Kane

Kane Oceania
In late Hawaiian mythology, the chief god of generation: he had a ‘dazzling’ phallus like the Polynesian trickster hero Maui. He was ‘the ancestor of chiefs and commoners’ as well as the maker of the three worlds—the upper heaven, the lower heaven, and the earth.

At the beginning Kane dwelt in darkness. Then light was created, and Ku, an ancestral deity, along with Lono, god of the heavens, helped Kane to fashion the earth and the things on the earth. Later they created man and woman, but the misbehaviour of this pair forced Kane to leave the earth and retire to heaven, after he had made mankind subject to death. That his original intention was to live among people can be seen from the title given to the world: Ka-honua-nui-a-Kane, ‘the great earth of Kane’.

Human sacrifice was never paid to Kane, because ‘life is sacred to him’. His images were rare, a tall conical stone often sufficed for altars. His powers,...

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