far more interpretive possibilities. The biggest difference today is that the Hawaiian language tends to be taught literally by literal-minded teachers. To some “old-time” Hawaiians, that is the biggest flaw in the revival of the Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is now a “written” language. It may not be immediately obvious that “fixing the language” has limited the way scholars approach it. To some degree, this fixing has been arbitrary. A committee of seven missionaries chose twelve English letters to represent the Hawaiian alphabet in 1826, and this results of this resolution are still in force. The consonants are h, k, l, m, n, p and w and the vowels a, e, i, o and u. The process of selection was close: missionaries voting by 4-3 to use “k” and not “t”, the “w” instead of the “v,” and the “l” instead of the “r.” The Hawaiian island of Ni’ihau, the only island where the language has been spoken without interruption still uses the “t” pronunciation, as does most of the rest of Polynesia. Certain scholars have chosen to use the ancient form of the language as a protest, such as linguist Joseph Finney (Finney: p. 1) and mythologist Reiaroha (formerly Leialoha) Perkins. It seems unlikely the Hawaiian language has benefited from the reduction of the sounds to the alphabet of a different culture. By now it will be apparent that a range of sounds has been lost. Schutz quoted Henry P. Judd writing about sixty years ago (Schutz 1994: pp. 26-27): “Not only were words and sentences full of double meanings, but different words with entirely different meanings sound exactly the same to our unpracticed ears. Fortunately, the native Hawaiian had a keen sense of hearing. These differences in sound are so small that a man who speaks English on hearing them would be positive he heard only one sound. And yet a Hawaiian would have heard a number of different sounds.” It seems justified to say that many linguistics analysts expected Polynesian languages to be representative of a simple humanity just out of the Edenic state. William Churchill wrote that analysis of the language of Easter Island was justified because it will: “carry our students very close to one of the origins of human utterance of ideas, so close that philology may then be justified in calling upon psychology to explain the process whereby the primitive man has learned to differentiate his animal cry into thought-directed speech” (Churchill 1912: p. 10 quoted in Schutz 1994: p. 14). The influential missionary Lorrin Andrews wrote (Andrews 1854: 19): “In Hawaiian there is a great want of generic terms, as is the case with all uncultivated languages. No people have use for generic terms until they begin to reason; and the language shows that the Hawaiians have never been a reasoning people.” Perhaps Mr. Andrews is a victim of his belief system, and the generalizations Christianity encourages him to make, and Hawaiian reasoning is “unseen, because not looked for.” The word for truth in Hawaiian is oia’i’o. It contains i’o, substance or muscle, and can be translated as “truth-telling has many dimensions.” In other words, people may understand the same words on many different levels, the way our mythical geologist may look at rock very differently from a film-maker, and the film-maker remain blithely unaware of other representations. Looking for the kaona or hidden meanings of the Hawaiian language, in the anthropological tradition popularized by Marshall Sahlins (Sahlins 1985 pp. 10-16); means that we are at least aware of some of the other meanings possible in our interpretation. Unlike Marshall Sahlins, I do not look primarily at the sexual meanings of dance chants, although, as he pointed out, there are certainly always “there” in Polynesia (Sahlins 1985: p. 14). The dance of Hawai’i, as most people know, is the hula, often seen as a “spectacle” of form without substance. Most people will agree that the manner Hawaiians traditionally pass down knowledge may include ways that are unfamiliar to the Western mind. The dance, for example, fulfills far more functions than Western society expects. In a previous paper (Bartlett 1991), I have analyzed that in more detail. Even today in Hawai’i, knowledge of the past is not usually transmitted through writing; but through chanting, story-telling and genealogy. The words are passed down, but their interpretation may change and vary in the mind of the listener. Yet it is important to understand that the words are not form without substance, but form covering substance, the way coconut shells cover the breasts of the female dancers. Generalized knowledge was not usually “taught” in Hawai’i in the form we know it, for instance to a group of people