To understand the original inhabitants of Hawaii, we must first accept that they saw their world very differently. This system of belief resulted in a distinctive account of the history of the islands and their inhabitants. For the aboriginal islanders, Pele serves as a beginning point of history.
Pele was born of the female spirit Haumea and along with all other important Hawaiian deities, descended from Papa (Earth Mother) and Wakea (Sky Father). She was every bit as passionate and volatile as she was capricious and philandering. Among the first voyagers to sail from Kahiki (Tahiti) to Hawaii, she had been pursued by her angry older sister, Na-maka-o-kaha’i, the goddess of the sea, for having seduced her husband. Pele followed the brightest star in the northeastern sky as she navigated her way first to Kauai, but each thrust of her Pa’oa, or magical digging stick, into the ground produced a flood, so she continued her journey across the chain of islands of this geological formation until finally she came upon Mauna Loa, a volcano on the Big Island. Ascending the summit of the Kilauea Crater, she found her new home and named the surrounding land Hawaii.
Some time later, Pele fell in love with Lohi’au, a chief of the island of Kauai, whom she had seen in a dream. She asked her sister Hi’iaka to find him and bring him to her. After forty days had passed, Pele grew suspicious. Believing she had been betrayed, she sent a flood of lava into Hi’iaka’s ’ohi’a-lehua grove, killing the beloved companion Hopoe in the process. When Hi’iaka saw her friend entombed in lava, she flung herself into the arms of Lohi’au. In retribution, Pele set lose another stream of lava, killing Lohi’au. Despite this interfamilal violence, the anger between ohana, or family, was short-lived.
Having witnessed the spirit of Lohi’au as it had passed his canoe, Pele’s brother Kane-milo-hai reached out and caught it. In a state of remorse, Pele brought Lohi’au back to life so that he might choose which sister he would love: he chose Hi’iaka, and together they returned to Kauai to live contentedly.
Following this episode, Pele made her presence felt by sending ribbons of fiery lava down the mountainside, adding new land around the southeastern shore, a process that continues unabated. Even now, the smell of sulfur she leaves behind recalls her presence in Halema’uma’u, and her frequent eruptions have built a new island to the south called Loahi, as yet still submerged from view.
The figure of Pele has remained an important presence in Hawaiian culture and folklore throughout the past two centuries. While the native religion was abolished in 1819 in favor of Christianity, a fear of Pele and her awesome powers continued, firmly entrenched in the culture. The most authoritative version of the Pele legend first appeared in the Hoku-o-ka-Pakipika (Star of the Pacific) newspaper in 1861, and again in 1864 in another Hawaiian paper, Ke Kuokoa.
References to the goddess abound. In a 1969 episode of Hawaii Five-0, her appearance is faked by a couple intent on frightening their uncle into selling his property to them. In an episode of the television series Raven (1992–1993), she is blamed for causing a severe heat wave and later for having assumed the form of a mysterious woman who led former Special Services Agent Jonathan Raven to cause an explosion. And she appears once in the television sitcom Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996–2003) as a hapless relative, prone to setting everything around her on fire.
In other media, a character claiming to be the goddess Pele first appears as a villainess in the DC comic book Superboy, relating the life of a youthful Clark Kent. She would later appear in the popular series Wonder Woman as she sought to avenge the murder of Kāne Milohai by the Greek god Zeus. And later still in 2010, we see her in Marvel’s five-issue miniseries Chaos War, where she is depicted as an ally of Hercules and the daughter of the primeval earth goddess, who has infused her life essence into all and who embodies the spirit of life, growth, harvest, and renewal.
In the action role-playing first-person shooter video game Borderlands (2009), Pele is referenced—with the likes of “Pele demands a sacrifice” or “Pele humbly requests a sacrifice, if it’s not too much trouble”—with “Volcano,” a rare weapon that explodes into a giant ball of fire if detonated. She appears as a demon in the Japanese postapocalyptic role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei IV (2013). She even makes a cameo appearance in the animated series It’s a Small World (2013), inspired by the classic Disney theme park attraction. In the 3D animation short E Ho’omau: Pele Searches for a Home (2014), exemplifying of the Hawaiian tradition of storytelling, Auntie relates to the local children the legend of Pele as the primal force of volcanic heat and lava, who leaves her ancient home of Kahiki in search of a new home for herself and her family. And children await the appearance of Pele, the Goddess of Fire and Volcanoes, in the preshow of the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland at the Disneyland Resort and at Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort.
