[Sidenote: The rite of circumcision; the lads supposed to be swallowed by a monster (balum). The sacred flutes.]

The place where the operation is performed on the lads is a long hut, about a hundred feet in length, which diminishes in height towards the rear. This represents the belly of the monster which is to swallow up the candidates. To keep up the delusion a pair of great eyes are painted over the entrance, and above them the projecting roots of a betel-palm represent the monster's hair, while the trunk of the tree passes for his backbone. As the awe-struck lads approach this imposing creature, he is heard from time to time to utter a growl. The growl is in fact no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men, who are concealed within the edifice. When the procession has come to a halt in front of the artificial monster, a loud defiant blast blown on shell-trumpets summons him to stand forth. The reply follows in the shape of another muffled roar of the bull-roarers from within the building. At the sound the men say that "Balum is coming up," and they raise a shrill song like a scream and sacrifice pigs to the monster in order to induce him to spare the lives of the candidates. When the operation has been performed on the lads, they must remain in strict seclusion for three or four months, avoiding all contact with women and even the sight of them. They live in the long hut, which represents the monster's belly, and their food is brought them by elder men. Their leisure time is spent in weaving baskets and playing on certain sacred flutes, which are never used except at such seasons. The instruments are of two patterns. One is called the male and the other the female, and they are supposed to be married to each other. No woman may see these mysterious flutes; if she did she would die. Even if she hears their shrill note in the distance, she will hasten to hide herself in a thicket. When the initiatory ceremonies are over, the flutes are carefully kept in the men's clubhouse of the village till the next time they are wanted for a similar occasion. On the other hand, if the women are obliged to go near the place where the lads are living in seclusion, they beat on certain bamboo drums in order to warn them to keep out of the way. Sometimes, though perhaps rarely, one of the lads dies under the operation; in that case the men explain his disappearance to the women by saying that the monster has a pig's stomach as well as a human stomach, and that unfortunately the deceased young man slipped by mistake into the wrong stomach and so perished miserably. But as a rule the candidates pass into the right stomach and after a sufficient period has been allowed for digestion, they come forth safe and sound, the monster having kindly consented to let them go free in consideration of the roast pigs which have been offered to him by the men. Indeed he is not very exacting, for he contents himself with devouring the souls of the pigs, while he leaves their bodies to be consumed by his worshippers. This is a kindly and considerate way of dealing with sacrifice, which our New Guinea ghost or monster shares with many deities of much higher social pretensions. However, lest he should prove refractory and perhaps run away with the poor young men in his inside, or possibly make a dart at any women or children who might be passing, the men take the precaution of tying him down tight with ropes. When the time of seclusion is up, one of the last acts in the long series of ceremonies is to cast off the ropes and let the monster go free. He avails himself of his liberty to return to his subterranean abode, and the young men are brought back to the village with much solemnity.

[Sidenote: The return of the novices to the village.]

An eye-witness has described the ceremony. The lads, now ranking as full-grown men, were first bathed in the sea and then elaborately decorated with paint and so forth. In marching back to the village they had to keep their eyes tightly shut, and each of them was led by a man who acted as a kind of god-father. As the procession moved on, an old bald-headed man touched each boy solemnly on the chin and brow with a bull-roarer. In the village preparations for a banquet had meanwhile been made, and the women and girls were waiting in festal attire. The women were much moved at the return of the lads; they sobbed and tears of joy ran down their cheeks. Arrived in the village the newly-initiated lads were drawn up in a row and fresh palm leaves were spread in front of them. Here they stood with closed eyes, motionless as statues. Then a man passed behind them, touching each of them in the hams with the handle of an axe and saying, "O circumcised one, sit down." But still the lads remained standing, stiff and motionless. Not till another man had knocked repeatedly on the ground with the stalk of a palm-leaf, crying, "O circumcised ones, open your eyes!" did the youths, one after another, open their eyes as if awaking from a profound stupor. Then they sat down on the mats and partook of the food brought them by the men. Young and old now ate in the open air. Next morning the circumcised lads were bathed in the sea and painted red instead of white. After that they might talk to women. This was the end of the ceremony.[411]

[Sidenote: The essence of the initiatory rites seems to be a simulation of death and resurrection; the novice is supposed to be killed and to come to life or be born again. The new birth among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.]

