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Hawaiian - Legend Of The Bitter Gourd
A chiefess of a certain family dies and is buried in a cave. From her navel grows a gourd vine. It finds its way to the garden of a chief of the seventh district, and there produces a fine gourd. The chief thumps it to test its ripeness and the spirit of the gourd complains to a kahuna in a dream. Kahuna and chief trace the vine to its source and the gourd is thereafter treated respectfully. 58
Myths tell how a god who has lived on earth takes at death the form of some plant. From the body of Kaohelo, sister of Pele, grew the ohelo bushes so abundant on volcanic mountainsides; "the flesh became the creeping vine and the bones became the bush plant." 59 The ieie vine is said to be the form in which the goddess Laukaieie was worshiped "when the time came for her to lay aside her human body." Kamakau relates of Hina-ai-ka-malama that "she found a sweet potato from the moon of a kind called hua-lani (fruit-of-heaven)" and he thinks it may be for this reason that she was said to be "nourished on the moon" (-ai-ka-malama). Her husband may thus have had a legitimate reason for cutting off her foot when she escaped to the moon, according to the popular story, in order to preserve a planting of the precious new food which may be conceived as the form her spirit took in its moment of deification. 60 Of Maikoha, banished son of Konikonia, the myth says that he wandered away and died at Kaupo on Maui and out of his body grew a wauke plant (Broussonetia papyrifera) of a hairy kind like the hairy Maikoha and useful for beating out bark cloth. 61
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Beckwith, Yale University Press [1940, copyright not renewed] and is now in the public domain.
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