Hina, the woman in the Moon: Polynesian myths from Hawaii to Aotearoa

In the islands of the Pacific, where nights of full Moon light up the lagoons almost like day, the markings on the Moon have been read as the figure of a woman. Her name, with small variations, recurs throughout Polynesia: Hina, Sina, Ina. She is not a single goddess with an organised cult, but a female presence who runs through many genealogies and many tales, and who on several islands has been linked in a special way with the Moon.

Hina who goes to the Moon

In Hawaii one of her forms is Hina-i-ka-malama, «Hina in the Moon». According to one of the versions handed down, Hina was weary of endless work and of her family's ingratitude, and decided to leave. She climbed towards the sky and reached the Moon. Her husband tried to hold her back by seizing one of her legs, which broke, but Hina still managed to escape and has lived up there ever since.

On clear nights Hawaiians said they could see her in the Moon with her gourd, which served her as a container, and with the tools for beating kapa, the bark cloth. In the Hawaiian language the Moon itself is called mahina, a word in which many recognise a link with the goddess's name. In many Hawaiian traditions Hina is also the mother of the hero Maui, the demigod who according to myth slowed the course of the Sun.

The Moon tree of Tahiti

In the traditions of Tahiti, collected between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hina is a voyager who reaches the Moon by canoe and decides to stay there. Up there, according to the tale, grows a great tree whose wood and bark she uses to make tapa. A branch of that tree, breaking off, is said to have fallen to earth, giving rise to the first tree of its kind in the islands.

Here too the myth explains what can be seen: the light and dark areas of the Moon become the woman, the tree and her work. Tapa, the cloth obtained by beating bark, was a typically female activity across much of Polynesia, and Hina's presence in the Moon turns this daily work into a heavenly image.

Rona and the water gourd

Among the Maori of New Zealand, Aotearoa, the woman in the Moon has a different name, Rona. The story tells that Rona went out at night to fetch water with a gourd. When clouds covered the Moon, she stumbled and insulted it. To punish her the Moon seized her and lifted her into the sky, while she clung in vain to a tree that was uprooted along with her.

Ever since, the Maori said, Rona, her gourd and the tree can be seen in the Moon. The tales of Hina and Rona share common features: a woman, a household task, a vessel, a flight or an abduction into the sky. Across thousands of kilometres of ocean, the Polynesians preserved a shared idea of the Moon as the home of a woman, close to human beings and yet beyond their reach.