S2E4 - Pele and Hi'iaka: Medicine for the Loyal Heart

In this episode of Story Medicine, we explore the Hawaiian epic of Pele and Hi'iaka. This is a story about two sisters who embody two of the most powerful forces in human experience: fire and devotion. 

Pele, the volcano goddess, falls in love in a dream. Unable to travel to her lover herself, she sends her most beloved sister Hi'iaka on a long and dangerous journey across the Hawaiian islands. Hi'iaka sets out faithfully, battles supernatural forces, reunites a dead man with his soul, and holds to her promise every single day... even as the terms are broken around her. 

This story speaks to anyone who has put their whole heart into something and found the outcome was not what they hoped for, to anyone who recognises the potential for consumption or destruction in the intensity of passion, or anyone trying to find the balance between fire and tending in their own life. 

The episode includes the complete story told in full, depth psychology analysis revealing the archetypal patterns and symbolic meaning, and three practical integration exercises to help you embody the medicine. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to Story Medicine. I'm Joe Summerfield. For over 20 years, I've been working to better understand and support people in navigating this human experience. And I've come to believe that stories are encoded with the collective wisdom of all who have come before us, that they bring us into connection with the collective unconscious and contain treasure waiting to be decoded. This podcast explores traditional tales through that lens. Each episode offers a story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it may be offering, and three practices to help you to integrate that medicine. Today's story comes from the Hawaiian people, from the islands that they've called home for over a thousand years. The Pele and Hi'iaka cycle is one of the great epic traditions of the Pacific, a vast and intricate body of story, chant, and hula that has been transmitted from generation to generation. The most substantial written record in English is Nathaniel Emerson's Pele and Hiyaka, a myth from Hawaii, published in 1915, assembled from oral sources and Hawaiian language newspapers. Although a far more complete Hawaiian language version, 500 pages of it, was published in 1906. This is a living tradition. Pele, the volcano goddess, is not a figure of the ancient past for Hawaiian people. She is present. When Kilawea erupts, that is understood as Pele's work. Stories of her appearances, as an old woman walking the road, as a young woman in white near the crater's edge, are told to this day. So I approach this story as an outsider with a deep respect for the tradition that holds it sacred and for the people who continue to carry it. This story is called Pele and Hiyaka. Let's begin. Part one The Story Pele is the goddess of volcanoes. She lives in the fire pit of Kilauea on the island of Hawaii, and the lava that moves down the mountain and hardens at the sea is her work. As such, she's the maker of new land, and she's also the destroyer of what stood there before, creation and destruction. Hiyaka is her youngest sister. Before Hiyaka was born, before she was anything more than an egg, Pele carried her. They had come from their homeland in Kahiki, what we now know as Tahiti, crossing the ocean by canoe to find a new home in the Hawaiian Islands. For the entire crossing, Pele had held the egg against her body, keeping it warm and safe, and when they arrived and Pele found her place at the volcano, Hiaka hatched. Her full name, Hiaka Ikapoli Opele, means Hiyaka in the bosom of Pele. She was named for the care that formed her. One day Pele fell into a deep sleep. Pele's spirit left Kilawea and drifted across the water to the island of Kawaii, drawn by something that she couldn't quite name, and then she heard it. A hula drum, a voice, both reaching her from a gathering on the coast. She followed the sound and found a festival in full celebration, and in the centre of it, drumming with a rhythm that seemed to reach directly into her, was a young chief named Lohio. They spent three days and three nights together as lovers. Then Pelle's spirit had to return to her waiting body at the volcano. She left him, promising that she would send for him and that he would come to her at Kilauea. When she spoke, the love was still with her, and it was urgent. But Pelle could not go herself. She is the fire of the volcano, as much a part of that place as the lava itself. Her spirit could travel, but her body couldn't. So she would need to send somebody else in her place, someone she trusted completely, somebody capable of surviving what the journey would ask. So she called on her sisters, one by one. The islands between Kilauea and Kawaii were not safe to cross alone. The territory was guarded by Mo, the great supernatural beings, shapeshifters, territorial and dangerous. And Pele's temper was well known, if something were to go wrong, there was no predicting what she might do. So, one by one, her sisters declined. Then Hiaka came. She had been down by the sea with her friend Hopoe, swimming, tending to the Lahua trees that she loved, and learning the hula that Hopoe was teaching her. She arrived still wearing the morning's flowers. She heard her sister's request, and she said yes. While I am away, you must protect my Lahua grove in Puna, and you must protect Hopoe. These are what I am leaving behind. Please promise me that they'll be safe. Pele agreed. She gave Hiaka a portion of her own divine power to carry into the journey, enough manner to face whatever lay ahead. And Pele named her own terms. Return within forty days, and do not take Lohiao as your lover. He belongs to me. Hiyaka agreed and set out. Pele gave her a companion for the road, a woman called Wahina Omao, whose loyalty would prove as steady as Hiyaka's own. The