the root plants, trees, and the inhabitants of the sea, but the younger
gods rent them apart to give room to walk upright;[1] so gods and men
walked together in the early myths, but in the later traditions, called
historical, the heavens do actually get pushed farther away from man and
the gods retreat thither. The fabulous demigods depart one by one from
Hawaii; first the great gods--Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa; then the
demigods, save Pele of the volcano. The supernatural race of the dragons
and other beast gods who came from "the shining heavens" to people
Hawaii, the gods and goddesses who governed the appearances in the
heavens, and the myriad race of divine helpers who dwelt in the tiniest
forms of the forest and did in a night the task of months of labor, all
those god men who shaped the islands and named their peaks and valleys,
rocks, and crevices as they trampled hollows with a spring and thrust
their spears through mountains, were superseded by a humaner race of
heroes who ruled the islands by subtlety and skill, and instead of
climbing the heavens after the fiery drink of the gods or searching the
underworld for ancestral hearth fires, voyaged to other groups of
islands for courtship or barter. Then even the long voyages ceased and
chiefs made adventure out of canoe trips about their own group, never
save by night out of sight of land. They set about the care of their
property from rival chiefs. Thus constantly in jeopardy from each other,
sharpening, too, their observation of what lay directly about them and
of the rational way to get on in life, they accepted the limits of a
man's power and prayed to the gods, who were their great ancestors, for
gifts beyond their reach.[2]

And during this transfer of attention from heaven to earth the
objective picture of a paradise in the heavens or of an underworld
inhabited by spirits of the dead got mixed up with that of a land of
origin on earth, an earthly paradise called Hawaiki or Bulotu or "the