Kū Removes His Feathers for War

Kū lives in the upper sky, among the clouds that bring rain to the mountains.

He is the god of the upright — the upright tree, the upright man, the upright post of the house, the erected fishing net. His name means to stand erect. He is the god of craft and agriculture and fishing. He is also, when circumstances require, the god of war.

When war is required, Kū descends.

The great feathered images — Kūkaʻilimoku, Kū-the-snatcher-of-islands — are not portraits of the god but vessels. The red feathers of the ʻiʻiwi bird, the yellow feathers of the ʻōʻō, are not decorations; they are the body the god wears when he comes down into the human world to join a battle. The chiefs who carry these images into war are not carrying symbols. They are carrying the god’s extended self. The image moves and the god moves with it.

To hold Kū’s feathered form is to be in relationship with the most demanding covenant in Hawaiian religion. Kū requires sacrifice. Not occasional sacrifice — continuous sacrifice. The luakini heiau, the great temples of the war god, are maintained by offerings of fish and dog and, on the most significant occasions, human beings. The human sacrifices are not arbitrary killings; they are specific acts required by the logic of divine contract. Kū gives victory. Victory is paid for.

The chiefs who devote themselves to Kū become extraordinary in battle and terrible outside it. The kapu system — the network of sacred prohibitions that regulates Hawaiian social life — becomes, in the war-chief period, increasingly strict around Kū-related activities. The head is sacred because that is where the feather helmet sits. Food prepared for a high chief cannot be touched by a woman because the chief’s body is Kū’s body, and Kū’s sacred nature requires separation from the ordinary world.

There is a story that precedes all the temple building — a story about why Kū is the way he is. He lived in the sky, peaceful, attending to rain and growth. His wife Hina persuaded him to go up higher, into the deeper heavens. His children and grandchildren called him back down. He came back down — for them, for the people who needed rain and craft and the upright pole of the house — and when he came back down he could not simply be the rain god. The people needed more from him than rain. They were fighting. They asked him to help them fight. He said yes.

When he says yes to war, the feathers come off. Not in the sense that the feather images are de-feathered — the images keep their feathers — but in the sense that the peaceful upper-sky Kū, the god of growing things, sheds that identity and becomes the war-god. The two aspects of Kū are the same being in different modes: the upright tree and the upright warrior use the same vertical axis.

The great chiefs — Kamehameha most famously — build their power by maintaining the covenant with Kū above all other considerations. The feathered war-god travels with the army. After the victory that unifies the islands, when the kapu system is abolished in 1819, it is Kū’s temples that are burned first. The women who had been forbidden from eating with men eat with them in public, and the gods whose power depended on that prohibition lose their institutional foundation.

The feathered images survived. They are in museums now — in London, in Honolulu, in Cambridge — vivid red and yellow under glass, the god still present in the feathers for those who know how to see. Kū is in the feathers. He is patient. He has been patient for longer than anyone has been looking at him through museum glass.