journey was long and brutal. The landscape between the islands was alive with danger. Mo blocked the crossings, shapeshifting beings who could take the form of frog or rain or trees, or of enormous lizards that filled the path from cliff to cliff, of sorcerers, of hostile spirits, of terrain that seemed to shift against Hiaka. And she moved through all of it with the gifts that she carried, chant, prayer, her own growing power, as well as the power given to her by her sister. She battled and she healed and she kept moving, her companion Wahineomao beside her. And as she went she looked back toward home. She could see from those distances that there was a smoke from the volcano falling over the Lahua forest, lava beginning to creep toward the trees that she had asked to be protected. So she chanted as she walked, songs of grief, songs that named what it was that she was seeing, and she kept going. When Hiyaka finally reached Kawaii, she found that Lohia was dead. He had died of longing. After Pele's spirit had left him, he had waited for the messenger that she had promised. The days passed and no one came. Some versions of this story say that his spirit was stolen by two Mo sisters who came to him in the form of beautiful women, and others say that the waiting broke him. Either way his body lay in a cave, his spirit somewhere between the living and the dead. So Hiyaka went after it. She gathered ferns and flowers and flowing water and rain, and she washed the body, and then she prayed. The ritual of restoration required absolute unbroken concentration. A single lapse could end it. For days Hiaka chanted without ceasing, one lapse in focus and the spirit could not return. Her companion Wahineo Mao kept watch outside, and eventually warmth returned and Lohio opened his eyes. But by this time the forty days were gone. The three of them began their journey back. As they travelled, something began to shift. Over those weeks of travel a love grew between them that neither of them had sought. Hiyaka held to the terms that she had agreed with her sister, but she could not prevent what was forming, and she could not prevent what he felt. As they neared Kilawea, Hiyaka saw that the Lahua forest was gone. Driven by jealousy, by the fear that Hiaka was keeping Lohio for herself, Pele had set fire to the trees that Hiaka had loved so much since childhood. And Hopoe, her closest friend, the woman who had taught her the hula, was dead, turned to stone. Everything that Hiyaka had asked her sister to protect was gone. Hiyaka stood at the rim of the crater, Lohiao beside her and Pele below. She had done everything that was asked. She had gone to where no one else would go. She had crossed the dangerous waters, defeated the Mo, raised a dead man from his cave, and walked forty days and more across the islands, and she had held the taboo of the growing love every single day in honour of her sister. And now she held Lohio, deliberately, in full view of her sister. She had kept every part of what she had agreed to, and Pele had not. And now Hiyaka named that in the only language available to her at the crater's edge. Pele's rage was immediate. She sent waves of lava at the two of them. Hiyaka was unharmed, no fire could touch her, but Lohio was engulfed and killed for a second time, his body consumed. Hiyaka managed to bring him back again, and then the larger forces intervened, the gods that even hold a volcano goddess within certain limits. Lohio was given the choice, and he chose Hiyaka. In some tellings they returned together to Kawaii, and in other tellings a fragile peace was made between the sisters. But that which had been lost would never return. Part two The Medicine Before we start, if you know somebody who might appreciate this story's medicine right now, please share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying the podcast and would like to help others find it too, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Thank you. This tale begins with a dream. Pelle is the most ferocious force in the Hawaiian world. She makes and she unmakes land. She is fire itself, and she is reached by a drum across the water in her sleep. She doesn't choose this love with her waking mind, it arrives to her, in the dream state, without the interference of ego, without fear, without possession, without the consuming heat that defines her waking nature. She meets Lohio and simply loves him. The feeling is clear and unmediated. Dreams can allow a quality of perception that ordinary consciousness rarely permits, contact with what is true before the ego has had a chance to complicate it. So the love was real, and we know this because Lohio felt it too. But then Pelle woke, and the love which had been pure in the dream had to survive being brought into the material world, into time, distance, waiting, uncertainty, insecurity, and of course into Pelle's own nature, which cannot modulate its heat. The dream gave her clarity about what she wanted, and the waking world gave her no way to hold it gently. This is a pattern that many of us will recognise in our own lives. We touch something true within ourselves, in a moment of openness or inspiration or grace, or genuine contact with another person. And then we carry that truth into everyday life where the ego reasserts itself, and what was in some moments clear to us becomes complicated and challenging. Pelle's intention is to bring the love into the material world, but she can't go herself. She is the goddess of volcanoes, and she is bound to Kilawea. The lava, the eruption, the fire in the earth's interior, this is what she is. And in some sense this is her tragedy. Pelle felt something real and true and total, a love that arrived with complete clarity, but she had no way to move toward it. The feeling was certain, but the body was bound. And so she did what we do sometimes when we carry a longing that we cannot fulfill ourselves. She sent somebody