The meaning of these curious ceremonies observed on the return of the lads to the village is not explained by the writer who describes them; but the analogy of similar ceremonies observed at initiation by many other races allows us to divine it with a fair degree of probability. As I have already observed in a former lecture, the ceremony of initiation at puberty is very often regarded as a process of death and resurrection; the candidate is supposed to die or to be killed and to come to life again or be born again; and the pretence of a new birth is not uncommonly kept up by the novices feigning to have forgotten all the most common actions of life and having accordingly to learn them all over again like newborn babes. We may conjecture that this is why the young circumcised Papuans, with whom we are at present concerned, march back to their village with closed eyes; this is why, when bidden to sit down, they remain standing stiffly, as if they understood neither the command nor the action; and this, too, we may surmise, is why their mothers and sisters receive them with a burst of emotion, as if their dead had come back to them from the grave. This interpretation of the ceremony is confirmed by a curious rite which is observed by the Akikuyu of British East Africa. Amongst them every boy or girl at or about the age of ten years has solemnly to pretend to be born again, not in a moral or religious, but in a physical sense. The mother of the child, or, if she is dead, some other woman, goes through an actual pantomime of bringing forth the boy or girl. I will spare you the details of the pantomime, which is very graphic, and will merely mention that the bouncing infant squalls like a newborn babe. Now this ceremony of the new birth was formerly enacted among the Akikuyu at the rite of circumcision, though the two ceremonies are now kept distinct.[412] Hence it is not very rash to conjecture that the ceremony performed by the young Papuans of Finsch Harbour on their return to the village after undergoing circumcision is merely a way of keeping up the pretence of being born again and of being therefore as ignorant and helpless as babes.

[Sidenote: The mock death of the novices as a preliminary to the mock birth.]

But if the end of the initiation is a mock resurrection, or rather new birth, as it certainly seems to be, we may infer with some confidence that the first part of it, namely the act of circumcision, is a mock death. This is borne out by the explicit statement of a very good authority, Mr. Vetter, that "the circumcision is designated as a process of being swallowed by the spirit, out of whose stomach (represented by a long hut) the release must take place by means of a sacrifice of pigs."[413] And it is further confirmed by the observation that both the spirit which is supposed to operate on the lads, and the bull-roarer, which apparently represents his voice, are known by the name of balum, which means the ghost or spirit of a dead person. Similarly, among the Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer, which they call sosom, is given to a mythical giant, who is supposed to appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he comes, a festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung. Boys are presented to the giant, and he kills them, but brings them to life again.[414] Thus the initiatory rite of circumcision, to which all lads have to submit among the Yabim, seems to be closely bound up with their conception of death and with their belief in a life after death; since the whole ceremony apparently consists in a simulation of dying and coming to life again. That is why I have touched upon these initiatory rites, which at first sight might appear to have no connexion with our immediate subject, the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead.

[Sidenote: General summary as to the Yabim.]

On the whole we may say that the Yabim have a very firm and practical belief in a life after death, and that while their attitude to the spirits of the departed is generally one of fear, they nevertheless look to these spirits also for information and help on various occasions. Thus their beliefs and practices contain at least in germ the elements of a worship of the dead.

[Footnote 394: Stolz, "Die Umgebung von Kap Koenig Wilhelm," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch New-Guinea (Berlin, 1911), iii. 243-286.]

[Footnote 395: Stolz, op. cit. pp. 252-254.]

[Footnote 396: Stolz, op. cit. pp. 245-247.]

[Footnote 397: Stolz, op. cit. pp. 247 sq.]

[Footnote 398: Stolz, op. cit. pp. 248-250.]

[Footnote 399: Stolz, op. cit. p. 258.]

[Footnote 400: Stolz, op. cit. p. 259.]

[Footnote 401: K. Vetter, in Komm herueber und hilf uns! oder die Arbeit der Neuen-Dettelsauer Mission, Nos. 1-4 (Barmen, 1898); id., in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelms-Land, 1897, pp. 86-102; id., in Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena, xi. (Jena, 1892) pp. 102-106; id., in Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena, xii. (Jena, 1893) pp. 95-97; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii (Berlin, 1911) pp. 287-394.]

[Footnote 402: K. Vetter, Komm herueber und hilf uns! ii. (Barmen, 1898) pp. 6-12.]

[Footnote 403: K. Vetter, op. cit. ii. 8; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 291, 308, 311.]

[Footnote 404: H. Zahn, op. cit. iii. 291.]

[Footnote 405: K. Vetter, Komm herueber und hilf uns! iii. 21 sq. According to Mr. H. Zahn (op. cit. p. 324) every village has its own entrance into the spirit-land.]

[Footnote 406: K. Vetter, Komm herueber und hilf uns! iii. 19-24; id., in Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena, xii. (1893) pp. 96 sq.]

[Footnote 407: K. Vetter, Komm herueber und hilf uns! ii. 7, iii. 24; id., in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und den Bismarck-Archipel, 1897, p. 94.]

[Footnote 408: K. Vetter, in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelms-Land, 1897, p. 94.]

[Footnote 409: K. Vetter, in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelms-Land, 1897, pp. 94 sq.; id., Komm herueber und hilf uns! iii. 15-19. Compare H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 320 sq.]

[Footnote 410: H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 318-320.]

