Aumakua

An aumakua is a family god, a Hawaiian ancestor who, after death, is believed to have entered into a natural form and to remain able to warn, protect and occasionally punish the descendants who honor the relationship. The forms vary by lineage: a shark patrolling a family's home waters, an owl that appears at moments of danger, an eel, a lizard, a particular species of plant or even a stone associated with a specific place. Martha Beckwith's collection of Hawaiian mythology records the diversity of these forms directly from families who named their own aumakua and the circumstances under which it had appeared to them.

The relationship runs in both directions. A family is expected to recognize its aumakua, to avoid harming the species or individual creature associated with it, and to make offerings, while the aumakua is understood to warn of danger, to guide a lost traveler home or a fisherman to a good catch, and to receive the dead back into itself when a descendant dies. Because the specific identity of a family's aumakua, and the protocols for approaching it, belong to that family's own inherited knowledge rather than to a single codified public teaching, this entry describes the general pattern that published ethnography and Hawaiian oral tradition record, not any one family's particular practice.

Hawaiian cosmology, as set out in the Kumulipo and in the wider mythology collected by Martha Beckwith, places the aumakua beside, rather than above or below, the four great akua who anchor the pantheon: Ku of war and the deep sea, Kane of fresh water and life, Lono of agriculture and the Makahiki season, and Kanaloa of the ocean. Pele the volcano goddess belongs to the same register as the great akua rather than to the aumakua, since her presence at Kilauea is treated as continuous and singular rather than as a relationship distributed across many families. The aumakua occupy a different place in the structure: where the great akua govern domains shared by the whole people, an aumakua's authority is local to one lineage, which is why Hawaiian religious life has always run alongside the great pantheon as much as through it, family by family.

The kapu system that once regulated approach to sacred things and sacred persons applied to the great akua and to chiefly rank; obligations toward an aumakua were, and remain, a matter of family practice rather than state enforced restriction. Aumakua veneration continued privately through the period when public Hawaiian religion was suppressed after 1819, and it is part of the religious and cultural practice publicly revived since the 1970s. What a particular family's own aumakua is, and how that family marks the relationship, is knowledge that belongs to the family itself; this entry sets out the structure of the belief, not any family's specific practice.