Hawaiian tradition sorts the visible world among four great male akua whose domains rarely overlap and whose seasons of ritual attention are kept largely separate. Kane governs light, life and fresh water; springs are called wai a Kane, the water of Kane, and Hawaiian tradition credits him with forming the first human from earth, without the human sacrifice that marks the rites of Ku. Ku takes war, fishing and the sharpest, most demanding kind of craftsmanship, and the great luakini temples where the highest and most feared rites were conducted, including human sacrifice, were his. Lono holds agriculture, rain, fertility and, notably, peace: his season is the Makahiki, roughly four months opened by the rising of the Pleiades, during which war was forbidden, heavy labor suspended, tribute gathered island by island, and his image, a crossbar hung with white kapa cloth, carried in procession. It was during a Makahiki, in 1779, that Captain Cook arrived at Kealakekua Bay and was received in ceremony drawing on the language of Lono, a moment anthropologists still argue over rather than agree on. Kanaloa, paired with or set against Kane in chant, holds the ocean and the deep.
Beside these four stands Pele, goddess of the volcano, who lives at Halemaumau on Kilauea; chant traces her journey down the island chain in an order that matches the islands' actual geological age, and her eruptions are still spoken of in Hawaiian as her own action rather than as a figure of speech. The four akua and Pele are not a closed set. Beneath them stand the aumakua, family and ancestral gods particular to a lineage, so that Hawaiian religious life ran on two registers at once, a shared pantheon above and a private one belonging to each family below it.