Kamapuaʻa and Pele
At a Glance
- Central figures: Kamapua’a, the pig-god, shape-shifter, and chief of the windward rains; Pele, the fire goddess of Kīlauea, called Pelehonuamea.
- Setting: The Hawaiian island chain, principally Hawai’i (the Big Island), from the volcanic summit of Kīlauea to the wet valleys of the windward coast; the story is preserved in Hawaiian mele (chant) and oral tradition.
- The turn: Kamapua’a arrives uninvited at Pele’s fire-pit and demands her as his lover; she mocks him, and the confrontation between water and fire erupts into open war.
- The outcome: Neither can destroy the other; the gods of the upper air intervene and the island is divided between them - Pele keeps the dry leeward side, Kamapua’a takes the wet windward.
- The legacy: The division of Hawai’i’s landscape into the dry volcanic leeward and the rain-fed windward is understood through this story; where Kamapua’a’s rain meets Pele’s lava, new land is made.
Pele was at the fire-pit. Kīlauea was open, the lake of molten rock shifting and cracking in slow red sheets, and Pele sat at the edge with her sisters around her. Some were braiding each other’s hair. Some were playing kilu, the gourd-rolling game, and laughing when they lost. The heat from the crater made the air above them bend and swim.
Kamapua’a came up the slope from the eastern side of the mountain. He came in his human shape - tall, broad-shouldered, handsome enough if you did not look too closely at the coarse hair that grew thick along his back and shoulders. He had heard about Pele. He had heard she was beautiful and had a temper that could split stone, and both of these interested him.
The Insult at the Crater’s Edge
He stood at the rim and called down to her.
Pele! I have come to see you.
She looked up. She saw a big man with small eyes and bristled skin. She saw him clearly.
Go away, pig. You smell like mud.
Her sisters laughed. Kamapua’a’s face darkened. He was a chief on the windward side, a grandson of Kū through his mother’s line, a man of mana, and no one spoke to him that way. But Pele was not interested in his genealogy. She called him puaʻa - pig - again, and described the places where pigs root and the things they eat, and her sisters howled and rolled on the ground.
Kamapua’a stood there with his jaw tight. He could have left. He did not leave.
You will take those words back, he said.
I will not, Pele said. You are a pig. I can see the snout under your face. I can see the hooves under your hands. Go back to your mud and your ferns.
She threw a burning stone at him. It hit the ground near his feet and hissed.
The Battle of Fire and Rain
Kamapua’a called the clouds. He was the lord of windward rain, of the mists that hang in the upland valleys, of every stream that comes down the Ko’olau ridges. He could fill a dry gulch in minutes. He called the clouds now, and they came - a dark bank rolling over the summit from Hilo side, heavy with water.
Rain struck the lava field. Steam exploded upward. Pele screamed and sent fire fountains shooting from the pit, but the rain kept falling, heavier and heavier, and the surface of the lava lake began to crust and blacken. Pele called her brothers - the fire-keepers who lived below - and they fed more magma into the pit, but Kamapua’a called more rain.
The ground shook. Sulfur clouds mixed with steam until no one could see. Pele’s sisters scattered. Kamapua’a changed shape - not fully pig, not fully man, something between - and charged through the steam toward Pele. She threw walls of flame at him. He ran through them. His hair singed and his skin blistered but the rain on his back healed him as fast as the fire burned.
Pele opened new vents in the rock. Lava broke out of the mountainside in rivers, running toward the sea. Kamapua’a sent floods down the same channels. Where fire met water the rock exploded into black sand. Trees burned. Streams boiled away and reformed.
They fought across the whole eastern face of Mauna Kea and down toward the coast. Neither could finish the other. Every time Pele drove him back with fire, Kamapua’a brought a new wall of rain. Every time Kamapua’a quenched her flames, she opened new ground and the magma came up fresh.
Lonomakua’s Intervention
The gods in the upper heavens could feel the island shaking. Lonomakua, the fire-keeper and elder among the divine family, sent word down: enough. The island could not survive this. One of them would crack Hawai’i in half if they kept on.
Pele did not want to stop. Kamapua’a did not want to stop. But they were both exhausted - Pele’s fire was dimmer than it had been, and Kamapua’a’s rain was thinning to drizzle - and the command from above carried weight neither of them could ignore.
A division was proposed. The island would be split.
The Division of Hawai’i
Pele took the Kona side - the dry leeward, the black lava fields, the open volcanic coast where the sun beats down and little rain falls. This was her domain: the ʻāina of fire, the land that remembers eruption.
Kamapua’a took the Hilo side - the wet windward, the valleys choked with fern and rain forest, the waterfalls, the green cliffs, the land where clouds pile up every afternoon and the streams never dry. His pigs rooted in the ʻamaʻu fern. His mists filled the valleys.
Between them lay the summit, and along that line the two forces met and never fully resolved. Rain still falls on lava. Lava still reaches the sea. Where they meet, new rock forms - black and steaming and too hot to touch, then cool enough to stand on, then covered in the first thin layer of soil where ferns will grow.
The Shape of the Pig-God
Kamapua’a never stopped wanting Pele. In some tellings they became lovers after all - briefly, violently, in a union as destructive as their war. In others he simply watched her from the wet side of the island, taking whatever shape pleased him. He could be a handsome chief. He could be a small black pig rooting in the underbrush. He could be the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa - the reef triggerfish with the pig-like snout - swimming in the shallows off the coast. He could be rain itself, coming in over the ridge at four in the afternoon, steady and warm and smelling of green.
Pele stayed where she was. She had no interest in compromise. The fire-pit at Kīlauea remained open, the lake shifting and cracking, and she sat at the edge with her sisters around her. If you drive the road from Kona to Hilo today you cross the line between them - the dry black rock gives way to wet green forest so sharply it looks like someone drew it with a knife. No one drew it. They fought it out, and this is where they stopped.