Individual islands of a group are popularly described as rocks dropped down out of heaven or fished up from below sea as resting places for the gods;[8] or they are named as offspring of the divine ancestors of the group.[9] The idea seems to be that they are a part of the divine fabric, connected in kind with the original source of the race.

Footnotes to Section II, 2:  Polynesian Cosmogony

[Footnote 1:  In the Polynesian picture of the universe the wall of heaven is conceived as shutting down about each group, so that boats traveling from one group to another “break through” this barrier wall.  The Kukulu o Kahiki in Hawaii seems to represent some such confine.  Emerson says (in Malo, 30):  “Kukulu was a wall or vertical erection such as was supposed to stand at the limits of the horizon and support the dome of heaven.”  Points of the compass were named accordingly Kukulu hikina, Kukulu komohana, Kukulu hema, Kukulu akau—­east, west, south, north.  The horizon was called Kukulu-o-ka-honua—­“the compass-of-the-earth.”  The planes inclosed by such confines, on the other hand, are named Kahiki.  The circle of the sky which bends upward from the horizon is called Kahiki-ku or “vertical.”  That through which, the eye travels in reaching the horizon, Kahiki-moe, or “horizontal.”]

[Footnote 2:  The Rarotongan world of spirits is an underworld. (See Gill’s Myths and Songs.) The Hawaiians believed in a subterranean world of the dead divided into two regions, in the upper of which Wakea reigned; in the lower, Milu.  Those who had not been sufficiently religious “must lie under the spreading Kou trees of Milu’s world, drink its waters and eat lizards and butterflies for food.”  Traditional points from which the soul took its leap into this underworld are to be found at the northern point of Hawaii, the west end of Maui, the south and the northwest points of Oahu, and, most famous of all, at the mouth of the great Waipio Valley on Hawaii.  Compare Thomson’s account from Fiji of the “pathway of the shade.” p. 119.]

[Footnote 3:  White, I, chart; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 3, 4; Ellis, III, 168-170.]

[Footnote 4:  Gill says of the Hervey Islanders (p. 17 of notes):  “The state is conceived of as a long house standing east and west, chiefs from the north and south sides of the island representing left and right; under chiefs the rafters; individuals the leaves of the thatch.  These are the counterpart of the actual house (of the gods) in the spirit world.”  Compare Stair, p. 210.]

[Footnote 5:  Bastian, Samoanische Schoepfungs-Sage; Ellis, I, 321; White, vol.  I; Turner, Samoa, 3; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 1-20; Moerenhout I, 419 et seq.; Liliuokalani, translation of the Hawaiian “Song of Creation”; Dixon, Oceanic Mythology.]