HAWAIIAN RELIGION. The traditional religion of the Hawaiians was based on that of their Polynesian ancestors, who as fishermen and horticulturalists became long distance navigators and explorers. These were the first to settle, perhaps between the first and the seventh centuries CE, the fertile and geographically isolated Hawaiian Islands. Although inhabitants of the islands from Hawaiʻi to Kauaʻi had altered some of the ancestral beliefs and practices, the similarities between Hawaiian and other Polynesian religions impressed Captain James Cook, who in 1778 was the first European to visit the islands.

Believing that supernatural forces filled sea, sky, and earth, the Hawaiians personified them in countless named and individualized deities, who controlled nature and humankind through their mana, or supernatural power. The people retained cosmogonic gods from the homeland, such as Kāne, Kanaloa, Kū, Lono, and goddesses like Hina and Haumea, but they added aspects to these gods and included the deified dead, beings like the volcano goddess Pele, and temperamental local spirits in their pantheon of supernatural beings. This pantheon provided the inherited or acquired guardian gods, or ʿaumakua, of each individual, family, occupation, and profession. A god communicated its will through dreams, images, something in nature such as a shark or thunder, or a human prophet.