In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of other primitive and story-loving people.  It includes primitive philosophy—­stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth; primitive annals—­migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of conquest and overrule.  There is primitive romances—­tales of competition, of vengeance, and of love; primitive wit—­of drolls and tricksters; and primitive fear in tales of spirits and the power of ghosts.  These divisions are not individual to Polynesia; they belong to universal delight; but the form each takes is shaped and determined by the background, either of real life or of life among the gods, familiar to the Polynesian mind.

The conception of the heavens is purely objective, corresponding, in fact, to Anaxagoras’s sketch of the universe.  Earth is a plain, walled about far as the horizon, where, according to Hawaiian expression, rise the confines of Kahiki, Kukulu o Kahiki.[1] From this point the heavens are superimposed one upon the other like cones, in number varying in different groups from 8 to 14; below lies the underworld, sometimes divided into two or three worlds ruled by deified ancestors and inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or even by the gods[2]—­the whole inclosed from chaos like an egg in a shell.[3] Ordinarily the gods seem to be conceived as inhabiting the heavens.  As in other mythologies, heaven and the life the gods live there are merely a reproduction or copy of earth and its ways.  In heaven the gods are ranged by rank; in the highest heaven dwells the chief god alone enjoying his supreme right of silence, tabu moe; others inhabit the lower heavens in gradually descending grade corresponding to the social ranks recognized among the Polynesian chiefs on earth.  This physical world is again the prototype for the activities of the gods, its multitudinous manifestations representing the forms and forces employed by the myriad gods in making known their presence on earth.  They are not these forms themselves, but have them at their disposal, to use as transformation bodies in their appearances on earth, or they may transfer them to their offspring on earth.  This is due to the fact that the gods people earth, and from them man is descended.  Chiefs rank, in fact, according to their claim to direct descent from the ancient gods.[4]

Just how this came about is not altogether uniformly explained.  In the Polynesian creation story[5] three things are significant—­a monistic idea of a god existing before creation;[6] a progressive order of creation out of the limitless and chaotic from lower to higher forms, actuated by desire, which is represented by the duality of sex generation in a long line of ancestry through specific pairs of forms from the inanimate world—­rocks and earth, plants of land and sea forms—­to the animate—­fish, insects, reptiles, and birds;[7] and the special analysis of the soul of man into “breath,” which constitutes life; “feeling,” located in the heart; “desire” in the intestines; and “thought” out of which springs doubt—­the whole constituting akamai or “knowledge.”  In Hawaii the creation story lays emphasis upon progressive sex generation of natural forms.