The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead Volume I Part 38

[Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of souls.]

Like most savages, the Fijians believed that man is animated by a soul which quits his body temporarily in sleep and permanently at death, to survive for a longer or a shorter time in a disembodied state thereafter. Indeed, they attributed souls to animals, vegetables, stones, tools, houses, canoes, and many other things, allowing that all of them may become immortal.[657] On this point I will quote the evidence of one of the earliest and best authorities on the customs and beliefs of the South Sea Islanders. "There seems," says William Mariner, "to be a wide difference between the opinions of the natives in the different cl.u.s.ters of the South Sea islands respecting the future existence of the soul. Whilst the Tonga doctrine limits immortality to chiefs, _matabooles_, and at most, to _mooas_, the Fiji doctrine, with abundant liberality, extends it to all mankind, to all brute animals, to all vegetables, and even to stones and mineral substances. If an animal or a plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the G.o.ds. If a house is taken down, or any way destroyed, its immortal part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world, swimming or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the regions of immortality. Such is the Fiji philosophy, but the Tonga people deny it, unwilling to think that the residence of the G.o.ds should be enc.u.mbered with so much useless rubbish. The natives of Otaheite entertain similar notions respecting these things, viz. that brutes, plants, and stones exist hereafter, but it is not mentioned that they extend the idea to objects of human invention."[658]

[Sidenote: Reported Fijian doctrine of two human souls, a light one and a dark one.]

According to one account, the Fijians imagined that every man has two souls, a dark soul, consisting of his shadow, and a light soul, consisting of his reflection in water or a looking-gla.s.s: the dark soul departs at death to Hades, while the light soul stays near the place where he died or was killed. "Probably," says Thomas Williams, "this doctrine of shadows has to do with the notion of inanimate objects having spirits. I once placed a good-looking native suddenly before a mirror. He stood delighted. 'Now,' said he, softly, 'I can see into the world of spirits.'"[659] However, according to another good authority this distinction of two human souls rests merely on a misapprehension of the Fijian word for shadow, _yaloyalo_, which is a reduplication of _yalo_, the word for soul.[660] Apparently the Fijians pictured to themselves the human soul as a miniature of the man himself. This may be inferred from the customs observed at the death of a chief among the Nakelo tribe. When a chief dies, certain men who are the hereditary undertakers call him, as he lies, oiled and ornamented, on fine mats, saying, "Rise, sir, the chief, and let us be going. The day has come over the land." Then they conduct him to the river side, where the ghostly ferryman comes to ferry Nakelo ghosts across the stream. As they attend the chief on his last journey, they hold their great fans close to the ground to shelter him, because, as one of them explained to a missionary, "His soul is only a little child."[661]

[Sidenote: Absence of the soul in sleep. Catching the soul of a rascal in a scarf.]

The souls of some men were supposed to quit their bodies in sleep and enter into the bodies of other sleepers, troubling and disturbing them.

A soul that had contracted this bad habit was called a _yalombula_. When any one fainted or died, his vagrant spirit might, so the Fijians thought, be induced to come back by calling after it. Sometimes, on awaking from a nap, a stout man might be seen lying at full length and bawling out l.u.s.tily for the return of his own soul.[662] In the windward islands of Fiji there used to be an ordeal called _yalovaki_ which was much dreaded by evil-doers. When the evidence was strong against suspected criminals, and they stubbornly refused to confess, the chief, who was also the judge, would call for a scarf, with which "to catch away the soul of the rogue." A threat of the rack could not have been more effectual. The culprit generally confessed at the sight and even the mention of the light instrument; but if he did not, the scarf would be waved over his head until his soul was caught in it like a moth or a fly, after which it would be carefully folded up and nailed to the small end of a chief's canoe, and for want of his soul the suspected person would pine and die.[663]

[Sidenote: Fijian dread of sorcery and witchcraft.]

