The prayers lost their jobs in 1819

Claim (verbatim)

Hawaiʻi's state religion ended by decree in late 1819, when Liholiho ate with the chiefly women and the heiau were abandoned — months before the first missionaries landed. The luakini service, the royal temple liturgy that had been performed fully staffed within living memory, was never performed again; its pule waited decades for Hawaiian scholars — Davida Malo, writing in the 1840s, Kelou Kamakau's account in the Fornander Collection, John Papa ʻĪʻī's memoirs — to set down what could still be recalled, and Malo repeatedly marks the places where recall failed. Genealogical chant met the same century with the opposite incentives: pedigree stayed load-bearing — for rank, for land claims after the Māhele, and finally for royal legitimacy itself, when Kalākaua's circle founded the Hale Nauā and printed the Kumulipo (1889) as dynastic charter. Same island, same decades, two corpora: the one whose institution died overnight in 1819 survives as truncated liturgy recalled at mid-century; the one that kept its constitutional employment survives at full length, culminating in a 2,102-line chant preserved whole. Differential survival by continuing utility — not by antiquity, beauty or sanctity — and it should be legible as a gross line-count asymmetry in the fixed record. Prediction: a line census of texted Hawaiian genealogical chant (the Kumulipo with the genealogical chants of the Fornander Collection) against texted luakini liturgy (the pule preserved in Malo, Kelou Kamakau and ʻĪʻī, as inventoried in Valeri's reconstruction of the service) will show genealogical text exceeding temple liturgy by at least five to one, and the surviving luakini prayers will carry explicit truncation or forgetting formulas at a rate the genealogical corpus lacks (primary clause: the five-to-one line ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (trans. Emerson, 1903), the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore (Bishop Museum Memoirs, 1916–20), ʻĪʻī, Fragments of Hawaiian History (Bishop Museum Press, 1959), and Beckwith's Kumulipo edition (1951), with the ritual-corpus inventory in Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice (Chicago, 1985) as the control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a line census of texted Hawaiian genealogical chant (the Kumulipo with the genealogical chants of the Fornander Collection) against texted luakini liturgy (the pule preserved in Malo, Kelou Kamakau and ʻĪʻī, as inventoried in Valeri's reconstruction of the service) will show genealogical text exceeding temple liturgy by at least five to one, and the surviving luakini prayers will carry explicit truncation or forgetting formulas at a rate the genealogical corpus lacks (primary clause: the five-to-one line ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (trans. Emerson, 1903), the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore (Bishop Museum Memoirs, 1916–20), ʻĪʻī, Fragments of Hawaiian History (Bishop Museum Press, 1959), and Beckwith's Kumulipo edition (1951), with the ritual-corpus inventory in Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice (Chicago, 1985) as the control.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The differential-survival story is standard Hawaiian scholarship: the 1819 ʻAi Noa ended the temple cult months before the mission landed, the luakini liturgy survives only in the mid-century fragments of Malo, Kelou Kamakau and ʻIʻi (Malo marking his own gaps), while genealogical chant kept its constitutional employment and survives whole in the 2,102-line Kumulipo — Valeri's Kingship and Sacrifice (1985) reconstructs the fragmentary service against exactly this contrast. But the primary clause is a line census yielding at least a five-to-one genealogical-to-liturgy ratio, and that count across the named corpora was not located as ever having been tabulated. Adjacent.

• Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (University of Chicago Press, 1985)
• David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, trans. N. B. Emerson (Honolulu, 1903)
• Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (University of Chicago Press, 1951)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.