BECKWITH] INTRODUCTION 299 
quest and overrule. There is primitive romance—tales of competi- 
tion, of vengeance, and of love; primitive wit—of drolls and trick- 
sters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts. 
These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to 
universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined 
by the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, 
familiar to the Polynesian mind. 
The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in 
fact, to Anaxagoras’s sketch of the universe. Earth is a plain, walled 
about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, 
rise the confines of Kahiki, Aukulu 0 Kahiki2 From this point the 
heavens are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number 
varying in different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld, 
sometimes divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors 
and inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods *—the 
whole inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell. Ordinarily the 
gods seem to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens. As in other 
mythologies, heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a 
reproduction or copy of earth and its ways. In heaven the gods are 
ranged by rank; in the highest heaven dwells the chief god alone en- 
joying his supreme right of silence, tabu moe; others inhabit the 
lower heavens in gradually descending grade corresponding to the so- 
cial ranks recognized among the Polynesian chiefs on earth. This 
physical world is again the prototype for the activities of the gods, 
its multitudinous manifestations representing the forms and forces 
employed by the myriad gods in making known their presence on 
earth. They are not these forms themselves, but have them at their 
disposal, to use as transformation bodies in their appearances on 
earth, or they may transfer them to their offspring on earth. This 
is due to the fact that the gods people earth, and from them man is 
1In the Polynesian picture of the universe the wall of heaven is conceived as shutting 
down about each group, so that boats traveling from one group to another “ break 
through” this barrier wall. The Kukulu o Kahiki in Hawaii seems to represent some 
such confine. Emerson says (in Malo, 30): “ Kukulu was a wall or vertical erection 
such as was supposed to stand at the limits of the horizon arid support the dome of 
heaven.’”’ Points of the compass were named accordingly Kukulu hikina, Kukulu komo- 
kana, Kukulu hema, Kukulu akau—east, west, south, north. The horizon was called 
Kukulu-o-ka-honua—* the compass-of-the-earth.’”” The planes inclosed by such confines, 
on the other hand, are named Kahiki. The circle of the sky which bends upward 
from the horizon is called Kahiki-ku or “ vertical.”” That through which the eye travels 
in reaching the horizon, Kahiki-moe, or “ horizontal.” 
2The Rarotongan world of spirits is an underworld. (See Gill’s Myths and Songs.) 
The Hawaiians believed in a subterranean world of the dead divided into two regions, 
in the upper of which Wakea reigned; in the lower, Milu. Those who had not been 
sufficiently religious ‘‘must lie under the spreading Kou trees of Milu’s world, drink its 
waters and eat lizards and butterflies for food.’’ Traditional points from which the 
soul took its leap into this underworld are to be found at the northern point of Hawail, 
the west end of Maui, the south and the northwest points of Oahu, and, most famous 
of all, at the mouth of the great Waipio Valley on Hawaii. Compare Thomson’s account 
from Fiji of the “ pathway of the shade,” p. 119. 
3 White, 1, chart; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 3, 4; Ellis, 11, 168-170. 