of a particular age. Rather the forms (the words) were passed on, and it was left to the individual to make their own interpretation. Therefore you could conceivably have members of a hula troupe all understanding different things from the same chant and never discussing it with each other, and certain hula troupes still operate that way today. There is a belief that people only find what they are ready to know, and it may be dangerous to give them more knowledge than they know how to use. I am reminded of Einstein’s remark when the neutron bomb, the invention he helped bring into being, was abused: “If I had known I would have been a shoemaker.” In other words, he should not necessarily have passed on his knowledge, because the world was not ready for it. Similarly one Hawaiian seer said of Valeri’s book which called the Hawaiian religion “childlike and limited” (Valeri 1985: 33), if that was all he could see, then “okay.” The island is alluring, yet it is made up of the solid rock of knowledge, layer upon layer of it. It is important not to take either the expected glimpse, or Foucault’s “archaeology of mind” for granted. We see only the layers we expect to find, and the layers themselves may dissolve, if they are glanced at from a particular angle. I prefer to use the concept of multi-dimensionality, as to me that signifies best the range of meanings it is possible to give Hawaiian words. Hawaiian society existed in a state of dynamic potential, and words and ritual help the potential “grow” in the desired direction. Now it is time to look at some ways the Hawaiian culture does this. To make sense of this we must try and understand things in Hawaiian terms, and we should note that this is only possible if we are prepared to question our familiar concepts. Let us start with analyzing a familiar word, mana . Tracking the Undergrowth Anthropologists often say that mana means divine or supernatural power. Implicit within this formulation is an assumption that the natural world is separate and distinct from the supernatural world. Luciano Minerbi, for example, defined mana as a divine, supernatural force (Minerbi 1996: p. 3). Hawaiians do not traditionally think this way. Hawaiian artist and writer Herb Kane recently wrote (Kane undated: p.1): “Polynesians did not share the European vision of the supernatural as a sphere separate from the natural universe and there is a general absence of equivalent words to concepts such as divine, sacred, etc. in Polynesian dialects.” It seems that the separation of the “divine” and the “supernatural” from the natural and the mundane is a construct of the West, not of the Hawaiians. It is a result of the separation of humanity from divinity inherent in the translations I have seen of the Bible. This construction must be questioned, for many Hawaiian stories and sayings and writings would appear to support a different view. Mary Pukui (Handy and Pukui 1993: p. 117) wrote: “A Hawaiian’s oneness with the living aspect of native phenomena, that is, with spirits and gods and other persons as souls, is not correctly described by the word rapport, and certainly not by such words as sympathy, empathy, abnormal, supernormal or neurotic; mystical or magical. It is not ‘extra-sensory,’ for it is party-of-the-senses-and-not-of-the senses. It is just a part of natural consciousness for the normal Hawaiian - a ‘second sense,’ if you will, like the Celtic ‘second sight’ - but it is not ‘sight’ only, or particularly, but covers every phase of sensory and mental consciousness.” The lack of clear distinction between the natural and supernatural is widespread in cultures of the world. The implications of the duality superimposed in retrospect on Hawaiian culture, may be far greater than we realize at first. Here it is important to understand certain differences between the traditional Polynesian belief system and Christianity. The gods, in Polynesia, were not omniscient beings, and it was not a situation of “Thy will be done.” Humanity needs to co-create with the gods, who cannot always be trusted to operate with full respect for human needs (Bartlett 1997b). Hawai’i contains the most actively volcanic islands in Polynesia and the primogenic hula myth is to do with controlling the power of Pele, the volcano goddess. The myth of Pele and her younger sister Hi’iaka concerns journeying. The account of the first journey describes the death and destruction Pele leaves in her travels through the Hawaiian islands. A second journey is needed, and Pele sends her little sister, Hi’iaka-i-ka-poli-a-Pele, or Hi’iaka-in-the-bosom-of-Pele. This dancing Hi’iaka, together with her maidservant Wahine-Oma’o, brings greenery to the Hawaiian islands. The