[Footnote 411: K. Vetter, in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und den Bismarck-Archipel, 1897, pp. 92 sq.; id., in Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena, xi. (1892) p. 105; id., Komm herueber und hilf uns! ii. (1898) p. 18; id., cited by M. Krieger, Neu-Guinea, pp. 167-170; O. Schellong, "Das Barlum (sic)-fest der Gegend Finsch-hafens (Kaiserwilhelmsland), ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Beschneidung der Melanesier," Internationales Archiv fuer Ethnographie, ii. (1889) pp. 145-162; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 296-298.]

[Footnote 412: W. S. Routledge and K. Routledge, With a Prehistoric People, the Akikuyu of British East Africa (London, 1910), pp. 151 sq. Compare Totemism and Exogamy, iv. 228; C. W. Hobley, "Kikuyu Customs and Beliefs," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, xl. (1910) pp. 440 sq.]

[Footnote 413: K. Vetter, in Nachrichten ueber Kaiser Wilhelmsland und den Bismarck-Archipel, 1897, p. 93.]

[Footnote 414: R. Poech, "Vierter Bericht ueber meine Reise nach Neu-Guinea," Sitzungsberichte der mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Klasse der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna), cxv. (1906) Abteilung 1, pp. 901, 902.]



LECTURE XII

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA (continued)

[Sidenote: The Bukaua of German New Guinea.]

In the last lecture I described the beliefs and practices concerning the dead as they are to be found among the Yabim of German New Guinea. To-day we begin with the Bukaua, a kindred and neighbouring tribe, which occupies the coast lands of the northern portion of Huon Gulf from Schollenbruch Point to Samoa Harbour. The language which the Bukaua speak belongs, like the language of the Yabim, to the Melanesian, not to the Papuan family. Their customs and beliefs have been reported by a German missionary, Mr. Stefan Lehner, whose account I follow.[415] In many respects they closely resemble those of their neighbours the Yabim.

[Sidenote: Means of subsistence of the Bukaua. Men's clubhouses.]

The Bukaua are an agricultural people who subsist mainly on the crops of taro which they raise. But they also cultivate many kinds of bananas and vegetables, together with sugar-cane, sago, and tobacco. From time to time they cut down and burn the forest in order to obtain fresh fields for cultivation. The land is not held in common. Each family has its own fields and patches of forest, and would resent the intrusion of others on their hereditary domain. Hunting and fishing supply them with animal food to eke out the vegetable nourishment which they draw from their fields and plantations.[416] Every village contains one or more of the men's clubhouses which are a common feature in the social life of the tribes on this coast. In these clubhouses the young men are obliged to sleep, and on the platforms in front of them the older men hold their councils. Such a clubhouse is called a lum.[417]

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the Bukaua concerning the souls of the dead. Sickness and disease attributed to ghostly agency.]

The Bukaua have a firm belief in the existence of the human soul after death. They think that a man's soul can even quit his body temporarily in his lifetime during sleep or a swoon, and that in its disembodied state it can appear to people at a distance; but such apparitions are regarded as omens of approaching death, when the soul will depart for good and all. The soul of a dead man is called a balum. The spirits of the departed are believed to be generally mischievous and spiteful to the living, but they can be appeased by sacrifice, and other measures can be taken to avert their dangerous influence.[418] They are very touchy, and if they imagine that they are not honoured enough by their kinsfolk, and that the offerings made to them are insufficient, they will avenge the slight by visiting their disrespectful and stingy relatives with sickness and disease. Among the maladies which the natives ascribe to the anger of ghosts are epilepsy, fainting fits, and wasting decline.[419] When a man suffers from a sore which he believes to have been inflicted on him by a ghost, he will take a stone from the fence of the grave and heat it in the fire, saying: "Father, see, thou hast gone, I am left, I must till the land in thy stead and care for my brothers and sisters. Do me good again." Then he dips the hot stone in a puddle on the grave, and holds his sore in the steam which rises from it. His pain is eased thereby and he explains the alleviation which he feels by saying, "The spirit of the dead man has eaten up the wound."[420]

[Sidenote: Sickness and death often ascribed by the Bukaua to sorcery.]

But like most savages the Bukaua attribute many illnesses and many deaths not to the wrath of ghosts but to the malignant arts of sorcerers; and in such cases they usually endeavour by means of divination to ascertain the culprit and to avenge the death of their friend by taking the life of his imaginary murderer.[421] If they fail to exact vengeance, the ghost is believed to be very angry, and they must be on their guard against him. He may meet them anywhere, but is especially apt to dog the footsteps of the sorcerer who killed him. Hence when on the occasion of a great feast the sorcerer comes to the village of his victim, the surviving relatives of the dead man are at particular pains to protect themselves and their property against the insidious attacks of the prowling ghost. For this purpose they bury a creeper with white blossoms in the path leading to the village; the ghost is thought to be filled with fear at the sight of it and to turn back, leaving his kinsfolk, their dogs, and pigs in peace.[422]

[Sidenote: Fear of the ghosts of the slain.]

