May 14

A Hidden King: The Hūnākele of Kamehameha the Great

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On May 14, 1819, Kamehameha I—the warrior king who had unified the Hawaiian Islands with strength, political genius, and an extraordinary spiritual life—died at Kamakahonu, his compound at Kailua-Kona on the island of Hawaiʻi. His last words, addressed to the chiefs and retainers gathered around him, were characteristically spare: “Endless is the good that I have given you to enjoy.”

His most trusted companions took his bones and hid them, harnessing his sacred powers.

Written in the Stars

The Hawaiian word mana is often translated as “power” or “spiritual authority,” but that’s truly an understatement; to tribal believers, mana was the animating force of the universe itself—the divine energy that flowed through all things. The ancient Egyptians called it Ka; the ancient Romans knew it as Spiritus; the Taoists call it Qi (pronounced, “Chi.”); In Western Esotericism, we know it as the Anima Mundi—or the “World Soul.”

Mana was believed to be most concentrated in living beings, and particularly in the aliʻi—the chiefly class whose genealogical lines could be traced directly to the gods themselves—and, through spiritual practices and high moral actions, could be harnessed and transferred between beings, and directed into objects or places. But it could also be stolen or corrupted by enemies who gained access to the physical remains of the powerful dead.

Like the above-mentioned spiritual philosophies, the Hawaiian tradition held that mana did not die with the body; rather, it persisted within the bones of the dead—the iwi—which became, after death, the most potent receptacle for the power a person had collected through their life. Thus, the greater the mana of the living person, the more dangerous and desirable their bones became after death. Hawaiian royal bones were viewed as much more than mere “final remains” of a loved-one or fallen hero; they were charged relics, and required very specific rituals and protocols to preserve their power.

Warrior king Kamehameha was believed to have entered the world already possessing extraordinary mana: the legends surrounding his birth are epic in scale, complete with raging storms and the thunder of the gods. See, Halley’s Comet was visible from Hawaiʻi in 1758, and Hawaiian sages had noted the comet’s appearance with Kamehameha’s birth; he was, in the Hawaiian reckoning, a child upon whom the universe had already gifted as a great future leader. But history not only repeats itself; it often mirrors the greatest benchmarks in every esoteric order. Much like Herod’s paranoid roundup of all the first-born sons throughout the surrounding areas of Bethlehem in his attempt to prevent the coming of the Messiah (inspired by the Pharoah’s strategy to kill all the Israelite children in the Book of Exodus before him), the birth of Kamehameha was viewed as a great threat to rival clans; the newborn king was taken away and hidden for his own protection immediately following his birth. He spent his earliest years in the secluded valley of Waipiʻo before returning to Kailua at the age of five.

His first experience of the world was as a living secret—and it would ultimately end the same way.

A Warrior King and Snatcher of Islands

Kamehameha’s world existed under the code of the kapu—a sacred law that maintained the hierarchical order and kept mana flowing throughout the governed. Much like Moses’ Commandments, kapu was more of a spiritual code than a list of civic laws, but carried similar legal consequences. Violations of kapu were capital offenses—not because the ruling class was tyrannical (although the system certainly served their interests)—but because they represented tangible disruptions of the sacred order. A commoner who allowed his shadow to fall on a chief’s food, or a woman who ate the flesh of a pig or a banana that had been consecrated to the gods, wasn’t merely breaking a rule; they were interfering with a mechanism that the entire society depended on for its spiritual integrity.

Under this system, a prophesied leader such as Kamehameha was seen as it supreme embodiment—and militaristic defender. Every battle he won added to his mana, and the ritual sacrifice of defeated enemies and capture of their war gods, provided his absorption of their spiritual authority. When his uncle Kalaniʻōpuʻu died and bequeathed to him the guardianship of Kūkāʻilimoku—the Hawaiian war god, the “Snatcher of Islands,” a feathered idol of terrifying force—Kamehameha’s spiritual street cred ballooned. Now, he was much more than a warrior chief; he was the earthly custodian of a god—and his subsequent campaigns to unify the islands were understood by his contemporaries not as political conquests, but as religious crusades. He made his goal perfectly clear to both his people and his enemies: nothing short of a full unification of all the islands—consolidation of all the mana under a single sovereign state.

And Kamehameha was victorious in his campaign. By the time he defeated Kauaʻi’s king Kaumualiʻi’s defeat in 1810 after years of resistance, Kamehameha had become had become both the entire archipelago’s sovereign leader and its sacred authority.

He spent his last years at Kamakahonu, a compound built around a restored heiau—a sacred stone temple—at the edge of Kailua Bay. The enclosure housed the Ahuʻena Heiau, dedicated to Lono, the god of agriculture and peace, and topped with a carved wooden figure of Kūkāʻilimoku. There—like Odysseus, the weary warrior—he planned to spend his final days in contemplation, traveling only to visit his devoted people among the islands he governed and ensuring his kingdom enjoyed its hard-earned peace. In his final days, Kamehameha was attended in his final illness by only his closest chiefs, by John Young—the English sailor who had been his adviser and friend for nearly thirty years—and by the women who had been the most powerful presences in his court. His last words were a testament to his faith in mana: “Endless is the good that I have given you to enjoy.”

Bones of Power

So revered and beloved was Kamehameha that his death required the strictest protocols and precautions, his earthly body the greatest protection.

