Mana (hawaiien)
prononc. « MA-na »
Hawaiian word (*ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi*): the universal force that animates all life and every element of the universe. In his chapter on Hawaiian cosmology, George Kanahele presents *mana* as the concept that best connects the Hawaiian worldview to their values: a "universal energy" and a "divine" spiritual force granted to humans to shape themselves. *Mana* energizes—to varying degrees—gods, chiefs, priest-experts, artisans, poets, down to the commoner, the animal, and the plant—the very matter from which gods are formed and from which great men draw their works. It is a reality as cosmological as it is psychological, as immaterial as it is material.
We see the truth of this in the way Hawaiians think of mana as "universal energy" (Johnson 1983)—the force that animates all life and all elements in the universe—and as the "divine" spiritual force available to human beings for fashioning their own perfectability.
In the chapter he devotes to Hawaiian cosmology, George Kanahele seeks the concept that best connects the worldview of the ancient Hawaiians to their values. He finds it in mana: “We see the truth of this in the way Hawaiians think of mana as ‘universal energy’ (Johnson 1983)—the force that animates all life and all elements in the universe—and as the ‘divine’ spiritual force available to human beings for fashioning their own perfectibility.” The Hawaiians, he writes, conceive of mana as a “universal energy” (borrowing the term from R. Johnson)—the force that animates all life and every element of the universe—and as the “divine” spiritual force offered to humans to shape themselves, to perfect themselves.
Mana is no one’s exclusive privilege: it energizes the cosmos and, to varying degrees, the aliʻi (the chief), the kahuna (the priest-expert), the artisan, the poet, down to the commoner, the animal, the plant. It is the very substance of which the gods are made, and that from which great men and women draw their achievements. A “central reality of the universe,” Kanahele writes, it is also that of “man’s spiritual world”—at once cosmological and psychological, immaterial and material, supernatural and natural.
This mana is not the mana of Hirini Moko Mead’s Māori tradition. The two Polynesian languages share the root and part of its meaning—a force that sets apart those who bear more of it—but the emphasis differs sharply. For Mead, mana is primarily social: inherited from ancestors, then augmented by one’s own deeds, under the gaze of others who acknowledge or withhold recognition of merit. For Kanahele, mana is first and foremost cosmological: an energy that precedes and transcends all social recognition, present even in stone and plant before it concentrates in a chief or priest. In Aotearoa, it becomes a prestige earned through deeds; in Hawaiʻi, it is a substance of which ea itself—the life of the land—is made, and which pono legitimizes rather than generates.