Maui Magazine / Maui Magazine January/February 2009 / Hawaiian Moon Calendar

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Hawaiian Moon Calendar

In its wax and wane, Hawaiians of old found the secrets to sustainable living.

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Illustrations by Holly Camp

In old days, the Hawaiians measured time by the moon. That methodology, kaulana mahina, is just now being rediscovered. And guess what—in terms of astronomical sophistication it rivals that of the Mayans. Captured in poetry and stone by many generations of kahuna (native scholars), this kaulana mahina holds the secret to sustainable living in these islands.

The agreement that today is January 14th or March 3rd or (you name it) certainly comes in handy. It tells us when to pay the electric bill or what day to show up at the office. Days are numbered like beads on a string that can be taken anywhere and used any place. This admirable simplicity has helped make the Gregorian system (first adopted in 1582) the most widely used calendar on Earth.

But we pay a price for this simplicity. We can stop looking at the sky. We can have “a day” without ever seeing daylight (or moonlight). If you live according to the tides and the rains, the movements of sea life and the liveliness of plants, the cyclic scarcity and abundance of natural resources, you would prefer a calendar that provides more information.

Such is the Hawaiian moon calendar, the system indigenous to these islands. Kaulana mahina—literally, “positions of the moon” (mahina being the word for moon)—kept the human and natural worlds in harmony for centuries until it was crowded out by the gradual Westernization of the Islands. Fortunately we have excellent information about this system preserved in the old chants (including the all-important Kumulipo), in some early histories (such as David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities), and above all in millions of pages of nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers, most of which are still not translated into English. The woman who has embraced the challenge of resurrecting the kaulana mahina is Maui-born Kalei Tsuha.

During the early nineties, Kalei went with a group to Kaho‘olawe. In the group were students from Hawai‘i Island who knew an ancient hand-game, a mnemonic or memory device so that children would know the names of each of the moon’s thirty phases. She learned that all children by age six used to know these names—something like our “Thirty days hath September. . . .”—and an old proverb would tease ignorant people by saying “You’re just like a child who doesn’t know the moon.” She decided not to be ignorant.

Today she holds a master’s degree in Hawaiian language from UH–Manoa and works primarily as a researcher for the Edith Kanaka‘ole Foundation. Her kuleana (area of responsibility) is papahulilani, the study of the sky, a task she was given “because of my passion with the moon,” she says. (She wrote her master’s thesis on the subject.) She also teaches Hawaiian language and Hawaiian astronomy at Maui Community College, which is where I caught up with her. She and her astronomy students were gathered on the campus commons under the balmy Kahului night sky. A bullying wind kept whipping our paper sky-maps as we pointed and peered into a slightly misty Hawaiian sky.

We saw mahina in the first quarter or ‘Ole Ku Kahi phase. We admired Ka‘awela (the name for Jupiter at that time), considered a kite-shaped constellation (Pegasus) that preserves the story of rivals Kalupe and Kawelo, strained to see Kio-pa‘a (the North Star), and found the place where Makali‘i (the Pleiades) had just risen.

“Pleiades is funny,” she said. “If you look at it, you can’t see it. But if you don’t look at it, it’s there. It’s a shaka-length away from that tree.” (Shaka hand-signs at arm’s length turn out to be a good way to plot your way through the night sky.) She pointed out the “mariner’s triangle” and said, “You need twenty-one stars to sail by.”

I was instantly reminded of the most important thing to know about kaulana mahina—that it was devised by a culture of open-sea voyagers, people who had studied the sky for their own survival and who knew its features the way most people know how to butter toast.