Further, the Fijians, like many other savages, stood in great terror of witchcraft, believing that the sorcerer had it in his power to kill them by the practice of his nefarious art. "Of all their superst.i.tions," says Thomas Williams, "this exerts the strongest influence on the minds of the people. Men who laugh at the pretensions of the priest tremble at the power of the wizard; and those who become christians lose this fear last of all the relics of their heathenism."[664] Indeed "native agents of the mission who, in the discharge of their duty, have boldly faced death by open violence, have been driven from their posts by their dread of the sorcerer; and my own observation confirms the statement of more than one observer that savages not unfrequently die of fear when they think themselves bewitched."[665] Professed pract.i.tioners of witchcraft were dreaded by all cla.s.ses, and by destroying mutual confidence they annulled the comfort and shook the security of society. Almost all sudden deaths were set down to their machinations. A common mode of effecting their object was to obtain a shred of the clothing of the man they intended to bewitch, some refuse of his food, a lock of his hair, or some other personal relic; having got it they wrapped it up in certain leaves, and then cooked or buried it or hung it up in the forest; whereupon the victim was supposed to die of a wasting disease.

Another way was to bury a coco-nut, with the eye upward, beneath the hearth of the temple, on which a fire was kept constantly burning; and as the life of the nut was destroyed, so the health of the person whom the nut represented would fail till death put an end to his sufferings.

"The native imagination," we are told, "is so absolutely under the control of fear of these charms, that persons, hearing that they were the object of such spells, have lain down on their mats, and died through fear."[666] To guard against the fell craft of the magician the people resorted to many precautions. A man who suspected another of plotting against him would be careful not to eat in his presence or at all events to leave no morsel of food behind, lest the other should secrete it and bewitch him by it; and for the same reason people disposed of their garments so that no part could be removed; and when they had their hair cut they generally hid the clippings in the thatch of their own houses. Some even built themselves a small hut and surrounded it with a moat, believing that a little water had power to neutralise the charms directed against them.[667]

[Sidenote: The fear of sorcery has had the beneficial effect of enforcing habits of personal cleanliness.]

"In the face of such instances as these," says one who knows the Fijians well, "it demands some courage to a.s.sert that upon the whole the belief in witchcraft was formerly a positive advantage to the community. It filled, in fact, the place of a system of sanitation. The wizard's tools consisting in those waste matters that are inimical to health, every man was his own scavenger. From birth to old age a man was governed by this one fear; he went into the sea, the graveyard or the depths of the forest to satisfy his natural wants; he burned his cast-off _malo_; he gave every fragment left over from his food to the pigs; he concealed even the clippings of his hair in the thatch of his house. This ever-present fear even drove women in the western districts out into the forest for the birth of their children, where fire destroyed every trace of their lying-in. Until Christianity broke it down, the villages were kept clean; there were no festering rubbish-heaps nor filthy _raras_."[668]

[Sidenote: Fijian dread of ghosts. Uproar made to drive away ghosts.]

Of apparitions the Fijians used to be very much afraid. They believed that the ghosts of the dead appeared often and afflicted mankind, especially in sleep. The spirits of slain men, unchaste women, and women who died in childbed were most dreaded. After a death people have been known to hide themselves for a few days, until they supposed the soul of the departed was at rest. Also they shunned the places where people had been murdered, particularly when it rained, because then the moans of the ghost could be heard as he sat up, trying to relieve his pain by resting his poor aching head on the palms of his hands. Some however said that the moans were caused by the soul of the murderer knocking down the soul of his victim, whenever the wretched spirit attempted to get up.[669] When Fijians pa.s.sed a spot in the forest where a man had been clubbed to death, they would sometimes throw leaves on it as a mark of homage to his spirit, believing that they would soon be killed themselves if they failed in thus paying their respects to the ghost.[670] And after they had buried a man alive, as they very often did, these savages used at nightfall to make a great din with large bamboos, trumpet-sh.e.l.ls, and so forth, in order to drive away his spirit and deter him from loitering about his old home. "The uproar is always held in the late habitation of the deceased, the reason being that as no one knows for a certainty what reception he will receive in the invisible world, if it is not according to his expectations he will most likely repent of his bargain and wish to come back. For that reason they make a great noise to frighten him away, and dismantle his former habitation of everything that is attractive, and clothe it with everything that to their ideas seems repulsive."[671]

[Sidenote: Killing a ghost.]

