Polynesian PantheonRealm
Hawaiki
The legendary ancestral homeland of the Polynesian peoples, from which the great voyaging canoes departed to settle the Pacific islands. Hawaiki is both a physical place (possibly in the Society Islands) and a spiritual realm where souls return after death.
About Hawaiki
Ancestral west, and a return for souls
Hawaiki (Hawai'i, Savai'i, and cognates) is the named homeland in Polynesian genealogies from which canoes left to settle distant islands. In Maori tradition souls also travel back toward it. It is both a remembered geography (often argued toward the Society Islands or further west) and a spiritual direction. There is no single canonical book; the evidence is chant, genealogy, and later collections (Grey, Fornander).
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Maori and wider Polynesian oral tradition (as recorded in 19th-c. collections)
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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