land is able to flourish. Creation is not only external, but also internal. One of Hawaii’s most famous hula teachers, said mana means creative power. In that context, creative power implies that human beings are interacting with the gods. The anthropologist Douglas Oliver (Oliver 1974: p. 301) wrote that: “The erotic dancing of the tropical islands of Polynesia was believed to stimulate and bring into action the mana of the gods, who were believed to be motivated by the same emotions as men.” The concept of co-creation may be seen in the ways the Hawaiians attempt to create with the akua [gods] through the hula dance. One method can be loosely defined by the English word “color,” the other way shows ritual as an attempt to “grow the moon.” Dancing the Island Awake The hula dance is an elaborate system in Hawai’i, designed to transmit knowledge in many dimensions. The role of color, at first sight, does not seem important. Color is a relatively simple quality, particularly when it is found in such abundance as in Polynesia. Paul Gauguin wrote (Danielsson undated: p. 30): “It was so simple to paint things as I saw them, applying a red next to a blue without any special calculation. I was fascinated by golden figures in streams or on the sea-shore.” But color in Hawai’i, which may be defined by its moral qualities (Bartlett 1991: p. 29), does not just shine in a world of surfaces. When color appears, it is because there is something behind it. It may signal that knowledge has been obtained, for example. As is generally known, knowledge was largely (but not exclusively) transmitted by the family in Polynesia. Each clan wore a kapa [mulberry bark] cloth of their own distinctive color (Lee and Willis 1987: p. 17). An association between color and knowledge seems likely and this association may be maintained in the analysis of the dance which follows. Each technique of the hula is similar to a word representing color. Akala, pink, is close to akalewa, to sway the hips daintily. Uliuli means the shaking hula rattles as well as the sea’s deep blue. I believe the dancers are helping color to grow through the dance. But the color must grow in the desired way. The Hawaiians do not want their land to be overwhelmed by the bloody red of Pele’s lava. To prevent that they must keep tight control. Perhaps that is why each of these words is also close to the word for a taboo. Akalau means “many shadows,” uli is the goddess of sorcery. Just as color is defined by its boundaries, so must a dancer be. It was very important for a fledgling dancer not to transgress taboo. According to Nathaniel Emerson, the haole schoolteacher whose depth of writing about the hula I believe to be unmatched today, the dancers could not be noa or ritually free until their graduation when they bathed naked in the sea and ate a black pig (Emerson 1986: pp. 30-35). That was the signal the dancers were able to make their own decisions and follow their own values. They have learned to control their consciousness. The dancers dance towards the goddess Laka, whose name means “tame, domesticated, gentle, docile, to tame, domesticate, attract.” Metaphorically it can mean “to tame oneself.” The goddess Laka is worshipped with greenery, which decorated the kuahu or altar “a rustic frame embowered in greenery” (Emerson 1986: p. 15). Emerson continued: “the gathering of the green leaves and other sweet finery of nature for its construction and decoration was a matter of so great importance that it could not be entrusted to any chance assemblage of wild youth who might see fit to take the work in hand. There were formalities that must be observed, songs to be chanted, prayers to be recited.” The dancers’ aim to help the dance grow like a plant. Space does not permit me to quote the whole of the prayers for the gathering of greenery, but one couplet is (Emerson 1986: pp. 17-18): I kupu ke a’a I ke kumu, That the root may grow from the stem, So the mana of the dancer branches out (the word mana may also refer to the branch of a tree). Hula expert Roselle Bailey has confirmed to me that this greenery is to do with consciousness. The word for green, as in plants, is o.ma’o. The second journey, when growth is consciously directed and obstacles overcome through dancing and chanting, was necessary because Pele’s first journey did not bring growth to the islands of Hawai’i. Hi’iaka means hi’i, “carry,” and aka, “the first sign of consciousness,” so perhaps it is Hi’iaka’s role to carry consciousness. It may be relevant to note that Hi’iaka’s journey was with her maidservant, Wahine Oma’o or “lady in green.” The word for consciousness is ike ho omao popo, which contains the word for green, o.ma’o. Interestingly, the