Customer Reviews

Hawaiian Religion & Magic

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4 star:		(1)
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I like this volume more that the later release "Hawaiian Magic And Spirituality" because of the 25+ color photos in the section between pages 82 and 83.

Mr. Cunningham OBVIOUSLY did his homework. This has one of the most complete picture of HUNA and Deities I have seen.

Unfortunately; Mr. Cunningham allowed his Wiccan beliefs to influence his perceptions of HUNA.

It is true that BOTH HUNA and Wicca are Shamanic religions, but they are RADICALY different.

Please E-mail me if you have questions or comments about this review. Two Bears.

Wah doh Ogedoda (We give thanks Great Spirit)

While there might be some interesting information in this book, it's all in the presentation. This book reads like a dry doctoral dissertation. It was grueling.

Perhaps I was expecting something else, however. I really wanted a book on Huna, and this is not it. This is a dry dissection of the history of religion in Hawaii, with little of the philosophical teachings of the huna belief system. (Huna and the religion he talks about are two different things.)

So, I suppose if you simply want to read a dry history of the topic, you might find it interesting. I sure didn't. If you're looking for Huna, look to "Fundamentals of Hawaiian Mysticism".

Has Scott Cunningham written a book that doesn't show up on every Wiccan's shelf? Even if you aren't interested in the Hawaiian pantheon, the study of the culture alone provides great reading. The information here is priceless, showing that Cunningham actually went to the source rather than to the library

In the world of new age books the late Scott Cunningham is a somewhat divisive person. Some consider him visionary opening up new vistas of understanding. Some consider him king of the fluffy bunny brigade who is so eager to see the good in people that he is unrealistic. Personally I think Cunningham has written some very good and very important books. Unfortunately he has also written some dreadful books and Hawaiian magic is one of those.

Scott dedicated his last years to learning the spirit of the islands. That is their culture, their magic, their art and he desperately wanted to share this with the world. The problem was he was so bent on showing how good it was, to the exclusion of all that is `bad' that he rendered his final book into little more than a love fest, useless to the serious student, except to raise questions that it was his job to answer.

Early on he says that the island cultures had war and slavery but dismisses this by saying in effect so did the west. But development in western culture often is based around these things. Why did they start and why did they end? How did the tradition start? These are a part of the fabric of society and to ignore them because they are ugly pretty well invalidates the study. Imagine trying to study the culture of the United States in the early 19th century without Dread Scott or the issue of Free or slave states?

Perhaps even more damaging is Cunningham's unwillingness to explore the history of the islands even as he comments on it. By this I mean that if you read between the lines on his work you discover that there were two waves of immigration to the Islands from Asia. The second wave brought in far more rules and taboos and a level of oppression. Cunningham mentions these as he covers cultural taboos but then doesn't bother to ask "why" any other this happened. Why was there another wave? Why were they more formal than the first wave? And so forth.

Cunningham contents himself to just say that they were that way without asking why. The effect is that the rituals and taboos he mention are cut from their context and become little more than cutesy little native gimmicks. Rather than reviving the Hawaiian culture he loved Cunningham relegated it back to where he found it, being as cultureal relevant and educational as a tourist in a flower pattern shirt wearing a plastic lay at a Honolulu beach barbecue.

Cunningham has written some very good books, but here, he badly dropped the ball. No culture is all good or all bad. To truly understand a culture you have to understand and accept all its elements and how they interact to create the whole. All too often Western societies were so sure of their superiority that they tried to erase native culture and in so doing destroyed much that was good as well as what was bad. In showing Hawaiian culture as all good and ignoring what was bad or at least different, Cunningham shows the same degree of arrogance as the other white men whose work he claims to be trying to undo.

HE AMAZES ME WITH HIS LOVING KNOWLEDGE THAT HE SHARES WITH US IN ORDER TO CREATE A FINER PLACE TO LIVE AND NURTURE OF FAMLIES. i MEET SCOTT MANY YEARS AGO AT THE CHELSEA HOTEL..I WOULD LOVE TO GET IN TOUCH WITH HIM AGAIN..JUST TO CATCH UP...HE SENT ME BOOKS AND POEMS AND CALLED ME FROM TENN. THE NIGHT DUANE ALLMAN DIED. WE BOTH CRIED AND CRIED. SPECIAL MAN, SORRY I LOST TOUCH. HE HAS CERTAINLY CARVED A PLACE IN THE LITERARY WORLD AND IT COUND'T OF HAPPENED TO A FINER MAN WHO'S TIME HAS COME. . MARGUERITE NYC