Kahuna MagickPage: 1/2 (1907 total words in this text) (345 Reads)  The Kahunas and the Missionaries
First published in the June 24, 1998 edition of ESP Magazine
by Christine Hall In 1917, Max Freedom Long arrived in Hawaii and took a position as a teacher so that he could be near the volcano Kileauea. Almost as soon as he arrived, he began hearing stories of the magical practices of the native population. He heard that there were people among the Hawaiians who were called “Kahunas,” and that they had magic that could heal, look into the future and even bring death to their enemies.
He considered these stories to be bunk, the superstitious beliefs of a primitive people. He found such beliefs unsettling and, for his own peace of mind, he set-off to disprove the idea of Kahuna magic. He started at the Honolulu library, where he discovered a delicious tidbit of history among the writings of the early Christian missionaries.
Like the ancient Egyptians, native Hawaiian society had been centered around spiritual practices. In fact, the priests held so much influence that the political chiefs were relatively powerless without the cooperation of the clergy. Ironically, a very powerful Kahuna “priest,” Hewahewa, practically handed-over the spiritual lives of the natives to the Christian missionaries immediately upon their landing in the islands.
Not long before the arrival of the missionaries, Hewahewa had a vision while peering into the future. “He saw white men and their wives arriving in Hawaii to tell the Hawaiians of their God,” wrote Long in his book The Secret Science Behind Miracles. “He saw the spot on a certain beach on one of the eight islands where they would land to meet royalty.”
This led the Hawaiian priest to inquire of the American and European sailors then on the island, asking about their religious beliefs. He was told about Jesus, the great miracles and the raising of the dead. “Convinced that the white men had superior ways, guns, ships and machines” said Long, “Hewahewa took it for granted that they had a superior form of magic.” So he ordered the clearing of all the temples and wooden idols that spotted the islands to make way for these new magicians from the west. He was interested in learning this new magic to help his people.
In October of 1820, when missionaries from New England arrived at the same spot on the same beach from Hewahewa’s vision, the big Kahuna was there to meet them. He welcomed the new Christian priests and their “gods from far high places.”
However, it soon became evident that these “white Kahunas” possessed little, if any, real magic. “The blind and sick and halt had been brought before them and had been taken away, still blind, still sick and still halt,” Long wrote. “Something was amiss. The Kahunas had been able to do much better than that, idols or no idols.”
Hewahewa still hoped to see the powerful magic of these new arrivals. When the missionaries said they needed a temple, he and his crew helped to build one of cut stone, thinking that the creation of sacred space would enable them to perform their miracles. “But, when it was at last done and dedicated, the missionaries still could not heal, to say nothing of raising the dead as they had been supposed to do.”
Evidently, this was the last straw. Soon afterwards, when Hewahewa was urged to convert to Christianity, he refused and returned to his native spirituality. At the same time, he ordered his fellow Kahunas back to their native healing practices.
But the damage had already been done. He had changed his mind too late to save the spiritual heritage of his people. “A few years later, what with Christianity, hymn singing and reading and writing being accepted by the chiefs in their rapid stride into civilized states, the missionaries outlawed the Kahunas,” Long explained.
That, of course, did not stop the Kahunas from continuing their practices in private, and these practices sometimes escalated into something of a “magical war” against the Christians. Long found evidence of one such episode three years later when he made the acquaintance of an elderly woman minister who had a large congregation of native Hawaiians.
Said Long, “In due time I found that she was the daughter of a man who had ventured to try his Christian prayers and faith against the magic of a local Kahuna who had challenged him and had promised to pray his congregation of Hawaiians to death...to show that his beliefs were more practical and genuine than the superstitions of the Christians.”
The woman showed Long her father’s diary. “In it he reported the death, one by one, of members of his flock, then the sudden desertion of the remaining members.” The lady minister then went on to tell him about how her father, in desperation, learned the death magic of the native Hawaiians and used it against the challenging Kahuna. “The Kahuna had not expected such a turning of the tables and had taken no precautions against attack. He died in three days.”
After that, according to Long, the members of the minister’s congregation “rushed back into church.”
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