Another class of ghosts who are much dreaded are the spirits of slain foes. They are believed to pursue their slayers to the village and to blind them so that sooner or later they fall an easy prey to their enemies. Hence when a party of warriors has returned home from a successful attack on a village, in which they have butchered all on whom they could lay their hands, they kindle a great fire, dance wildly about it, and hurl burning brands in the direction of the battlefield in order to keep the ghosts of their slaughtered foes at bay. Phosphorescent lights seen under the houses throw the inmates into great alarm, for they are thought to be the souls of the slain. Sometimes the vanquished in battle resort to a curious ruse for the purpose of avenging themselves on the victors by means of a ghost. They take the sleeping-mat of one of the slain, roll it up in a bundle along with his loin-cloth, apron, netted bag, or head-rest, and give the bundle to two cripples to carry. Then they steal quietly to the landing-place of their foes, peering warily about lest they should be observed. The bundle represents the dead man, and the cripples who carry it reel to and fro, and finally sink to the ground with their burden. In this way the ghost of the victim, whose things are carried in the bundle, is supposed to make their enemies weak and tottery. Strong young men are not given the bundle to carry, lest the ghost should spoil their manly figures; whereas if he should wound or maim a couple of poor cripples, no great harm is done.[423]

[Sidenote: Ghosts of ancestors appealed to for help, especially in the cultivation of the ground. First-fruits offered to the spirits of the dead.]

However, the Bukaua also look on the ghosts of their ancestors in a more amiable light as beings who, if properly appealed to, can and will help them in the affairs of life, especially by procuring for them good crops. Hence when they are planting their fields, which are formed in clearings of the forest, they take particular care to insert shoots of all their crops in the ground near the tree stumps which remain standing, because the souls of their dead grandfathers and great-grandfathers are believed to be sitting on the stumps watching their descendants at their work. Accordingly in the act of planting they call out the names of these forefathers and pray them to guard the field in order that their living children may have food and not suffer from hunger. And at harvest, when the first-fruits of the taro, bananas, sugar-cane, and so forth have been brought back from the fields, a portion of them is offered in a bowl to the spirits of the forefathers in the house of the landowner, and the spirits are addressed in prayer as follows: "O ye who have guarded our field as we prayed you to do, there is something for you; now and henceforth behold us with favour." While the family are feasting on the rest of the first-fruits, the householder will surreptitiously stir the offerings in the bowl with his finger, and will then shew the bowl to the others as a proof that the souls of the dead have really partaken of the good things provided for them.[424] A hunter will also pray to his dead father to drive the wild pigs into his net.[425]

[Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs of the Bukaua.]

The Bukaua bury their dead in shallow graves, which are sometimes dug under the houses but more usually in front of or beside them. Along with the corpses are deposited bags of taro, nuts, drinking-vessels, and other articles of daily use. Only the stone axes are too valuable to be thus sacrificed. Over the grave is erected a rude hut in which the widower, if the deceased was a married woman, remains for a time in seclusion. A widow on the death of her husband remains in the house. Widow and widower may not shew themselves in public until they have prepared their mourning costume. The widower wears a black hat made of bark, cords round his neck, wicker work on his arms and feet, and a torn old bracelet of his wife in a bag on his breast. A widow is completely swathed in nets, one over the other, and she carries about with her the loincloth of her deceased husband. The souls of the dead dwell in a subterranean region called lamboam, and their life there seems to resemble life here on earth; but the ideas of the people on the subject are very vague.[426]

[Sidenote: Initiation of young men among the Bukaua. Lads at circumcision supposed to be swallowed by a monster.]

The customs and beliefs of the Bukaua in regard to the initiation of young men are practically identical with those of their neighbours the Yabim. Indeed the initiatory ceremonies are performed by the tribes jointly, now in the territory of the Bukaua, now in the territory of the Yabim, or in the land of the Kai, a tribe of mountaineers, or again in the neighbouring Tami islands. The intervals between the ceremonies vary from ten to eighteen years.[427] The central feature of the initiatory rites is the circumcision of the novices. It is given out that the lads are swallowed by a ferocious monster called a balum, who, however, is induced by the sacrifice of many pigs to vomit them up again. In spewing them out of his maw he bites or scratches them, and the wound so inflicted is circumcision. This explanation of the rite is fobbed off on the women, who more or less believe it and weep accordingly when their sons are led away to be committed to the monster's jaws. And when the time for the ceremony is approaching, the fond mothers busy themselves with rearing and fattening young pigs, so that they may be able with them to redeem their loved ones from the belly of the ravenous beast; for he must have a pig for every boy. When a lad bleeds to death from the effect of the operation, he is secretly buried, and his sorrowful mother is told that the monster swallowed him and refused to bring him up again. What really happens is that the youths are shut up for several months in a house specially built for the purpose in the village. During their seclusion they are under the charge of guardians, usually two young men, and must observe strictly a rule of fasting and chastity. When they are judged to be ready to undergo the rite, they are led forth and circumcised in front of the house amid a prodigious uproar made by the swinging of bull-roarers. The noise is supposed to be the voice of the monster who swallows and vomits up the novice at circumcision. The bull-roarer as well as the monster bears the name of balum, and the building in which the novices are lodged before and after the operation is called the monster's house (balumslum). After they have been circumcised the lads remain in the house for several months till their wounds are healed; then, painted and bedizened with all the ornaments that can be collected, they are brought back and restored to their joyful mothers. Women must vacate the village for a long time while the initiatory ceremonies are being performed.[428]

[Sidenote: Novices at circumcision supposed to be killed and then restored to a new and higher life.]

