Pulotu is best understood as part of the broader concept of Po, the foundational Polynesian concept of primordial darkness and the unseen world, from which Pulotu, like Rarohenga in Maori tradition, represents one specific regional elaboration rather than a wholly independent cosmology invented separately. This atlas keeps its own account of Pulotu at the level of its publicly documented general function, an ancestral and afterlife realm associated with the sea and the west, without reproducing genealogical chant material or community-specific ritual knowledge that belongs to the traditions that maintain it.
Tongan tradition places Pulotu northwest of the archipelago, home of the ancestors and the gods, with a water of life and a talking tree by its ruler, details from early twentieth century ethnography still cited by a later comparative study of Polynesian eschatology.
Comparative Pacific religious scholarship notes that realms structured this way, an ancestral point of both origin and return associated with the ocean, recur across several Pacific Island cultures independently, reflecting the ocean's central place in Pacific cosmology generally as both a barrier and a connective medium between the world of the living and the realm of ancestors and spirits.