Max Freedom Long - The Teachings of Huna

At the beginning of my fourth year in the Islands I moved to Honolulu, and after getting settled, took time out to visit the Bishop Museum, a famous institution founded by Hawaiian Royalty and endowed to support a school for children of Hawaiian blood.

The purpose of my visit was to try to find someone who could give me an authoritative answer to the question of the kahunas which had plagued me for so long. My bump of curiosity had grown too large to be comfortable, and I harbored an angry desire to have something done about it one way or another, definitely and decisively. I had heard that the curator of the museum had spent most of his years delving into things Hawaiian, and I had the hope that he would be able to give me the truth, coldly, scientifically and in an acceptable form.

At the entrance I met a charming Hawaiian woman, a Mrs. Webb, who listened to my blunt statement of the reason for my visit, studied me for a moment, then said, "You'd better go up and see Dr. Brigham. He's in his office on the next floor."

Dr. Brigham turned away from his desk, where he was studying some botanical material through a glass, to examine me with friendly blue eyes. He was a great scientist, an authority in his chosen field, recognized and respected in the British Museum for the perfection of his studies and printed reports on them. He was eighty-two, huge, bald and bearded. He was heavy with the weight of an incredibly varied mass of scientific knowledge—and he looked like Santa Claus. (See Who's Who in America for 1922-1923 for his record, under William Tufts Brigham.)

I took the chair which he offered, introduced myself, and went swiftly to the questions which had brought me to him. He listened attentively, asked questions about the things I had heard, the places where I had lived and the people I had come to know.

He countered my questions about the kahunas with questions as to what my conclusions had been. I explained that I was quite convinced that it was all superstition or suggestion, or poison, but admitted that I needed someone who spoke with the authority of real information to help me quiet the nagging little doubt in the back of my mind.

Some time passed. Dr. Brigham almost annoyed me with his questions. He seemed to forget the purpose of my visit and lose himself in the exploration of my background. He wanted to know what I had read, where I had studied, and what I thought about a dozen matters which were quite aside from the question I had raised.

I was beginning to grow impatient when he suddenly fixed me with so stern a glance that I was startled. "Can I trust you to respect my confidence?" he asked. "I have a little scientific standing which I wish to preserve," he smiled suddenly, "even in the vanity of my old age."

I assured him that what he might say would go no farther, then waited.

He thought for a moment, then said slowly: "For forty years I have been studying the kahunas to find the answer to the question you have asked. The kahunas do use what you have called magic. They do heal. They do kill. They do look into the future and change it for their clients. Many were impostors, but some were genuine. Some even used this magic to fire-walk across lava overflows barely cooled enough to carry the weight of a man." He broke off abruptly as if fearing he had said too much. Leaning back in his swivel chair he watched me moodily through half-closed eyes.

I am not sure, but I believe I muttered "thanks." I half rose from my chair and sank back on it. I must have stared at him blankly for an idiotically long time. My trouble was that there was no wind left in my sails. He had knocked the underpinning from under the world I had braced almost to solidity over a period of three years. I had confidently expected an official negation of the kahunas, and I had told myself that I would be able to wash my hands completely of them and their superstitions. Now I was back in the trackless swamp, and, not up to my ankles as before, but suddenly sunk to the tip of my curious nose in the mire of mystery.

I may have made inarticulate noises, I have never been quite sure, but finally I managed to find my tongue.

"Fire-walking?" I asked uncertainly. "Over hot lava? I never heard of that.…" I swallowed a few times, then managed to ask, "How do they do it?"

Dr. Brigham's eyes popped open very wide, then narrowed down while his bushy brows climbed toward his bald dome. His white beard began to twitch, and suddenly he leaned back in his chair and let out a roar of laughter which shook the walls. He laughed until tears rolled down his pink cheeks.

"Forgive me," he gasped at last, placing a placating hand on my knee while he wiped his eyes. "The reason your question struck me as so funny was that I have been trying for forty years to answer it for myself—without success."

With that the ice was broken. Although I had a baffled and hollow feeling at being tossed back into the middle of the very problem I had thought to escape, we fell to talking. The old scientist had also been a teacher. He had a gift of simplicity and directness in discussing even the most complicated subjects. I did not realize it until weeks afterward, but in that hour he placed his finger on me, claiming me as his own, and like Elijah of old, preparing to cast his mantle across my shoulders before he took his departure.

He told me later that he had long watched for a young man to train in the scientific approach and to whom he could entrust the knowledge he had gained in the field—the new and unexplored field of magic. Often on a warm night when he sensed my feeling of discouragement over the seeming impossibility of learning the secret of magic, he would say:

"I've hardly made a beginning. Just because I'll never know the answer is no reason why you will not. Just think what has happened in my time. The science of Psychology has been born! We know the subconscious! Look at the new phenomena being observed and reported month by month by the Societies for Psychical Research. Keep everlastingly at it. No telling when you may find a clue or when some new discovery in psychology will help you to understand why the kahunas observed their various rites, and what went on in their minds while they observed them."

At other times he would open his heart to me. He was a great soul, and still simple. He had an almost childish yearning to know the secret of the kahunas and he was getting very old. The sand was almost sure to run out before success came. The kahunas had failed to get their sons and daughters to take the training and learn the ancient lore that was handed down under vows of inviolable secrecy only from parent to child. Those who could heal instantly or who could fire-walk had been gone since the year 1900—many of them old and dear friends. He was left almost alone in a field in which little was left to observe. Moreover, he was a little bewildered. It seemed so absurd to think that he had been able to watch the kahunas work, had become their friend, had fire-walked under their protection—and still had not been able to get the slightest inkling as to how they worked their magic except in the matter of the death prayer, which, as he explained, was not true magic, but a very advanced phenomenon of spiritualism.

Sometimes we would sit in the darkness with the mosquito punk burning on the lanai and he would go over various points in review, to be sure that I had remembered. Often he would say in ending:

"I have been able to prove that none of the popular explanations of kahuna magic will hold water. It is not suggestion, nor anything yet known in psychology. They use something that we have still to discover, and this is something inestimably important. We simply must find it. It will revolutionize the world if we can find it. It will change the entire concept of science. It would bring order into conflicting religious beliefs.…