Dance for the End of the World

You’ve heard of hula dancing. It’s a Hawaiian tradition. Women dress in bright hula skirts, men wear loin cloths, and everyone decks themselves out with flowers and leaves. Nowadays the hula dance is often done as a performance for tourists, but once upon a time it was a tradition with the power to bring about good fortune or cataclysmic bad luck.

Hula is originally a religious performance. It is performed for Laka, the Hawaiian goddess of dance, and other traditional Hawaiian gods. Not every hula dance was used for this purpose – hula comes out at holidays, or to greet guests, or just for entertainment on a day to day basis. But when it’s done in a religious context hula is a ceremony, and one with great cosmic reverberations.

According to tradition, a ceremonial hula must be performed flawlessly. A single error ruins the dance, but beyond that, it can inflict great harm on people. Since the dance is performed as a gift to the gods, making a mistake appears as disrespectful. This means that a botched hula dance can bring bad luck tumbling down on the people present. Imagine if your pastor started mistreating his copy of the Bible – you might want to stand back and watch out for lightning bolts!

It’s this ritual power that made hula so prominent in Hawaiian culture. Done properly it brings good fortune, but a sloppy performance might cause injury to the whole tribe. In that historic context, you can see how skilled dancers became such respected members of Hawaiian society.