Hawaiian funerary practice for high-ranking chiefs required ten days of mourning and ceremony before the bones could be prepared for their final concealment. (This period immediately following a ruler’s death was viewed as a time of dangerous instability.) The kapu was suspended, allowing for national mourning, while also creating the conditions for a political transition. His son and heir, Liholiho, was immediately shuffled out of Kailua—which had been rendered spiritually defiled by the presence of death—and taken to Kawaihae under the mourning period was completed and the city had been purified for its new leader.

During those ten days, Kamehameha’s body was prepared: the flesh was separated from the bones and cast into the sea—far out, so that it could not be recovered; the iwi—the sacred bones—were then cleaned and prepared for their own containment. A special basket shaped like a human body with a face, called the kāʻai, was woven—its eyes made of mother of pearl, its mouth fashioned with the fallen king’s own teeth (according to the account preserved by William Kaiheʻekai Maiʻoho—a descendant of the men who performed the burial, and later curator of the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaiʻi). Only then would the final—and, perhaps, most important moment in the ritual take place: the concealment of the now-sacred bones.

The three people granted the honor of the task were Hoʻoulu, Hoapili, and Keōpūolani—two high chiefs and the king’s highest-ranking wife, whose own genealogical mana was so concentrated that she had been required, since childhood, to be carried everywhere rather than walk on ground that common feet might also touch. Under the cloak of night, the holy trio took the kāʻai containing Kamehameha’s bones and carried them to a final resting place—the location of which, they took to their own graves.

This sacred practice of concealment was called hūnākele—literally, “to hide in secret.” Though not unique to Kamehameha (it was, after all, the standard treatment for high-ranking Hawaiian chiefs whose mana was considered too powerful and too dangerous to make public knowledge), the king’s hūnākele was executed with such thoroughness, it suggests the holy participants understood full-well that they were concealing something of unprecedented power. No record was kept, no landmark identified. The knowledge passed out of the world when the last person who held it died.

Or nearly so…

The one story that survives about a near-disclosure comes from Kamehameha III, who asked Hoapili—his father’s trusted chief, then an old man—to take him to the burial site. Hoapili agreed and they set out together in secret. At some point along their journey, however, Hoapili spied that the duo was being followed. He turned around without explanation and never attempted the visit again.

Although Kamehameha’s final resting place remains a secret, over the last two centuries, many possible locations have been theorized. Some historians believe the bones rest in a sea cave along the lava coastline of Hawaiʻi Island, accessible only at certain tides; others have suggested the island of Maui—specifically Mokuʻula, the royal residence of Kamehameha III, which is also the burial site of several other Hawaiian royals. However, a persistent oral tradition holds that the bones are somewhere in the vicinity of Kailua-Kona, where Kamehameha spent his final years and where the burial preparations took place. None of these locations has ever been confirmed, and the Hawaiian state government and Native Hawaiian organizations actively discourage archaeological searches for the burial, for reasons that go to the heart of why the hūnākele was performed in the first place.

A Collapse Foretold

Many view Kamehameha as the “last great king”—both out of respect for him memory, and for more practical historical reasons. Within six months of the king’s death, the kapu system was abolished—and had been abolished with a single, progressive act: Kamehameha ‘s son, Liholiho, the new king, sat down at a feast table with women and ate. In a system where men and women eating together was a capital offense, a single act of public transgression by the king himself was sufficient to collapse the entire structure.

The women who engineered this moment were Kaʻahumanu—Kamehameha’s most powerful wife, now co-regent—and Keōpūolani, his highest-ranking wife and Liholiho’s own mother. The high priest Hewahewa supported the abolition and led the subsequent destruction of idols and temples. Within weeks, wooden images of gods were being burned across the islands; the heiau were dismantled; a religious system that had organized every aspect of Hawaiian life, from the growing of food to the raising of children to the conduct of war, was formally ended. By the following spring, the first American Protestant missionaries arrived in Kailua, sailing into a spiritual vacuum their own tradition was eager to fill.

A seer named Kapihe had reportedly delivered a prophecy to Kamehameha himself: “There shall be a long malo reaching from Kuamoʻo to Hōlualoa. The islands shall come together, the tapus shall fall. The high shall be brought low and the low shall rise to heaven.”

Kamehameha had heard it and continued his devotions. The collapse came anyway, six months after his bones were hidden.

An Occult Perspective

The hūnākele of Kamehameha’s bones is, at one level, a practical security measure: if your enemies can’t find your remains, they can’t use your mana against your dynasty. But at a deeper level it represents something more interesting—a theology of power in which the relationship between the living and the dead is not sentimental but strategic, not commemorative but active. The bones aren’t hidden to protect the king’s dignity or to honor his memory in the way that Western funerary traditions honor the dead; they’re hidden because they’re dangerous—because they work.

Because the mana that accumulated in that body over sixty-plus years of battles and ceremonies and divine guardianship is still present in the material substance of his bones.

There’s a parallel here that anyone familiar with Western magical tradition will recognize: the understanding that the remains of the powerful dead carry genuine spiritual charge, that relics are not merely symbolic objects but actual concentrations of sacred force—and that, in the wrong hands, they can be weaponized. The Christian relic cult that filled the Pantheon with martyrs’ bones in our May 13 post operated on a structurally similar logic—though its theology ran in the opposite direction, treating the bones of the holy dead as sources of beneficence rather than danger. What the Hawaiians understood about the iwi of their greatest chiefs is something most magical traditions have understood in some form:

The dead are never really gone—and still have a power of their own.

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