The Fish

I am pondering the meaning of the Hawaiian myth I’m working on that deals with the creation of the universe, and so today, I looked up “universe” in the OED and found the Latin words “unus”--“one” and “versus”—“to turn.” So the literal translation is “turned into one,” which reinforces the extraordinary depth of myths like this one and all the philosophical, psychological and spiritual teachings they contain. In this story, the origin of the Milky Way concerns the uniting of two brothers, Kaulu and Kaeha. “Cosmos” comes from the Greek “kosmos” and is listed as “good order” as opposed to “chaos,” which is described as a “gaping void,” or again from the Greek, an “abyss, that which gapes wide open, is vast and empty.” In this story, Kaulu must traverse the dimensions of land, sea and sky to find his brother Kaeha. Ordering the landscape as he goes, Kaulu ultimately falls into the endless abyss of his own existential emptiness where he finally finds Kaeha. Out of this moment, the universe “turns into one,” and is manifested as The Fish, a swimming constellation of stars.