Po

Po is a foundational cosmological concept found across Polynesian traditions, referring broadly to the realm of primordial darkness, the unseen world, and the spiritual dimension from which the world of light and ordinary human life, Ao, ultimately emerged, and to which the dead and ancestral spirits are understood to return. Rather than describing a single fixed location the way many other entries in this atlas do, Po functions across the wider Polynesian cultural sphere, including Hawaiian, Maori and other regional traditions, more as a foundational category, the deep, sacred realm underlying and preceding manifest existence, comparable in its structural role to concepts of primordial chaos or undifferentiated potential found in other creation cosmologies worldwide, while carrying its own specifically Polynesian religious and genealogical significance that varies meaningfully by island group and tradition.

George Grey's nineteenth-century recording of Polynesian mythology and Martha Warren Beckwith's study of Hawaiian mythology both document Po as a concept woven deeply into chant, genealogy and cosmogony across the region, though the specific details and named subdivisions of Po differ from one Polynesian tradition to another rather than forming one single, uniform account.

Sources Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand RaceGeorge Grey with Hawaiian MythologyMartha Warren Beckwith

Because Po carries deep genealogical and cosmogonic significance in Polynesian tradition, often bound up with specific chant sequences, whakapapa or genealogical recitation, and ancestral lineage claims that belong properly to the communities and knowledge-holders who maintain them, this entry deliberately stays at the level of Po's broad, publicly documented cosmological function rather than reproducing specific genealogical chant material or island-specific ritual detail, which is not this atlas's to summarise on a community's behalf.

What can be said honestly and at a general level is that Po and Ao together form a foundational conceptual pairing across Polynesian cosmology, darkness and light, the unseen and the seen, understood not simply as opposites but as a continuous cycle each culture's creation chants describe in its own sequence and detail. Related, more specific realms named elsewhere in Polynesian and Maori tradition, including Pulotu and Rarohenga, are best understood as particular regional or cultural elaborations of the broader Po concept rather than wholly separate cosmological systems.