THE prose note explains the name Lono-i-ka-makahiki with which the final genealogy of the chant concludes-"To Ahu, to Ahu-a-'I, to Lono-i-ka-makahiki"--as the name given to the infant by his mother at his birth, to be replaced after his consecration in the temple by the name by which he is known in history. The word maka, "eye," refers to the constellation of the Pleiades, hiki is a sign of movement; the word translated liberally hence refers to the rising of the Pleiades in the heavens corresponding with the time of the sun's turn northward, bringing warmth again to earth, the growth of plants, and the spawning of fish. At this time a festival was celebrated in honor of the fertility god Lono, god of cultivated food plants not alone in Hawaii but throughout marginal Polynesian islands, and prayed to in Hawaiian households to send rain and sunshine upon the growing crops, spawn to fill the fishing stations, offspring to mankind. His signs were observed in the clouds. Heiau were built to Lono not in time of war but under stress of famine or scarcity. His worship was mild, without human sacrifice such as belonged to the severer worship of the war god Ku. Any man might set up a temple to Lono, a ruling chief alone to the god Ku as a prayer for success in war, for life in case of illness, or upon the birth of a first-born son.
During the Makahiki period athletic sports were celebrated, said to have been inaugurated by the god Lono in person. "Father Lono," symbolized by a long pole with a strip of tapa and other embellishments attached, was carried about from district to district to collect taxes ('auhau) in the
{p. 19}
shape of products given in return for the use of the land distributed by each overlord among his family group. There was also a ceremony in which "a structure of basket-work, called the wa'a-'auhau," literally "tribute-canoe," was sent adrift "to represent the canoe in which Lono returned to Tahiti," or more probably the tribute paid to the absent god from the food supply of the past year, earnest of similar gifts in the year to follow.[1]
Symbolic forms of this sort look as if Lono of the Makahiki had once appeared in the person of some voyager who brought culture gifts, introduced athletic sports, perhaps also the Polynesian custom of the ho'okupu or tributary offering, a word meaning literally "to cause to grow, as a vegetable; to spring up, as a seed." The offering sent to sea to feed the god was hence to come back to the people in abundant crops for the coming season. The basket of food was to provide for the god's "return" in symbol in the year to follow.
There was indeed a tradition that such a human manifestation of the god had actually appeared, established games and perhaps the annual taxing, and then departed to "Kahiki," promising to return "by sea on the canoes 'Auwa'alalua" according to the prose note. "A Spanish man of war" translates the queen, remembering a tradition of arrival of a Spanish galleon beaten out of its course in the early days of exploration of the Pacific; "a very large double canoe" is Mrs. Pukui's more literal rendering, from 'Au[hau]-wa'a-l[o]a-lua. The blue-sailed jellyfish we call "Portuguese man-of-war" Hawaiians speak of, perhaps half in derision, as 'Auwa'alalua. The mother honored Keawe's son, perhaps born propitiously during the period of the Makahiki, by giving him the name of Lono-i-ka-Makahiki, seeing perhaps in the child a symbol of the god's promised return.
{p. 22}