However, stronger measures were sometimes resorted to. It was believed to be possible to kill a troublesome ghost. Once it happened that many chiefs feasted in the house of Tanoa, King of Ambau. In the course of the evening one of them related how he had slain a neighbouring chief.

That very night, having occasion to leave the house, he saw, as he believed, the ghost of his victim, hurled his club at him, and killed him stone dead. On his return to the house he roused the king and the rest of the inmates from their slumbers, and recounted his exploit. The matter was deemed of high importance, and they all sat on it in solemn conclave. Next morning a search was made for the club on the scene of the murder; it was found and carried with great pomp and parade to the nearest temple, where it was laid up for a perpetual memorial. Everybody was firmly persuaded that by this swas.h.i.+ng blow the ghost had been not only killed but annihilated.[672]

[Sidenote: Dazing the ghost of a grandfather.]

A more humane method of dealing with an importunate ghost used to be adopted in Vanua-levu, the largest but one of the Fijian islands. In that island, as a consequence, it is said, of reckoning kins.h.i.+p through the mother, a child was considered to be more closely related to his grandfather than to his father. Hence when a grandfather died, his ghost naturally desired to carry off the soul of his grandchild with him to the spirit land. The wish was creditable to the warmth of his domestic affection, but if the survivors preferred to keep the child with them a little longer in this vale of tears, they took steps to baffle grandfather's ghost. For this purpose when the old man's body was stretched on the bier and raised on the shoulders of half-a-dozen stout young fellows, the mother's brother would take the grandchild in his arms and begin running round and round the corpse. Round and round he ran, and grandfather's ghost looked after him, craning his neck from side to side and twisting it round and round in the vain attempt to follow the rapid movements of the runner. When the ghost was supposed to be quite giddy with this unwonted exercise, the mother's brother made a sudden dart away with the child in his arms, the bearers fairly bolted with the corpse to the grave, and before he could collect his scattered wits grandfather was safely landed in his long home.[673]

[Sidenote: Special relation of grandfather to grandchild. Soul of a grandfather reborn in his grandchildren.]

Mr. Fison, who reports this quaint mode of bilking a ghost, explains the special attachment of the grandfather to his grandchild by the rule of female descent which survives in Vanua-levu; and it is true that where exogamy prevails along with female descent, a child regularly belongs to the exogamous cla.s.s of its grandfather and not of its father and hence may be regarded as more closely akin to the grandfather than to the father. But on the other hand it is to be observed that exogamy at present is unknown in Fiji, and at most its former prevalence in the islands can only be indirectly inferred from relics of totemism and from the existence of the cla.s.sificatory system of relations.h.i.+p.[674] Perhaps the real reason why in Vanua-levu a dead grandfather is so anxious to carry off the soul of his living grandchild lies nearer to hand in the apparently widespread belief that the soul of the grandfather is actually reborn in his grandchild. For example, in Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands, every one "is persuaded that the soul of a grandfather is transmitted by nature into the body of his grandchildren; and that, if an unfruitful wife were to place herself under the corpse of her deceased grandfather, she would be sure to become pregnant."[675]

Again, the Kayans of Borneo "believe in the reincarnation of the soul, although this belief is not clearly harmonised with the belief in the life in another world. It is generally believed that the soul of a grandfather may pa.s.s into one of his grandchildren, and an old man will try to secure the pa.s.sage of his soul to a favourite grandchild by holding it above his head from time to time. The grandfather usually gives up his name to his eldest grandson, and rea.s.sumes the original name of his childhood with the prefix or t.i.tle _Laki_, and the custom seems to be connected with this belief or hope."[676]

[Sidenote: A dead grandfather may reasonably reclaim his own soul from his grandchild.]

