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Hawaiian - Legend Of Oro
(a) Ellis and Mühlmann versions. Oro desires a wife of the daughters of Ta-ata, the first man. He sends his two brothers, Tu-fara-pai-nu‘u and Tu-fara-pai-ra‘i, to seek for such a wife. They visit island after island and finally at Moua-tahataha-rua (Red-ridged mountain) on Borabora they find the beautiful Vai-raumati. Oro makes of the rainbow a pathway to earth. He finds the girl bathing at Ovaiaia at Vai-tape on Borabora and makes her his wife. Hoa-tabu-i-to-rai is the child born to him. His younger brothers come in search of him, Oro-tetefa and Uru-tetefa. Finding the wife and having no suitable gift to present to her, one turns himself into a pig and a bunch of red feathers and the other makes the offering. To reward his brothers, Oro deifies them and makes them leaders of the Arioi society. 17
(b) Moerenhout version. Oro himself descends to earth on the island of Borabora and with his two sisters, the goddesses Teouri and Oaaoa, attends all the festivals where women are gathered. At Vaitapé he finds a girl of rare beauty bathing in the pool Ovaiaia, Vairaumati by name. The sisters approach her on his behalf and she consents to have an affair with him provided he is young, handsome, and a chief. Each night he descends on a rainbow to his bride. His brothers come to seek him and, finding him with the girl and having with them no presents to offer, one takes the body of a pig, the other of a bunch of red feathers and, retaining also their human bodies, they present their gifts. That night the pig bears seven little ones which are dedicated to the Arioi, which a man named Mahi now initiates at Oro's request. Oro quits Vairaumati in a column of flame after bidding her name the child Oa-tabou-te-ra‘i (Sacred friend of the gods). This child becomes a great chief and rules well. At his death he ascends to the heavens where his father and mother dwell. 18
The likeness between this late Hawaiian Lono story and that collected early in Tahiti as the origin of the Arioi society under the patronage of Oro does not argue for an original identity of Lono with the Tahitian god Oro, whose worship at the great temple at Raiatea probably arose later than the migration period to Hawaii. The theme of the descent of a god from heaven to a beautiful woman of earth is a stock theme in Polynesian mythology and recurs repeatedly in Hawaiian chant and story. Further investigation is needed to prove that it originally belonged to the Lono myth, tempting as is the hypothesis. Its application to the figure of this new god--who is said to have been introduced late from Maui into the orders of priesthood and who was worshiped without human sacrifice as a god of peace and of fructification of the earth, in contrast to the severe Ku ritual directed toward the preservation of the ruling chief in time of war or danger from sorcery and the enforcement of the tapu system upon which a chief's rank and power depended--would explain some mythical allusions which are now obscure. But the theme uniformly connected with the Lono myth and his institution of the Makahiki games is the jealousy motive and this does not appear in the Tahitian Oro myth, although it bears some resemblance to an episode in the life of the navigator Hiro. It gets mixed up in Hawaii with the late history of a grandson of Umi named Lono-i-ka-makahiki, to which it does not belong. A song of the god Lono in an epic form unusual in Hawaiian poetry is quoted in translation in the notes taken on the visit to Honolulu of H.M.S. Blonde in 1825. The allusion in the fourth couplet is to the play of pieces in the game of checkers (konane) in which Lono and his wife are engaged, but its secret meaning, divined by the chief, suggests getting rid of the lady's present lover in favor of the one who sends the message. 19
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Beckwith, Yale University Press [1940, copyright not renewed] and is now in the public domain.
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