Every year the National Park Service in Hawaii receives packages of volcanic rock mailed back by tourists who believe they have been cursed. This episode traces the biography of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, from her origins in a mystical homeland near Tahiti and her exile by her sea-goddess sister Namaka, through her canoe journey down the island chain digging fire pits with her staff, to her final stronghold in the Halemaumau crater on Kilauea.

It covers her battles with the snow goddess Poliahu on Mauna Kea, her creation of the hula, the tragic quest of her sister Hiiaka and the chief Lohiau, and how she survived the abolition of the Hawaiian religion, missionary stunts in her crater, hotel-owner gin-bottle offerings, and hitchhiker legends. It closes with the field of geomythology, showing how her migration story encodes the real geological ages of the islands and how carbon-dated lava flows match battles described in the chants.

• Why Pele’s stories are not morality tales but maps of natural boundaries between fire and snow
• Pahoehoe and aa lava, and how hula movements mimic the flow of molten rock
• William Ellis eating sacred ohelo berries in 1823 and Kapiolani’s Christian descent into the crater in 1824
• The 2003 campaign that replaced a blonde painting of Pele with authentic Polynesian iconography
• Pele’s hair, Pele’s tears, a volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, and eruptions around 1500 AD confirmed by science