Hina- Polynesian GodDeity"Lady of the Moon"

The Woman in the Moon

In Hawaiian tradition, Hina is Māui's mother. Day after day she beat the bark of the wauke tree into tapa cloth, the fabric that clothed the islands. The work never ended. She soaked the bark, stripped it, pounded it in stages over days, each pass refining rough fiber into smooth cloth. Māui, watching her labor, snared the sun and slowed its passage across the sky so she would have more daylight hours to dry the tapa.

It was not enough. Beckwith records that Hina tried to climb a rainbow to the sun, but the heat drove her back. So she climbed instead to the moon, where the air was cool. On clear nights, Hawaiians see her there, sitting beside her gourd and her tapa beater, finally at rest. The marks on the moon's face are her figure. The rhythmic sound of tapa being beaten, thump after thump, was understood as an echo of the goddess's own labor overhead.

The Eel

Across central and eastern Polynesia, Hina's story involves a great eel named Tuna. In Gill's account from Mangaia, the eel pursued her from pool to pool with unwanted desire. She fled from place to place, but it followed. Māui killed the eel and cut off its head. He told Hina to bury it.

From the buried head grew the first coconut palm. The face-like pattern on a coconut shell, two dark spots and a mouth-like depression, are the eyes and mouth of the slain eel.

In the Samoan telling recorded by Turner, the eel was Sina's pet, raised from small in a pool near her home. She had nurtured it. Over time it grew enormous and revealed itself as a supernatural being that desired her. When it was killed, the eel spoke its last words to Sina, asking her to plant its head. From it grew the first coconut tree. The Samoan version carries grief where the others carry only relief: the coconut is a memorial to a creature that once was loved.

Dark Hina

In Māori tradition, Hina appears as Hina-uri, "Dark Hina." She married Irawaru, and when Māui quarreled with his brother-in-law during a fishing trip, he transformed Irawaru into a dog. Grey's Polynesian Mythology records what followed: Hina-uri discovered what Māui had done to her husband, and in her grief she threw herself into the sea.

She did not drown. She descended beneath the waves and became a figure of power in the world below, transformed by the ocean as her husband had been transformed by Māui. Hina-uri and her counterpart Hina-keha, "Fair Hina," govern the dark and light phases of the moon. The Māori lunar calendar, which structured planting and fishing and ceremony, followed their alternation. Each night of the month bore its own name, and the knowledge of which nights belonged to which Hina told fishermen when to cast their nets and farmers when to plant.