The World / Hawaiian Eschatology (Pele and the Fire)
Hawaiian Eschatology (Pele and the Fire)
The end in the island chain is written in the fire that built it: Pele, the goddess of the volcano, whose eruptions create and consume the land. The Hawaiian end is geological, intimate, and continuous — the land ends every time the lava moves.
Hawaiian eschatology is the archive's most present-tense end: no future date, no final battle, only the fire that is already at work. Pele's myths have her arrive on each island, driven out and moving on, until she reaches Kilauea and digs her home. The land the people stand on is her work — and her appetite. The end, in the island chain, is not an event to come but the mountain's current behavior. See the myth entry for the account.
Key texts
- Hawaiian oral tradition (Pele and Hi'iaka cycles)
- Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (1940)
- E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion (1927)
Key figures
Pele · Hi'iaka · the islands
The end, in order
- 01Pele, the fire goddess, moves from island to island, digging with her magic staff
- 02She settles in Kilauea; her eruptions build and reshape the land
- 03The islands — including the home of the living — are made and unmade by her fire
- 04The end is continuous: the land ends in the fire that gives it form
- 05The tradition holds no final day — the end is the volcano's present tense
What survives
The fire and the land's renewal — the Hawaiian end is not annihilation but transformation by the goddess who owns the raw material.