A central rite of the season was a ceremonial procession, carrying an image of Lono, the akua loa, in a clockwise circuit around each island district to collect tribute from local communities, accompanied by athletic competitions and games associated with the season's festive character. The Makahiki closed with rites that symbolically restored precedence to Ku, the war god whose ordinary authority the peaceful Makahiki season had set aside, and the regular kapu resumed for the working year ahead.
Captain James Cook's arrival in Hawaiian waters in 1778 to 1779 coincided with the Makahiki season, and the question of whether Hawaiians understood Cook as connected to Lono has been the subject of extensive and genuinely contested scholarly debate, most famously between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. This atlas notes that the debate exists rather than adjudicating it, since it concerns interpretation of contact era events rather than the Makahiki's own well documented pre-contact religious structure.
The tribute collected, called ho'okupu, took the form of agricultural produce, textiles and other goods rendered by each district to its chief, who in turn owed tribute to the paramount chief of the island, making the Makahiki procession simultaneously a religious circuit and an annual accounting of the political economy binding commoners, local chiefs and the ruling chief together.