The term “Huna” refers to an Ancient Hawai’ian spiritual philosophy that goes back at least as far as 1500 C.E. While the word itself simply means “secret” or “hidden”, its use to describe the ancient teachings originated with a Western researcher by the name of Max Freedom Long.

He was among the first Westerners to study these teachings in earnest from his first stay on the Islands around 1917 until his death in 1971. Originally, “Huna” would in fact have been referred to as “Ho’omana” (Ho’o = to make, mana = energy, taken together means something akin to “empowerment”).

Long had called Huna a “psycho-religious structure”, and he wasn’t that far off, except that Huna as a spiritual philosophy must be seen as religiously neutral, with the focus being more on the psychological side of things. In fact, the Hawai’ians had developed, many centuries before Freud and others, a sophisticated view of the human mind as composed of several distinct partitions, including an Unconscious Mind (the “Unihipili” or “little creature”, or as we would say in today’s parlance “the inner child”).

Some of the examples of the ancient Hawai’ians level of understanding include insights into psycho-somatic illness, as well as the formalized “deprogramming” of warriors returning to normal life after battle.

For a brief glimpse of the historical background, it is instructive to read descriptions of the state of Hawai’ian society before the arrival of the Westerners: When Captain Cook and his men landed in 1778, and were soon followed by more white men and finally the missionaries (around 1810), the Islands contained a population much larger than what might be surmised from today’s population patterns (estimates range from 250,000 to as high as 800,000).

And this large society, with a well developed system of political rule and agriculture, was virtually free of both physical disease as well as mental illness. Unfortunately, these populations were subsequently decimated to about 40,000 by the diseases that were brought by Cook’s men and their successors.