"O Kukea-olo-walu!
Make the taro grow,
Let the leaf spread like a banana.
Taro for us, O Kukea!
The banana and the taro for us.
Pull up the taro for us, O Kukea!
Pound the taro,
Make the fire for cooking the pig.
Give life to us—
To the farmers—
From sunrise to sunset
From one fastened place to the other fastened place
[i.e., one side of the sky to the other fastened on each side of the earth]. Amama [Amen]."
Trees with their branches and fruit were frequently endowed with spirit power. All the different kinds of birds and even insects, and also the clouds and winds and the fish in the seas were given a place among the spirits around the Hawaiians.
The people believed in life and its many forms of power. They would pray to the unseen forces for life for themselves and their friends, and for death to come on the families of their enemies. They had special priests and incantations for the pule-ana-ana, or praying to death, and even to the present time the supposed power to pray to death is one of the most formidable terrors to their imagination.
Menehunes, eepas, and kupuas were classes of fairies or gnomes which did not belong to the ancestor-gods, or aumakuas.
The menehunes were fairy servants. Some of the Polynesian Islands called the lowest class of servants "manahune." The Hawaiians separated them almost entirely from the spirits of ancestors. They worked at night performing prodigious tasks which they were never supposed to touch again after the coming of dawn.
The eepas were usually deformed and defective gnomes. They suffered from all kinds of weakness, sometimes having no bones and no more power to stand than a large leaf. They were sometimes set apart as spirit caretakers of little children. Nuuanu Valley was the home of a multitude of eepas who had their temple on the western side of the valley.
Kupuas were the demons of ghost-land. They were very powerful and very destructive. No human being could withstand their attacks unless specially endowed with power from the gods. They had animal as well as human bodies and could use whichever body seemed to be most available. The dragons, or mo-os, were the most terrible kupuas in the islands.
THE DRAGON GHOST-GODS
Dragons were among the ghost-gods of the ancient Hawaiians. These dragons were called mo-o. The New Zealanders used the same names for some of their large reptile gods. They, however, spelled the word with a "k," calling it mo-ko, and it was almost identical in pronunciation as in meaning with the Hawaiian name. Both the Hawaiians and New Zealanders called all kinds of lizards mo-o or mo-ko; and their use of this word in traditions showed that they often had in mind animals like crocodiles and alligators, and sometimes they referred the name to any monster of great mythical powers belonging to a man-destroying class.