Pele and Hiʻiaka

At a Glance

Central figures: Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, and her youngest sister Hi’iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele (Hi’iaka in the bosom of Pele), whom Pele raised from an egg carried across the sea from Kahiki.
Setting: The Hawaiian island chain, principally Hawai’i (the Big Island) and Kaua’i; the story belongs to the Pele cycle preserved in mele (chant) and oral tradition central to Native Hawaiian religious practice.
The turn: Pele sends Hi’iaka to fetch her lover Lohi’au from Kaua’i, granting her supernatural powers but setting a forty-day limit - and Hi’iaka, delayed by battles with mo’o (lizard guardians) along the way, cannot return in time.
The outcome: Pele, believing Hi’iaka has betrayed her, kills Lohi’au with fire; Hi’iaka, in grief and rage, embraces Lohi’au’s spirit companion Hopoe and openly defies her sister, until Lohi’au is eventually restored to life.
The legacy: The journey of Hi’iaka across the islands established named places, groves, and landscapes along her route - many sites on O’ahu, Maui, and Hawai’i carry names from episodes in her passage, and the hula traditions preserve her chants as among the most sacred in the repertoire.

Pele lay down in her fire-pit at Halema’uma’u and sent her spirit traveling. It drifted north and west across the channels, past Maui, past Moloka’i, past O’ahu, until it reached the windward cliffs of Kaua’i. There, on a night when drums were beating for a hula gathering, her spirit found the chief Lohi’au. He was young. He was beautiful. He danced, and Pele’s spirit fell in love with him.

She stayed with him three days and three nights in spirit form. On the fourth morning she told him she would send for him. Then her spirit returned to the fire-pit on Hawai’i, and Pele woke in her own body with the smell of sulfur in her hair and the memory of Lohi’au on her skin.

The Summons

Pele needed someone to go to Kaua’i and bring Lohi’au back. She asked her older sisters first. Each one refused. The journey was long, the sea channels dangerous, and Pele’s jealousy was well known - no sister wanted to be caught between Pele and a man she desired.

Hi’iaka was the youngest. She had been an egg when the family left Kahiki, and Pele had carried that egg tucked against her body during the long canoe voyage. When Hi’iaka hatched, Pele raised her. Of all the sisters, Hi’iaka loved Pele most.

Pele called Hi’iaka to the crater’s edge.

Go to Kaua’i. Bring Lohi’au to me. You have forty days.

Hi’iaka agreed, but she set conditions. She asked Pele to protect her lehua groves and her dear friend Hopoe, a woman of Puna who danced among the trees. Pele swore she would. In return, Pele gave Hi’iaka supernatural power - the ability to fight and destroy the mo’o, the great lizard spirits that guarded the passes and waterways between the islands.

Hi’iaka took one companion, a woman named Wahine’oma’o, and set out on foot.

The Mo’o of the Road

The journey was not a straight walk. Between Hawai’i and Kaua’i lay hundreds of miles of ocean, forest, cliff, and swamp, and in nearly every passage a mo’o waited. These were not small lizards. They were enormous - river-spanning, ridge-long, their tails damming streams, their mouths wide enough to swallow a canoe.

Hi’iaka fought them one after another. On O’ahu she killed the mo’o Mokoli’i, whose body became the small island off Kane’ohe Bay that bears that name to this day. In the uplands she fought others whose names the chants preserve - Pana’ewa in the forest of Hilo, a creature of mist and shifting form that took Hi’iaka days to destroy.

Each battle cost time. Each detour cost more. Hi’iaka chanted as she walked, and the chants she composed along the way became some of the oldest mele in the Hawaiian tradition - praise songs for the landscapes she passed through, laments for the friends she missed, descriptions of rain falling on specific ridges in specific valleys. The hula masters kept these chants. They are still performed.

Kaua’i

Hi’iaka arrived on Kaua’i past the forty-day limit. She found Lohi’au dead. He had waited for Pele’s promised return, and when she did not come, he had hanged himself from grief. His body was in a cliff burial.

Hi’iaka climbed to the burial place. She chanted over his body for ten days, calling his spirit back from the edges of the underworld, pulling it piece by piece the way a fisherwoman draws a net hand over hand from deep water. On the tenth day Lohi’au breathed. He opened his eyes. Hi’iaka had brought him back from death.

She told him who she was and why she had come. Together, with Wahine’oma’o, they began the journey south and east toward Hawai’i. Hi’iaka did not touch Lohi’au. She had promised her sister.

The Fire

But Pele had been watching. The forty days had passed. From the rim of Halema’uma’u she looked north and saw Hi’iaka walking beside a handsome man, and she drew her own conclusion.

Pele’s rage came as lava. She sent fire rolling down through Puna, through the groves of lehua trees where Hopoe danced. The groves burned. Hopoe burned. Everything Hi’iaka had asked Pele to protect was destroyed before Hi’iaka reached the coast of Hawai’i.

Hi’iaka saw the smoke from across the channel. She felt it in her chest - the loss of Hopoe, the loss of the trees, the broken promise. She had kept her word. Pele had not kept hers.

When Hi’iaka reached the crater’s edge with Lohi’au alive beside her, she did what she had never done. She put her arms around Lohi’au in full view of Pele. Not because she desired him - or perhaps partly so - but because the oath between the sisters was already ash.

Pele killed Lohi’au again. Fire took him where he stood. His body blackened and fell.

Lohi’au Restored

The story does not end with killing. Other gods intervened - Kane and Kanaloa, or in some tellings Lohi’au’s own guardian spirit, searched for his soul and found it clinging to a cliff face on the road to the underworld. They restored him to his body a second time.

Lohi’au lived. Whether he stayed with Pele or returned to Kaua’i depends on who tells the story and which island they call home. Some chants say he chose Hi’iaka. Some say he went back to his own people. Some say the sisters eventually reconciled, because the bond between Pele and Hi’iaka was older than any lover and deeper than any fire.

The lehua groves grew back. They always grow back on volcanic land - the ‘ohi’a lehua is the first tree to root in new lava. Hawaiians say that if you pick a lehua blossom, it will rain - the tears of Hi’iaka, or of Pele, or of both, falling on the raw stone where something green is trying, again, to grow.