word oma means “open the mouth, as though to speak or to ask indirectly.” The vowel sound o, means to “answer, reply,” and the “greening” of the Hawaiian islands is the sign the gods have answered the dancers’ call. The hula must always be accompanied by chanted sound after all, and the link between words and creation is well known. Sound acts as the mouthpiece for light and its filter, letting through the iridescent color. This is achieved through harmonic resonance or the quality of sound within sound. In English this is called “color.” Growing the Light of the Moon Hawaiians help the gods along by building up consciousness through “growing the moon.” David Malo (Malo 1951: 32) described the way ritual in Hawai’i needed to be performed on a specific night of the moon. By “growing the moon” the Hawaiians grew the light of the gods, the moon, like color, is a sign that the gods are present. Akua, the word for God, is the same word for the “night of the full moon.” Akua can also mean fully developed consciousness. The moon has “been grown” from aka, the first dim light of moonrise in the darkness, which can also mean the fetus at the moment of conception, when consciousness was believed to begin. The fetus then goes on to grow limbs known as mana. The dance known as the hula is one way of helping those limbs of power to grow. On the island of Moloka’i consciousness was also built up through a moon ritual called waiaka “water,” wai, of the “moon’s beginnings” or aka. John Ke’imikaua, a famous hula master of Kaneohe, O’ahu, described it thus, in a ritual which had to be performed on the night of the full moon (personal communication 1996). The heiau [temples] were called waiaka and were circular, with pegged poles in the ground and cross-beams at the top. Large sheets of kapa were draped over them to act as curtains. They were only found on Moloka’i. In the middle of each heiau was a large gourd. When the moon began to rise in the night sky, the women entered, each bearing a small gourd of water. She says who she is, where she comes from and her purpose, then pours her water into the central gourd. As the moon nears the top of the sky its reflection appeared in the bowl of water. Akua, the word for God, also means “fully-developed consciousness.” At this time: “Hina dwells in that waiaka for a few minutes.” Just as the moon reflects the sun, so “helping the moon to grow” helps the growth of the individual Hawaiian. The dancers have grown limbs of mana, developed their consciousness and tamed themselves. They have helped light grow from the dim glow of aka to the glowing orb of akua. Aka and akua are separated by the quality of light we recognize as “color” or “brightness.” And so the two ways of developing consciousness, creating color through the hula and building up the moon are brought together. They both build up the “quality of light” through acts we know as ritual. One of the goals of these rituals is to make color appear. The clearer the color the better. The goddess Laka, for example, is represented by a block of lama wood wrapped in clear kapa. Her kapa must be “well-beaten, clearer than snow on the mountains” (Emerson 1986: 113). Malamalama is a word meaning “enlightenment,” which contains malama, moon, as well as this lama wood. So words create brightness, in color and in clarity of mind. Approaching the Hidden Islands The transparency of the fabled “hidden islands” which shine on the aquamarine horizon just at the limit of human sight, mean they can only be seen by those who know the knowledge of their ancestors, so crossing the trans-parent boundaries. To most, those islands remain a mystery, because their minds are not prepared. Edward Kanahele wrote (Van James 1991: foreword): “Pali-uli, a divine place of much spiritual presence, cannot be found with a map or jungle guide. Pali-uli is discoverable only if one’s mind and soul are ready to receive...” Once the land was “watered” with consciousness it was essential it remain fertile, in other words the ritual needed to be repeated. Even the inner garden on Kane huna moku, or the hidden island of Kane was called ulu hai malama, and is where the fragrant flowers of paradise grow (Beckwith 1976: 71). Ulu hai malama means offering, hai, to the growth, ulu, of the moon, malama. Malama also means “to take care of, tend, preserve, to keep or observe, as a taboo.” A burgeoning garden on this ultimate island of mystery is a sign the rituals are being performed correctly. Legend has it that any Hawaiian who succeeds in visiting these islands will never want to leave them (Beckwith 1976: 69). But one can only do so if one has developed peace, harmony and clarity within oneself and alignment with the