What do you know of the story of Wakea in Polynesia?

Question

I am trying to verify some religious stories from a book published in 1963, and this was the first one.

Answer 1

Hope this helps you, posted from a website first one linked below:

WAKEA in the form of Atea or Vatea, replaced in New Zealand by Rangi (Lani) meaning "Sky," appears as a primary male generative force throughout eastern Polynesia, the name a symbol of the upper regions of air, whence descend sunshine and rain to fertilize earth. The wife Papa, a word applied in Hawaii to a flat surface or layer, symbolizes the warm upper layer of earth, where lies the fertilized seed awaiting the period of maturity to spring into life. But to the Polynesian these functions of sky and earth are themselves direct analogues of the process of human reproduction. Animate nature manifested in the physical universe is equally potent, if properly approached, to insure human fertility. Father Sky and Mother Earth are the first parents of human life on earth as they are of plant life that springs living from earth under the influence of sun and rain from heaven and of animal life that feeds upon it.

At the time of foreign contact Hawaii, too, counted its stock from Wakea and Papa as the official parent-pair. Their names occur on the earliest genealogy of the race given out by Hawaiian students at the mission high school in 1838 and repeated forty years later by Judge Fornander in his Account of the Polynesian Race. They are quoted by Malo and incorporated into the report made in 1904 by a committee of native scholars appointed by the legislature to inquire into the true native tradition of "the beginning of the Hawaiian people