The meaning of the whole rite, as I pointed out in dealing with the similar initiatory rite of the Yabim, appears to be that the novices are killed and then restored to a new and better life; for after their initiation they rank no longer as boys but as full-grown men, entitled to all the privileges of manhood and citizenship, if we can speak of such a thing as citizenship among the savages of New Guinea. This interpretation of the rite is supported by the notable fact that the Bukaua, like the Yabim, give the name of balum to the souls of the dead as well as to the mythical monster and to the bull-roarer; this shews how intimately the three things are associated in their minds. Indeed not only is the bull-roarer in general associated with the souls of the dead by a community of name, but among the Bukaua each particular bull-roarer bears in addition the name of a particular dead man and varies in dignity and importance with the dignity and importance of the deceased person whom it represents. The most venerated of all are curiously carved and have been handed down for generations; they bear the names of famous warriors or magicians of old and are supposed to reproduce the personal peculiarities of the celebrated originals in their shape and tones. And there are smaller bull-roarers which emit shriller notes and are thought to represent the shrill-voiced wives of the ancient heroes.[429]

[Sidenote: The Kai tribe of Saddle Mountain in German New Guinea. The land of the Kai. Their mode of cultivation. Their villages.]

The Bukaua and the Yabim, the two tribes with which I have been dealing in this and the last lecture, inhabit, as I have said, the coast about Finsch Harbour and speak a Melanesian language. We now pass from them to the consideration of another people, belonging to a different stock and speaking a different language, who inhabit the rugged and densely wooded mountains inland from Finsch Harbour. Their neighbours on the coast call these mountaineers by the name of Kai, a word which signifies forest or inland in opposition to the seashore; and this name of the tribe we may adopt, following the example of a German missionary, Mr. Ch. Keysser, who has laboured among them for more than eleven years and has given us an excellent description of their customs and beliefs. His account applies particularly to the natives of what is called Saddle Mountain, the part of the range which advances nearest to the coast and rises to the height of about three thousand feet. It is a rough, broken country, cleft by many ravines and covered with forest, bush, or bamboo thickets; though here and there at rare intervals some brown patches mark the clearings which the sparse inhabitants have made for the purpose of cultivation. Water is plentiful. Springs gush forth everywhere in the glens and valleys, and rushing streams of crystal-clear water pour down the mountain sides, and in the clefts of the hills are lonely tarns, the undisturbed haunts of wild ducks and other water fowl. During the wet season, which extends from June to August, the rain descends in sheets and the mountains are sometimes covered for weeks together with so thick a mist that all prospect is cut off at the distance of a hundred yards. The natives are then loth to leave their huts and will spend the day crouching over a fire. They are a shorter and sturdier race than the tribes on the coast; the expression of their face is less frank and agreeable, and their persons are very much dirtier. They belong to the aboriginal Papuan stock, whereas the Yabim and Bukaua on the coast are probably immigrants from beyond the sea, who have driven the indigenous population back into the mountains.[430] Their staple foods are taro and yams, which they grow in their fields. A field is cultivated for only one year at a time; it is then allowed to lie fallow and is soon overgrown with rank underwood. Six or eight years may elapse before it is again cleared and brought under cultivation. Game and fish abound in the woods and waters, and the Kai make free use of these natural resources. They keep pigs and dogs, and eat the flesh of both. Pork is indeed a favourite viand, figuring largely in the banquets which are held at the circumcision festivals.[431] The people live in small villages, each village comprising from two to six houses. The houses are raised on piles and the walls are usually constructed of pandanus leaves, though many natives now make them of boards. After eighteen months or two years the houses are so rotten and tumble-down that the village is deserted and a new one built on another site. Assembly-houses are erected only for the circumcision ceremonies, and the bull-roarers used on these occasions are kept in them. Husband and wife live together, often two couples in one hut; but each family has its own side of the house and its own fireplace. In times of insecurity the Kai used to build their huts for safety among the spreading boughs of great trees. A whole village, consisting of three or four huts, might thus be quartered on a single tree. Of late years, with the peace and protection for life introduced by German rule, these tree-houses have gone out of fashion.[432]

[Sidenote: Observations of a German missionary on the animistic beliefs of the Kai.]

