Pele: I Like Her Because She Is Bold And Fiery, ~ Literally!!!... :D

MADAME PELE, --- LITTLE MOTHER OF VOLCANOES... >>> Pele is the goddess of fire, lighting, and volcanoes in Hawaiian indigenous religion. She is sometimes called Madame Pele, Tutu (Grandmother) Pele, or Ka wahine ʻai honua, the earth-eating woman. According to Hawaiian legend, Pele is the creator of the Hawaiian islands. There are thousands of divine beings in Hawaiian religion, but Pele is perhaps the best known. She is a descendant of the Sky Father and a spirit named Haumea. As the goddess of the element of fire, Pele is also considered an akua: the sacred embodiment of a natural element. There are a number of folktales that characterize Pele's origins. According to one folktale, Pele was born in Tahiti, where her fiery temper and indiscretions with her sister's husband got her into trouble. Her father, the king, banished her from Tahiti. Pele traveled to the Hawaiian islands in a canoe. Soon after she landed, her sister Namakaokahai arrived and attacked her, leaving her for dead. Pele managed to recover from her injuries by fleeing to Oahu and the other islands, where she dug several giant fire pits, including the one that is now the Diamond Head crater and Maui’s Haleakala volcano. When Namakaokahai found out Pele was still alive, she was livid. She chased Pele to Maui, where the two of them battled to the death. Pele was torn to pieces by her own sister. She became a god and made her home on Mauna Kea. Although Hawaii is now part of the United States, it hasn’t always been so. In fact, for hundreds of years, the Hawaiian Islands have faced conflict with European and American forces. The first European to encounter Hawaii was Captain James Cook, in 1793, which paved the way for traders, merchants, and missionaries to take advantage of the islands’ many resources. They were generally opposed to Hawaii’s traditional monarchy, and constantly pressed the island government to adopt a constitutional monarchy like that found in Britain and other European nations. A century later, in 1893, Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani was forced to abdicate her throne by sugar planters and businessmen who had organized a political coup. A series of violent clashes led to her eventual arrest for treason. Within five years, the United States had annexed Hawaii, and in 1959, it became the 50th state in the union. For Hawaiians, Pele has emerged as a symbol of the resilience, adaptability, and power of the indigenous culture of the islands. Her fires create and destroy the land itself, forming new volcanoes that erupt, cover the land with lava, and then begin the cycle anew. She is a representative of not just the physical aspects of the Hawaiian Islands, but also of the fiery passion of Hawaiian culture. The Kilauea volcano is one of the most active in the world, and has been regularly erupting for decades. Sometimes, however, Kilauea becomes more active than usual, and the lava flow places neighborhoods in danger. It’s commonly accepted that Pele will bring bad fortune upon anyone foolish enough to take any pieces of lava or rocks home from the islands as a souvenir. (And, each year Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park gets numerous packages of lava sent from all over the world, claiming that Madame Pele brought her curse of horrendous bad luck on those who stole her lava rocks.) In May 2018, Kilauea began to erupt so violently that entire communities were forced to evacuate. (Some Hawaiian residents made offerings of flowers and ti leaves in the cracks in the roads in front of their homes as a method of appeasing the goddess.) ***This is also interesting: In pre-contact Hawaii sex and all relations between people were considered to be natural and normal, and not something to be ashamed of in any way. The Hawaiian ancient religion had no concept of "original sin," and so the Hawaiians were flabbergasted and even amused by the up-tight mores and the extreme religious strictness of the first missionaries to their islands. By the way, in the pre-contact Islands sexually transmitted diseases were totally unknown; they simply didn't exist. (Common diseases known in the rest of the world ravaged the isolated Hawaiians. Measles was a deadly scourge among the Hawaiians, who had no natural immunity.)To the Hawaiians sex and everything that led up to the actual act was to be enjoyed, not regulated. They felt no shame about nudity, which was considered practical, healthful, normal and beautiful, in a very warm climate. They surfed the waves on their surf boards joyously, and totally nude, since wet bodies dried quickly, without the chafing of sodden clothing, --- even if it was only bark cloth (tapa) loin coverings, or wrappings.

Royal incest was practiced and seen as necessary to insure the highest "mana," or power of the kings and queens of their race. Brother and sister mating was done among the "Alii," the royalty of the Islands, for the supreme benefit of all the People, to create the most pure human "vessels" for communicating with the gods, and to insure that there would always be that human conduit to their deities. (Naturally, this horrified the missionaries.) In addition to the fact that after the royal mating, and marriage, was preformed the brother and sister couple were free, according to Hawaiian society practices, to take other wives and other husbands of their choice, often multiple mates. (The missionaries were, once again, absolutely scandalized by this.) The hula, the traditional dance, done by both men and women, was a graceful and sincere expression of Hawaiian culture. But, missionaries saw this slow, sensual swinging of the hips and the rest of the body as disgraceful and sinful. They sought to stamp out the hula wherever they saw it preformed. Madame Pele was, of course, a very powerful deity in the Islands when the missionaries arrived. Of course, they considered Pele to be as sinful as her worshippers. And, tried to stamp her out also. (For a fascinating, beautifully, thoroughly researched and vastly entertaining look at Hawaii, even from it's very beginning, with the geological formation of the islands, I give my highest rating - ***** to James Michener's huge and marvelous novel: "HAWAII".) >>> A clip from the 1966 movie, below: Wise Hawaiian elders try to reason with a missionary, and after the Alii Nui, ~ the Hawaiian High Queen, dies a spiritual Whisting Wind totally destroys the newly built church... >>> History: The Overthrow Of The Hawaiian Monarchy...