In keeping with her place in traditional music, hula dancers routinely make offerings to Pele of the scarlet lehua blossom of the ohia tree, often the first plant to grow on new lava flows. Likewise, she finds new life with the eight-woman world-beat band Pele Juju, based in Santa Cruz, California. In an odd homage of a sort, the American singer/songwriter Tori Amos released her third studio album Boys for Pele (1996) in her honor. Mentioned but once in a single lyric from “Muhammad, My Friend”—”You’ve never seen fire until you’ve seen Pele blow”—the album itself builds on those ideals associated with the deity, in particular the feminine power of “fire.” In 2004, Brian Balmages composed the powerful, haunting Pele for Solo Horn and Wind Ensemble on commission from Jerry Peel, professor of French horn at the University of Miami. In Perry Farrell’s “Hot Lava” (2008) on the South Park Album, she is described as “dormant, caught in sleep, following an explosive romp with a satisfied lover.” Finally, Steven Reineke captures the mystery and intrigue, as well as the intense and almost savage character of Pele as a woman with his symphonic piece Goddess of Fire (2009).
And she remains alive in literature, be it in the lengthy poem Oenone (1892) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson or in the contemporary novelist Karsten Knight’s paranormal Wildefire saga with a darkly humorous bent (2012–). In Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, Hawaiian poet and activist Haunani-Kay Trask (1949–) moves beyond the fire into the power of the word—in lyrics as incantation and as instigation—to invoke a specifically Hawaiian feminine strength. In fact, the entirety of Trask’s second volume builds upon island traditions, moving as it does through song-chants and the hula, intimately connecting Pele and her sister Hi’iaka to the volcanic landscape of Hawaii and other phenomena of nature, as she cries for her ancestral lands, now laid waste before the false gods of tourist dollars, increased militarism, and uncurbed urbanization.
Pele’s presence is felt everywhere in modern Hawaii, from whispered encounters by locals with an old woman dressed all in white and accompanied by a little dog, through haunting photographic apparitions, to rumors of a curse upon those who steal rocks from the lava fields or the misfortunes of those who dare to take pork over the Pali Highway to the windward side of Oahu. In fact, to grasp the perspective of the earliest inhabitants of Hawaii, we need to allow ourselves to extend our reading of this myth and must accept that truth cannot be captured by plain words and that the ritual behaviors expressed ought not to be taken as a literal description of historical events in our current understanding of time and space. Then and only then might we be able to appreciate—to value—how specific structures from the indigenous culture are somehow reflected by the psyche within the context of myth and rediscover essential elements of the traditional worldview of the native Hawaiian people and the cultural practices that gave form to that view. For only by understanding might we then know how to navigate our way through the intricate cultural pathways that comprise contemporary Hawaii.
James Allan Wren
See also Calabash of Poi, A; Creation Stories of the Native Americans
Further Reading
Emerson, Nathaniel B. 2008. Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula. Honolulu, HI: Forgotten Books.
Emerson, Nathaniel B. 2013. Pele and Hi’iaka: A Myth from Hawaii. North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle.
Franklin, Cynthia, and Laura E. Lyons. 2004. “Land, Leadership, and Nation: Haunani-Kay Trask on the Testimonial Uses of Life Writing in Hawai’i.” Biography 27 (1): 222–249.
Kahananui, Dorothy M. 1962. Music of Ancient Hawaii. Hilo, HI: Petroglyph Press.
Kane, Herb Kawainui. 1987. Pele: Goddess of Hawai’i’s Volcanoes. Captain Cook, HI: Kawainui Press.
Mullins, Joseph G. 1997. The Goddess Pele. Honolulu, HI: Aloha Graphics and Sales.
Varez, Dietrich, and Pua Kanaka’ole Kanahele. 1991. Pele: The Fire Goddess. Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press.