After describing the manners and customs of the Kai people at some length, the German missionary, who knows them intimately, proceeds to give us a very valuable account of their old native religion or superstition. He prefaces his account with some observations, the fruit of long experience, which deserve to be laid to heart by all who attempt to penetrate into the inner life, the thoughts, the feelings, the motives of savages. As his remarks are very germane to the subject of these lectures, I will translate them. He says: "In the preceding chapters I have sketched the daily life of the Kai people. But I have not attempted to set forth the reasons for their conduct, which is often very peculiar and unintelligible. The explanation of that conduct lies in the animistic view which the Papuan takes of the world. It must be most emphatically affirmed that nobody can judge the native aright who has not gained an insight into what we may call his religious opinions. The native must be described as very religious, although his ideas do not coincide with ours. His feelings, thoughts, and will are most intimately connected with his belief in souls. With that belief he is born, he has sucked it in with his mother's milk, and from the standpoint of that belief he regards the things and occurrences that meet him in life; by that belief he regulates his behaviour. An objective way of looking at events is unknown to him; everything is brought by him into relation to his belief, and by it he seeks to explain everything that to him seems strange and rare."[433] "The labyrinth of animistic customs at first sight presents an appearance of wild confusion to him who seeks to penetrate into them and reduce them to order; but on closer inspection he will soon recognise certain guiding lines. These guiding lines are the laws of animism, which have passed into the flesh and blood of the Papuan and influence his thought and speech, his acts and his omissions, his love and hate, in short his whole life and death. When once we have discovered these laws, the whole of the superstitious nonsense falls into an orderly system which compels us to regard it with a certain respect that increases in proportion to the contempt in which we had previously held the people. We need not wonder, moreover, that the laws of animism partially correspond to general laws of nature."[434]

[Sidenote: The essential rationality of the savage.]

Thus according to Mr. Keysser, who has no theory to maintain and merely gives us in this passage the result of long personal observation, the Kai savages are thinking, reasoning men, whose conduct, however strange and at first sight unintelligible it may appear to us, is really based on a definite religious or if you please superstitious view of the world. It is true that their theory as well as their practice differs widely from ours; but it would be false and unjust to deny that they have a theory and that on the whole their practice squares with it. Similar testimony is borne to other savage races by men who have lived long among them and observed them closely;[435] and on the strength of such testimony I think we may lay it down as a well-established truth that savages in general, so far as they are known to us, have certain more or less definite theories, whether we call them religious or philosophical, by which they regulate their conduct, and judged by which their acts, however absurd they may seem to the civilised man, are really both rational and intelligible. Hence it is, in my opinion, a profound mistake hastily to conclude that because the behaviour of the savage does not agree with our notions of what is reasonable, natural, and proper, it must therefore necessarily be illogical, the result of blind impulse rather than of deliberate thought and calculation. No doubt the savage like the civilised man does often act purely on impulse; his passions overmaster his reason, and sweep it away before them. He is probably indeed much more impulsive, much more liable to be whirled about by gusts of emotion than we are; yet it would be unfair to judge his life as a whole by these occasional outbursts rather than by its general tenour, which to those who know him from long observation reveals a groundwork of logic and reason resembling our own in its operations, though differing from ours in the premises from which it sets out. I think it desirable to emphasise the rational basis of savage life because it has been the fashion of late years with some writers to question or rather deny it. According to them, if I understand them aright, the savage acts first and invents his reasons, generally very absurd reasons, for so doing afterwards. Significantly enough, the writers who argue in favour of the essential irrationality of savage conduct have none of them, I believe, any personal acquaintance with savages. Their conclusions are based not on observation but on purely theoretical deductions, a most precarious foundation on which to erect a science of man or indeed of anything. As such, they cannot be weighed in the balance against the positive testimony of many witnesses who have lived for years with the savage and affirm emphatically the logical basis which underlies and explains his seeming vagaries. At all events I for one have no hesitation in accepting the evidence of such men to matters of fact with which they are acquainted, and I unhesitatingly reject all theories which directly contradict that evidence. If there ever has been any race of men who invariably acted first and thought afterwards, I can only say that in the course of my reading and observation I have never met with any trace of them, and I am apt to suppose that, if they ever existed anywhere but in the imagination of bookish dreamers, their career must have been an exceedingly short one, since in the struggle for existence they would surely succumb to adversaries who tempered and directed the blind fury of combat with at least a modicum of reason and sense. The myth of the illogical or prelogical savage may safely be relegated to that museum of learned absurdities and abortions which speculative anthropology is constantly enriching with fresh specimens of misapplied ingenuity and wasted industry. But enough of these fantasies. Let us return to facts.

[Sidenote: The Kai theory of the soul.]

