Hawaiian religion "Along with ancestors and gods, spirits are part of the family of Hawaiians. "There are many kinds of spirits that help for good and many that aid in evil. Some lie and deceive, and some are truthful ... It is a wonderful thing how the spirits ("ʻuhane") of the dead and the ‘angels’ ("anela") of the "ʻaumākua" can possess living persons. Nothing is impossible to god-spirits, "akua"." Kamehameha the Great died in 1819. In the aftermath, two of his wives, Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, then the two most powerful people in the kingdom, conferred with the "kahuna nui", Hewahewa. They convinced
Hawaiian phonology syllable-initial consonant is optional and the syllable may have a long vowel or diphthong. Elbert & Pukui have pointed out that "Certain combinations of sounds are absent or rare." For example, no content word has the form , and the form , is also not common. They also noted that monovocalic content words are always long. Word stress is predictable in Hawaiian for words with three or fewer moras (that is, three or fewer vowels, with diphthongs and long vowels counting as two vowels). In such cases, stress is always on the penultimate mora. Longer words will also follow this