The Secret Science Behind Miracles
by Max Freedom Long
[1948]

https://www.sacred-texts.com/nth/ssbm/ssbm02.htm

Most New Thought proponents look to Western esoteric traditions, or possibly to second-hand Hindu or Buddhist concepts. Max Freedom Long, on the other hand, was fascinated with the shamans of Hawaii, the Kahuna. While this is not, by far, an ethnographic account of Hawaiian healing, it is informed by anecdote and personal experience in the islands. Long spent many years in Hawaii, and besides several books on 'Huna' he also apparently wrote several mystery novels in that setting. This book, one of the first he wrote on the subject of Huna, is typical of the others, and if you like this, you'll probably like his other writings.
The Secret Science Behind Miracles, by Max Freedom Long, [1948], at sacred-texts.com
excerpt from one chapter;

CHAPTER I
THE DISCOVERY THAT MAY CHANGE THE WORLD

This report deals with the discovery of an ancient and secret system of workable magic, which, if we can learn to use it as did the native magicians of Polynesia and North Africa, bids fair to change the world … provided the atom bomb does not make all further changes impossible.

As a young man I was a Baptist. I attended the Catholic Church often with a boyhood friend. Later on I studied Christian Science briefly, took a long look into Theosophy, and ended by making a survey of all religions whose literatures were available to me.

With this background, and having majored in Psychology at school, I arrived in Hawaii in 1917 and took a job teaching because the position would place me near the volcano, Kilauea, which was very active at the time and which I proposed to visit as often as possible.

After a three days’ voyage in a small steamer out of Honolulu, I at last reached my school. It was one of three rooms and stood in a lonely valley between a great sugar plantation and a vast ranch manned by Hawaiians and owned by a white man who had lived most of his life in Hawaii.

The two teachers under me were both Hawaiian, and

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it was only natural that I soon began to know more about their simple Hawaiian friends. From the first I began to hear guarded references to native magicians, the kahunas, or "Keepers of the Secret."

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In isolated districts the kahunas practiced their arts openly. At the volcano several of them continued to make the ritual offerings to Pele, and acted as guides for tourists on the side, often astounding them with a certain magical feat of which I shall tell in detail very soon.

To continue my story, I read the books, decided with their authors that the kahunas possessed no genuine magic, and settled back fairly well satisfied that all the whispered tales I might hear were figments of imagination.

The next week I was introduced to a young Hawaiian who had been to school and who had thought to show his superior knowledge by defying the local native superstition that one might not enter a certain tumbled temple enclosure and defile it. His demonstration took an unexpected turn and he found his legs useless under him. His friends carried him home after he had crawled from the enclosure, and, after the plantation doctor had failed to help him, he had gone to a kahuna and had been restored by him. I did not believe the tale, but still I had no way of knowing.

I asked some of the older white men of the neighborhood what they thought of the kahunas, and they invariably advised me to keep my nose out of their affairs. I asked well educated Hawaiians and got no advice at all. They simply were not talking. They either laughed off my questions or ignored them.

This state of affairs prevailed for me all that year

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and the next and the next. I moved to a different school each year, each time finding myself in isolated corners where native life ran a strong undercurrent, and in my third year found myself in a brisk little coffee-growing community with ranchers and native fishermen in the hills and along the beaches.

Very quickly I learned that the delightful elderly lady with whom I boarded at a rambling cottage hotel, was a minister, and that she preached each Sunday to the largest congregation of Hawaiians in those parts. I further learned that she had no connection with the Mission Churches or any other, was self ordained, and peppery on the subject. In due time I found that she was the daughter of a man who had ventured to try his Christian prayers and faith against the magic of a local kahuna who had challenged him and had promised to pray his congregation of Hawaiians to death, one by one, to show that his beliefs were more practical and genuine than the superstitions of the Christians.

I even saw the diary of that earnest but misguided gentleman. In it he reported the death, one by one, of members of his flock, then the sudden desertion of the remaining members. The pages for many days were left blank in the diary at that point, but the daughter told me how the desperate missionary went afield, learned the use of the magic employed in the death prayer, and secretly made the death prayer for the challenging kahuna. The kahuna had not expected such a turning of the tables and had taken no precautions against attack. He died in three days.

The survivors of the flock rushed back to church … and the diary resumed with the glad tidings of the return.

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[paragraph continues] But the missionary was never the same. He attended the next conclave of the mission body in Honolulu, and said or did things not recorded in any available records. He may only have answered scandalized charges. In any event, he was churched and never again attended a conclave. But the Hawaiians understood. A princess gave him a strip of land a half mile wide and running from the breakers to the high mountains. On this land at the beach where Captain Cook landed and was killed hardly fifty years earlier, there stood the remains of one of the finest native temples in the land—the one from which the gods were paraded each year over the road that is still called "The Pathway of the Gods." Farther back from the beach, but on the same grant of land, stood the little church of coral stone which the natives had built with their own hands and in which his daughter was to preside as minister sixty years later.

At the beginning of my fourth year in the Islands I moved to Honolulu, and after getting settled, took time out to visit the Bishop Museum, a famous institution founded by Hawaiian Royalty and endowed to support a school for children of Hawaiian blood.

The purpose of my visit was to try to find someone who could give me an authoritative answer to the question of the kahunas which had plagued me for so long. My bump of curiosity had grown too large to be comfortable, and I harbored an angry desire to have something done about it one way or another, definitely and decisively. I had heard that the curator of the museum had spent most of his years delving into things Hawaiian, and I had the hope that he would be able to

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give me the truth, coldly, scientifically and in an acceptable form.

At the entrance I met a charming Hawaiian woman, a Mrs. Webb, who listened to my blunt statement of the reason for my visit, studied me for a moment, then said, "You'd better go up and see Dr. Brigham. He's in his office on the next floor."