The life of the Kai people, according to Mr. Keysser, is dominated by their conception of the soul. That conception differs greatly from and is very much more extensive than ours. The Kai regards his reflection and his shadow as his soul or parts of it; hence you should not tread on a man's shadow for fear of injuring his soul. The soul likewise dwells in his heart, for he feels it beating. Hence if you give a native a friendly poke in the ribs, he protests, saying, "Don't poke me so; you might drive my soul out of my body, and then I should die." The soul moreover resides in the eye, where you may see it twinkling; when it departs, the eye grows dim and vacant. Moreover, the soul is in the foot as much as in the head; it lurks even in the spittle and the other bodily excretions. The soul in fact pervades the body just as warmth does; everything that a man touches he infects, so to say, with his soul; that mysterious entity exists in the very sound of his voice. The sorcerer catches a man's soul by his magic, shuts it up tight, and destroys it. Then the man dies. He dies because the sorcerer has killed his soul. Yet the Kai believes, whether consistently or not, that the soul of the dead man continues to live. He talks to it, he makes offerings to it, he seeks to win its favour in order that he may have luck in the chase; he fears its ill-will and anger; he gives it food to eat, liquor to drink, tobacco to smoke, and betel to chew. What could a reasonable ghost ask for more?[436]

[Sidenote: Two kinds of human souls.]

Thus, according to Mr. Keysser, whose exposition I am simply reproducing, the Kai believes not in one nor yet in many souls belonging to each individual; he implicitly assumes that there are two different kinds of souls. One of these is the soul which survives the body at death; in all respects it resembles the man himself as he lived on earth, except that it has no body. It is not indeed absolutely incorporeal, but it is greatly shrunken and attenuated by death. That is why the souls of the dead are so angry with the living; they repine at their own degraded condition; they envy the full-blooded life which the living enjoy and which the dead have lost. The second kind of soul is distinguished by Mr. Keysser from the former as a spiritual essence or soul-stuff, which pervades the body as sap pervades the tree, and which diffuses itself like corporeal warmth over everything with which the body is brought into contact.[437] In these lectures we are concerned chiefly with the former kind of soul, which is believed to survive the death of the body, and which answers much more nearly than the second to the popular European conception of the soul. Accordingly in what follows we shall confine our attention mainly to it.

[Sidenote: Death thought by the Kai to be commonly caused by sorcery.]

Like many other savages, the Kai do not believe in the possibility of a natural death; they think that everybody dies through the maleficent arts of sorcerers or ghosts. Even in the case of old people, we are told, they assume the cause of death to be sorcery, and to sorcery all misfortunes are ascribed. If a man falls on the path and wounds himself to death, as often happens, on the jagged stump of a bamboo, the natives conclude that he was bewitched. The way in which the sorcerer brought about the catastrophe was this. He obtained some object which was infected with the soul-stuff or spiritual essence of his victim; he stuck a pile in the ground, he spread the soul-stuff on the pile; then he pretended to wound himself on the pile and to groan with pain. Anybody can see for himself that by a natural and necessary concatenation of causes this compelled the poor fellow to stumble over that jagged bamboo stump and to perish miserably. Again, take the case of a hunter in the forest who is charged and ripped up by a wild boar. On a superficial view of the circumstances it might perhaps occur to you that the cause of death was the boar. But you would assuredly be mistaken. The real cause of death was again a sorcerer, who pounded up the soul-stuff of his victim with a boar's tooth. Again, suppose that a man is bitten by a serpent and dies. A shallow rationalist might say that the man died of the bite; but the Kai knows better. He is aware that what really killed him was the sorcerer who took a pinch of his victim's soul and bunged it up tight in a tube along with the sting of a snake. Similarly, if a woman dies in childbed, or if a man hangs himself, the cause of death is still a sorcerer operating with the appropriate means and gestures. Thus to make a man hang himself all that the sorcerer has to do is to get a scrap of his victim's soul—and the smallest scrap is quite enough for his purpose, it may be a mere shred or speck of soul adhering to a hair of the man's head, to a drop of his sweat, or to a crumb of his food,—I say that the sorcerer need only obtain a tiny little bit of his victim's soul, clap it in a tube, set the tube dangling at the end of a string, and go through a pantomime of gurgling, goggling and so forth, like a man in the last stage of strangulation, and his victim is thereby physically compelled to put his neck in the noose and hang himself in good earnest.[438]

[Sidenote: Danger incurred by the sorcerer.]

Where these views of sorcery prevail, it is no wonder that the sorcerer is an unpopular character. He naturally therefore shrinks from publicity and hides his somewhat lurid light under a bushel. Not to put too fine a point on it, he carries his life in his hand and may be knocked on the head at any moment without the tedious formality of a trial. Once his professional reputation is established, all the deaths in the neighbourhood may be set down at his door. If he gets wind of a plot to assassinate him, he may stave off his doom for a while by soothing the angry passions of his enemies with presents, but sooner or later his fate is sealed.[439]

[Sidenote: Many hurts and maladies attributed by the Kai to the action of ghosts. In other cases the sickness is traced to witchcraft. Capturing a lost soul.]