Now where such a belief is held, it seems reasonable enough that a dead grandfather should reclaim his own soul for his personal use before he sets out for the spirit land; else how could he expect to be admitted to that blissful abode if on arriving at the portal he were obliged to explain to the porter that he had no soul about him, having left that indispensable article behind in the person of his grandchild? "Then you had better go back and fetch it. There is no admission at this gate for people without souls." Such might very well be the porter's retort; and foreseeing it any man of ordinary prudence would take the precaution of recovering his lost spiritual property before presenting himself to the Warden of the Dead. This theory would sufficiently account for the otherwise singular behaviour of grandfather's ghost in Vanua-levu. At the same time it must be admitted that the theory of the reincarnation of a grandfather in a grandson would be suggested more readily in a society where the custom of exogamy was combined with female descent than in one where the same custom coexisted with male descent; since, given exogamy and female descent, grandfather and grandson regularly belong to the same exogamous cla.s.s, whereas father and son never do so.[677] Thus Mr. Fison may after all be right in referring the partiality of a Fijian grandfather for his grandson in the last resort to a system of exogamy and female kins.h.i.+p.

[Footnote 627: G. Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 23 _sq._, 125, 320 _sqq._]

[Footnote 628: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 294 _sqq._; P. A. Kleint.i.tschen, _Die Kustenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Munster, N.D.), pp. 90 _sqq._ The sh.e.l.l money is called _tambu_ in New Britain, _diwara_ in the Duke of York Island, and _aringit_ in New Ireland.]

[Footnote 629: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 307, 313, 435, 436.]

[Footnote 630: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 270 _sq._, compare pp. 127, 200.]

[Footnote 631: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. v., 18.]

[Footnote 632: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 141 _sq._, 144, 145, 190-193.]

[Footnote 633: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 142, 192, 385, 386 _sq._]

[Footnote 634: G. Brown, _op. cit._ p. 390. The custom of cremating the dead in New Ireland is described more fully by Mr. R. Parkinson, who says that the life-sized figures which are burned with the corpse represent the deceased (_Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_, pp. 273 _sqq._).

In the central part of New Ireland the dead are buried in the earth; afterwards the bones are dug up and thrown into the sea. See Albert Hahl, "Das mittlere Neumecklenburg," _Globus_, xci. (1907) p. 314.]

[Footnote 635: R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_ (Stuttgart, 1907) p. 78; P. A. Kleint.i.tschen, _Die Kustenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Munster, N.D.), p. 222.]

[Footnote 636: Mgr. Couppe, "En Nouvelle-Pomeranie," _Les Missions Catholiques_, xxiii. (1891) pp. 364 _sq._; J. Graf Pfeil, _Studien und Beobachtungen aus der Sudsee_ (Brunswick, 1899), p. 79.]

[Footnote 637: R. Parkinson, _op. cit._ p. 81.]

[Footnote 638: _P._ Rascher, _M.S.C._, "Die Sulka, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographic Neu-Pommern," _Archiv fur Anthropologie_, xxix. (1904) pp.

214 _sq._, 216; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_, pp.

185-187.]

[Footnote 639: R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_, pp.

404-406.]

[Footnote 640: R. Parkinson, _op. cit._ pp. 441 _sq._]

[Footnote 641: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 176, 183, 385 _sq._ As to the wide-spread belief in New Britain that what we call natural deaths are brought about by sorcery, see further _P._ Rascher, _M.S.C._, "Die Sulka, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographic Neu-Pommern," _Archiv fur Ethnographie_, xxix. (1904) pp. 221 _sq._; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_, pp. 117 _sq._ 199-201; P. A. Kleint.i.tschen, _Die Kusten-bewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Munster, N.D.), p.

215.]

[Footnote 642: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 387-390.]

[Footnote 643: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 35, 89, 196, 201.]

[Footnote 644: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 177, 183, 184.]

[Footnote 645: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 192-195.]

[Footnote 646: P. A. Kleint.i.tschen, _Die Kustenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_, pp. 225 _sq._ Compare R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee_, p. 79.]

[Footnote 647: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), p.

xiv.]

[Footnote 648: Thomas Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 22-26.]

[Footnote 649: Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 77; Th. Williams, _op.

cit._ i. 18.]

[Footnote 650: Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 332 _sqq._; Thomas Williams _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 60 _sqq._; Berthold Seeman, _Viti_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 279 _sqq._; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_ (London, 1908), pp. 335 _sq._]