Kahuna

The English habit of translating kahuna as priest gets the shape of the office wrong. The word means one who is expert in something, and the somethings were specific. A kahuna kalai waa selected the tree, directed its felling with the appropriate prayers, and shaped a hull that would carry a family's lives; a kahuna lapaau diagnosed and treated with a materia medica of plants and with prayer that was part of the treatment rather than an addition to it; a kahuna kilokilo watched clouds, birds and the sky for what was coming; a kahuna nui conducted the ritual of the luakini temple, which under the direction of ruling chiefs included human sacrifice.

Martha Beckwith's survey of Hawaiian mythology and the genealogical chant Kumulipo both show the classes in operation and show how closely they were tied to rank, the highest kahuna serving the highest chiefs, so that a specialist's accuracy was a political matter as well as a technical one. Training was long, usually inside a family, and knowledge was not published. Because the work was technical, error had consequences read religiously as well as practically, and a specialist who failed lost standing. The office was restricted in the strict sense: not secret for its own sake, but closed because it could only be held by someone who had been taught.

In 1819, shortly after Kamehameha I died, his successor Liholiho and the chiefess Kaahumanu publicly broke the eating kapu, and the kapu system was abolished from the top. The temples were abandoned within months, and the kahuna classes attached to them lost the structure they had worked in. Christian missionaries arrived the following year into that vacuum. Over the nineteenth century surviving practice was pressed further: healing by kahuna lapaau was brought under licensing law, and the word itself acquired a disreputable sense in English-language usage. Much of what continued did so privately. From the 1970s the position changed.

The revival associated with the voyage of Hokulea in 1976 and the recovery of non-instrument navigation put one body of specialist Hawaiian knowledge back into public standing, and language, chant and healing followed; practitioners of kahuna lapaau work openly today. One development should not be confused with any of this.

A twentieth-century system marketed under the name Huna borrowed Hawaiian vocabulary for a set of ideas of its own, and it has no standing in Hawaiian practice; Hawaiian practitioners have said so repeatedly. The atlas now records the office under Native Hawaiian Religion itself rather than at the Polynesian family level, and treats Huna as a separate modern invention with no standing in Hawaiian practice.