The goddess of Hawaiian volcanoes: creator of the islands, destroyer of districts, and recipient of a steady flow of returned rocks in the mail.
Documented
Sung into the record
Pele's cycles, her migration to Kīlauea, her wars with her sister Hi'iaka, are preserved in chants collected in the nineteenth century and in Ellis's 1823 account. The goddess is textually attested as the volcano itself personified.
Assessment: Documented in chant and ethnography. The volcano and the goddess were never separate files.
Stories
The curse of the rocks
The popular legend: take lava rock or sand home and Pele's curse follows you. Investigators tracing the tale found it suspiciously young, likely spread by park staff and tour drivers tired of visitors pocketing the mountain.
Assessment: The paper trail points to a twentieth-century convenience. A manufactured taboo doing conservation work.
Interesting claims
The curse became real anyway
The documented twist: national park mail rooms receive thousands of returned rocks yearly, many with apology letters detailing job losses and divorces. An invented curse now generates its own evidence.
Assessment: The returned rocks are fact. What powers them is the question the whole archive is built on.
Sources and further reading
Ellis, 1823 account of Kīlauea tradition
Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, the Hi'iaka cycle
Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park records of returned rocks
Pele chant collections, 19th century
Worth asking
If a made-up curse changes real behavior for decades, in what sense is it made up?