BECKWITH] INTRODUCTION 3803 
the younger gods rent them apart to give room to walk upright;+ so 
gods and men walked together in the early myths, but in the later 
traditions, called historical, the heavens do actually get pushed 
farther away from man and the gods retreat thither. The fabulous 
demigods depart one by one from Hawaii; first the great gods—Kane, 
Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa; then the demigods, save Pele of the volcano. 
The supernatural race of the dragons and other beast gods who came 
from “the shining heavens” to people Hawaii, the gods and god- 
desses who governed the appearances in the heavens, and the myriad 
race of divine helpers who dwelt in the tiniest forms of the forest 
and did in a night the task of months of labor, all those god men 
who shaped the islands and named their peaks and valleys, rocks, 
and crevices as they trampled hollows with a spring and thrust their 
spears through mountains, were superseded by a humaner race of 
heroes who ruled the islands by subtlety and skill, and instead of 
climbing the heavens after the fiery drink of the gods or searching 
the underworld for ancestral hearth fires, voyaged to other groups of 
islands for courtship or barter. Then even the long voyages ceased 
and chiefs made adventure out of canoe trips about their own group, 
never save by night out of sight of land. They set about the care of 
their property from rival chiefs. Thus constantly in jeopardy from 
each other, sharpening, too, their observation of what lay directly 
about them and of the rational way to get on in life, they accepted the 
limits of a man’s power and prayed to the gods, who were their great 
ancestors, for gifts beyond their reach.? 
And during this transfer of attention from heaven to earth 
the objective picture of a paradise in the heavens or of an un- 
derworld inhabited by spirits of the dead got mixed up with 
that of a land of origin on earth, an earthly paradise called 
Hawaiki or Bulotu or “the lost land of Aane”—a land about 
which clustered those same wistful longings which men of other races 
have pictured in their visions of an earthly paradise—the “talking 
1Grey, pp. 1-15; White, 1, 46; Baessler, Neue Siidsee-Bilder, pp. 244, 245; Gill, 
Myths and Songs, pp. 58-60. 
2Compare Kriimer’s Samoan story (in Samoa Inseln, p. 413) of the quest after the 
pearl fishhooks kept by Night and Day in the twofold heavens with the Hawaiian 
stories collected by Fornander of Aiai and Nihoalaki. Kriimer’s story begins: 
“Aloalo went to his father 
To appease Sina’s longing; 
He sent him to the twofold heavens, 
To his grandparents, Night and Day, 
To the house whence drops fall spear-shaped, 
To hear their counsel and return. 
Aloalo entered the house, 
Took not the unlucky fishhook, 
Brought away that of good luck,” 
ete. 