else, and that person is Hiaka, the sister she formed with her own tenderness that she carried across the ocean as an egg and kept warm until she was ready to hatch. Whatever capacity for care exists in Pele, and the dream showed us that it is there, Hiaka is the living expression. She is what Pele's love built. But of course there is a cost to sending somebody else on the journey that you cannot make yourself, or perhaps the one that you are not yet ready to make, or that you don't want to make. The person you send will have the experiences that were fated for you. In this case, Hiyaka built through presence and shared ordeal, a bond with Lohio that no dream could have produced. But we are not Pele. Most of us are not bound to our volcanoes by nature. We are held back instead by fear or habit, or the belief that the journey is too uncertain, or that the outcome is too unclear. And the story asks us to consider what it costs to stay, because what Hiaka discovers, what she could not have known before she set out, is that nothing she gave on that journey was wasted. The battles, the grief, the weeks of difficult terrain, the days of prayer over a dead man's body. None of it in the end returned to her as she expected, but all of it made her more fully herself. The bond that she built with Lohio, the power that she discovered in her own gifts, the clarity that she found about who she was when everything she loved was taken. These were the fruits of having made the journey wholeheartedly. When we put our heart into something, something of value accrues to us. Even if the outcome might not be what we sought, the investment is never lost. Pele sent Hiyaka and lost Lohio. Hiyaka went and became more wholly herself than she had ever been. The difference between them isn't fortune, it's that one of them made the journey. Hiyaka moves through the Mo and the sorcerers and the hostile terrain armed with the manner that Pele gave her and with her own gifts, of chant and prayer and devotion. Where Pele's energy breaks and transforms, Hiyaka's energy heals and tends. Her powers are more relational. The Lehua trees that she loves are an expression of her nature. Pele creates the ground and Hiyaka makes it home. These two sisters are complementary forces that the Hawaiian world needs both of. The lava makes new earth, the forest and the rain and the healing power make it habitable. And what the story invites us to notice is that these same forces exist within us. The part that burns through what is no longer working and breaks open new territory, and also the part that tends to what is already there, that keeps faith, and that does the slow work of growth. When Hiyaka sees what is happening to the forest that she was promised would be safe, she chants. She puts what she's seeing and feeling into the form of song. This is what the patron of Hula does. She makes form from experience. She doesn't harden against what's painful, she sings it and she keeps moving. And there is medicine in that for all of us. Most of us, when we're losing something that we love and we can't stop it, do one of two things we go numb or we rage. Instead, Hiyaka gives it form. The practice of finding the form that holds our own experience, not necessarily song, but something, is the work of staying present to what we're going through rather than being consumed by it or armoured against it. So Hiyaka arrives in Kawaii and finds Lohio dead. What killed Lohio was the gap between the real experience in the dream and the material conditions that might have sustained it. Something genuine had passed between him and Pele, but she was gone and he had no way to reach her, so he was left trying to keep alive something that had no form to inhabit. That gap between real feeling and the life that could contain it is somewhere that many of us have found ourselves standing. Hiyaka goes after him and performs the rituals and the chants over the course of days to restore his life. Her companion keeps watch outside. Some work requires a guardian at the door. Hiyaka couldn't maintain that depth of focus and also watch the world, no one can. The work of restoration, of going all the way into the place that demands everything, requires a boundary between it and ordinary life. This is why the most demanding inner work of grief or healing or transformation needs a container, a protected time, a protected space, and somebody willing to hold the threshold while we go in. Hiyaka had Wahineomao. The question I think the story asks of us is whether we allow ourselves that protection when the work requires it, whether we are willing to go all the way in, rather than attempting the deepest work with one eye still on the door. Hiyaka had carried her sister's manor for the journey across the islands and it had served her in battle. But this, the restoration of a dead man's spirit, drew on something that was entirely her own. The journey will always ask more of us than we were prepared for. As well as representing challenge, this is how we discover what we actually carry. When Hiaka returns home, she finds her forest gone, and her dear friend Hopoe dead. Pelle couldn't hold to what she had promised. The waiting, the not knowing, the days stretching past forty. Her nature couldn't contain it. The same consuming force that made her love so real in the dream is what destroyed everything that she swore to protect. She didn't choose this, and she couldn't stop it. Fire of this intensity doesn't modulate. In creation and in destruction, it's one thing. Hiyaka had known that this was possible. In some tellings, before she sets out on her mission, she names it directly to her sister. Anger will rise in you, and you will destroy inland and toward the sea, but do not touch my friend. She asked for the promises because she understood Pele's nature. So when Hiyaka stands on the crater's rim and holds Lohio, she takes a stand. Their agreement is off. She kept her