ancestral knowledge (Bartlett 1997 a). The shamanistic system of the hula, the dance of “action and reaction on the way to enlightenment” as Roselle Bailey put it, the dance of expanding life, is one method. The dancer must know about the kaona within the language, and be able to use it in his or her life. Conclusion: The Islands Are Unveiled “Language is the means whereby people communicate. It is also, ironically, the main means whereby people fail to communicate.” This statement, from a well-known encyclopedia of languages (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages, 1987: p. 341), was not referring to the dimensions that exist within Polynesian languages. Those languages were characterized earlier in the volume (p. 317) as being primarily to do with memorization, recitation and ownership of knowledge. That failure of the Polynesian languages to communicate may be due to the unawareness of the listener, as well as the deliberate intent of the speaker. Although I am hampered by not being a linguistic expert, I have tried to show some of the dynamic potential inherent in the Hawaiian language. It may be argued that I only image what I see, and do not see the Hawaiian culture objectively. I agree and indeed would postulate that is all any of us ever do. In Polynesia we tend only to get answers to the questions we ask. What Polynesians believe and say is: “you don’t ask, you don’t get.” If we do not ask the questions, information is unlikely to be volunteered as it will be assumed we are “not ready to know.” Even if we ask the right question in the wrong way, we may well not get the answer, as we are not humble enough to receive that powerful information. Again, they would say, we are not ready for it. When we do ask the right questions though, and we are given the answers, we have access to information that may never have been told to a researcher before. To take an example: the Akatawa is the key way of organizing society in Pukapuka, now part of the Cook Islands. It was discussed in print for the first time by Borofsky. When he asked the islanders why no anthropologist had written about it before, the reply was: “they did not ask about this matter” (Borofsky 1987: p. 12). Therefore they were not told. So some information is conveyed and other information is not conveyed, and crucially, we never know what we miss. Therefore we may think we see “the whole picture” when we can only ever see a portion. We miss-the-story or miss the mystery. So how applicable is this principle and the information I have been able to convey? I believe it can be applied to Polynesia as a whole; and it might be very productive for someone to work on the links between Rapanui and Hawaiian society from this linguistic/ anthropological viewpoint. Until such research is accomplished, it would be prudent to remember that we are but small players in a game far bigger than us, however much we might be told we are “experts” on a particular culture. Yet this paper does show, I hope, a glimpse of the new world outside the accepted parameters of knowledge. The iris of the eye contracts or expands according to the amount of light we perceive. When the iris expands, boundaries may dissolve into a splintered form like Strindberg’s rainbow. In medieval times, the iris of the eye was called “the rainbow.” The Hawaiians recognized different types of the phenomena we know as “rainbows” and have many words to describe them. Na Po Makole is the “night rainbow,” a circular rainbow only appearing on the night of the full moon, harmonizing light around fully-developed consciousness. Two Hawaiians from the island of Moloka’i described it thus (Lee and Willis 1987: preface): “Na Po Makole is seen by only a few. It is the spirit rainbow. The rainbow that holds our ancestors.” The rainbow is the sign of the co-existence and harmony of different lights or knowledge. At last the appropriate ritual and understanding and consciousness has accessed the greater knowledge of the ancestors. The fact that the knowledge cannot be seen by everybody does not mean it is not there, just as the transparency of the hidden island does not mean it is not “there.” When intent and practice are in alignment, then we are ready to “see.” Then the chant may lead to enchantment. Bloody Mary’s song continues as the light changes: “If you try you’ll find me/ Where the sky meets the sea/ Here am I your special island/ Come to me, come to me.”
1. All Hawaiian-English definitions unless otherwise cited are
taken from the fourth edition (1985) of the revised and enlarged
dictionary of the Hawaiian language by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel
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