Mana Mana

In traditional Hawaiian beliefs, Mana is the spiritual energy of the world. The divine spark, the most important thing from which all in the worlds are made. My personal spiritual philosophy has this energy as the kind of divine awareness of which all living things are a part. This energy, in Hawaiian tradition, is what connects all things. In the spiritual hierarchy, there is a democracy, since there was no real separation between god and man, we are all made of the same stuff. Gods made man, but man also made gods. This was part of the reason why Hawaiians had so many gods, because it was giving the divine energy form, like using quantum energy (pseudo-science, some of my dabbling) and making it have a form, and it could be anything, from a door frame, a particularly large eel, to a funny-shaped rock. I interpret this as a reflection of how Kane used himself to make all the gods, so humans too can make gods out of this original energy.

The other thing that can happen when human beings have all this power to create gods, they can also kill off their gods that stop being helpful, or just were never helpful. Particularly vulnerable were war gods, because if the battle was lost, well…off with his head.