word, and Pele didn't. The medicine here for us may be about what we do when we have held our part of something faithfully and the other person has not. Hiyaka neither absorbs the harm silently or retaliates in kind. She names what happens and she acts from her own truth accordingly. This is what it looks like to act from wholeness rather than from wound. There is a kind of self possession in that which no one can take from you because it doesn't depend on what the other person does or doesn't do. The forces that each sister carries live within each of us, and the story suggests that we need both, but that each has its proper moment. Pelle's love is the spark, the dream clarity and the passion, the energy that set the story in motion. This is how new ground gets made, in love, in creative work, in the moments when we know something with a certainty that bypasses ordinary thinking. Without that force, Force, nothing new begins. The Hawaiian Islands exist because of it. But that same unbridled fire that creates also destroys. Hiyaka's gift is the devotion that moves through difficulty without losing its form, the love that chants its grief and keeps walking, the willingness to tend to new ground without guarantee of return, to do the slow faithful work of making what the fire began into something that can sustain life. In Hawaiian tradition, the lava field is not the end of a story, it's the beginning of one. The Lahua tree, the tree that's sacred to both sisters, is always the first to grow on new lava. Life returns to the most barren ground, given time and the right care. So perhaps the medicine that this story offers is not a choice between fire and forest, or between passion and devotion. It's the recognition that both are necessary and that each belongs to its moment. The fire opens the way, the tending makes it habitable, and perhaps the wisdom is in knowing which one the moment is asking for. In order for insight to create change in our lives, we need to invite it into our body and into our lived experience. Here are three practices to help you to integrate this story's medicine. First practice, the form you give it. A part of Hiyaka's medicine is her chanting. She doesn't harden against what's painful, she gives it form and keeps moving. This practice asks you to do the same. Think of something that you've lost or that you may be losing, that you haven't yet given form to. Perhaps you've been numbing around it, or avoiding, or denying, or bargaining, or raging at it. Take twenty minutes this week to hold it and to find form for it. Write it or draw it, or sing it, or dance it, or speak it aloud to a pillow. Walk with it and let the body say what the mind hasn't. The form doesn't need to be beautiful or finished. Take this opportunity to get your head out of the way, it just needs to be honest. The medicine is not in the product, it's in the act of staying present to what you're carrying, rather than being consumed by it or armoured against it. Second practice The Journey You Haven't Made. This story invites us to consider what it costs to stay. Think of a longing in your life, something that in moments you feel with clarity, but you haven't yet moved toward a relationship, a change, a piece of work, a conversation. Perhaps you've been second guessing yourself, or waiting for circumstances to make it easier. Perhaps you found reasons to delay. Remember the difference in the story between the purity of the dream and the complications of the ego. Take fifteen minutes with your journal and write honestly about what's keeping you at the volcano. Is it fear? Is it habit? Is it the belief that the outcome is too uncertain? Name it specifically. Then write one small thing, one concrete step that would be the beginning of making the journey yourself. Not necessarily the whole journey, just the first step. Doing anything is better than nothing. Hiyaka didn't cross all of the islands on the first day, she set out. Third practice the fire that creates and destroys. Pele's fire is what made the islands. The dream clarity, the total conviction, the love that crosses the water in the night, that's fire. Without it, nothing new gets made. But the same fire that opened new ground raged with impatience and jealousy and burnt what it promised to protect. Take twenty minutes with your journal, and think of an area in your life where you carry that fire, a love, a creative drive, an ambition, a passion, something that arrived with clarity and felt true. Write about what that energy feels like in your body when it's alive. Where do you feel it? How will you characterize it? How strong is it? And what does it do to you? Don't analyze it, just describe it. Give it its full weight and beauty before you go any further. Then take an honest look at where that same energy has become consuming. Where has the fire that created something also threatened to burn it? Where has the intensity that opened the door made it difficult for anything to grow in the room? Where have the people or the things that you love the most felt the heat of it in ways that you didn't intend? This practice isn't about extinguishing your fire, it's about knowing the nature of what you carry, honouring its creative power, but also recognizing its shadow side, rage or jealousy or impatience, and recognizing when they may begin to burn the thing that matters to you. In those moments the story offers us Hiyaka's energy as a companion, the part of us that cares rather than consumes, that keeps its form under pressure, and the part of us that knows how to make barren new ground habitable. Pele's fire made the islands. Hiyaka's devotion made them home. Both of those forces are in you. This story trusts you to know which one the moment is asking for. The wisdom in these old stories waits patiently. I hope that this one's medicine found you where you need it. Thank you for listening to Story Medicine. I'm Joe Summerfield. Until next time.