However, the Kai savage is far from attributing all deaths without distinction to sorcerers.[440] In many hurts and maladies he detects the cold clammy hand of a ghost. If a man, for example, wounds himself in the forest, perhaps in the pursuit of a wild beast, he may imagine that he has been speared or clubbed by a malignant ghost. And when a person falls ill, the first thing to do is naturally to ascertain the cause of the illness in order that it may be treated properly. In all such enquiries, Mr. Keysser tells us, suspicion first falls on the ghosts; they are looked upon as even worse than the sorcerers.[441] So when a doctor is called in to see a patient, the only question with him is whether the sickness is caused by a sorcerer or a ghost. To decide this nice point he takes a boiled taro over which he has pronounced a charm. This he bites, and if he finds a small stone in the fruit, he decides that ghosts are the cause of the malady; but if on the other hand he detects a minute roll of leaves, he knows that the sufferer is bewitched. In the latter case the obvious remedy is to discover the sorcerer and to induce him, for an adequate consideration, to give up the magic tube in which he has bottled up a portion of the sick man's soul. If, however, the magician turns a deaf ear alike to the voice of pity and the allurement of gain, the resources of the physician are not yet exhausted. He now produces his whip or scourge for souls. This valuable instrument consists, like a common whip, of a handle with a lash attached to it, but what gives it the peculiar qualities which distinguish it from all other whips is a small packet tied to the end of the lash. The packet contains a certain herb, and the sick man and his friends must all touch it in order to impregnate it with the volatile essence of their souls. Armed with this potent implement the doctor goes by night into the depth of the forest; for the darkness of night and the solitude of the woods are necessary for the success of the delicate operation which this good physician of souls has now to perform. Finding himself alone he whistles for the lost soul of the sufferer, and if only the sorcerer by his infernal craft has not yet brought it to death's door, the soul appears at the sound of the whistle; for it is strongly attracted by the soul-stuff of its friends in the packet. But the doctor has still to catch it, a feat which is not so easily accomplished as might be supposed. It is now that the whip of souls comes into play. Suddenly the doctor heaves up his arm and lashes out at the truant soul with all his might. If only he hits it, the business is done, the soul is captured, the doctor carries it back to the house in triumph, and restores it to the body of the poor sick man, who necessarily recovers.[442]

[Sidenote: Extracting ghosts from a sick man.]

But suppose that the result of the diagnosis is different, and that on mature consideration the doctor should decide that a ghost and not a sorcerer is at the bottom of the mischief. The question then naturally arises whether the sick man has not of late been straying on haunted ground and infected himself with the very dangerous soul-stuff or spiritual essence of the dead. If he remembers to have done so, some leaves are fetched from the place in the forest where the mishap occurred, and with them the whole body of the sufferer or the wound, as the case may be, is stroked or brushed down. The healing virtue of this procedure is obvious. The ghosts who are vexing the patient are attracted by the familiar smell of the leaves which come from their old home; and yielding in a moment of weakness to the soft emotions excited by the perfume they creep out of the body of the sick man and into the leaves. Quick as thought the doctor now whisks the leaves away with the ghosts in them; he belabours them with a cudgel, he hangs them up in the smoke, or he throws them into the fire. Such powerful disinfectants have their natural results; if the ghosts are not absolutely destroyed they are at least disarmed, and the sick is made whole.

[Sidenote: Scraping ghosts from the patient's body.]

Another equally effective cure for sickness caused by ghosts is this. You take a stout stick, cleave it down the middle so that the two ends remain entire, and give it to two men to hold. Then the sick man pokes his head through the cleft; after that you rub him with the stick from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. In this way you obviously scrape off the bloodsucking ghosts who are clinging like flies or mosquitoes to his person, and having thus transferred them to the cleft stick you throw it away or otherwise destroy it. The cure is now complete, and if the patient does not recover, he cannot reasonably blame the doctor, who has done all that humanly speaking could be done to bring back the bloom of health to the poor sick man.[443]

[Sidenote: Extravagant demonstrations of grief at the death of a sick man.]

If, however, the sick man obstinately persists in dying, there is a great uproar in the village. For the fear of his ghost has now fallen like a thunderclap on all the people. His disembodied spirit is believed to be hovering in the air, seeing everything that is done, hearing every word that is spoken, and woe to the unlucky wight who does not display a proper degree of sorrow for the irreparable loss that has just befallen the community. Accordingly shrieks of despair begin to resound, and crocodile tears to flow in cataracts. The whole population assemble and give themselves up to the most frantic demonstrations of grief. Cries are raised on all sides, "Why must he die?" "Wherefore did they bewitch him?" "Those wicked, wicked men!" "I'll do for them!" "I'll hew them in pieces!" "I'll destroy their crops!" "I'll fell all their palm-trees!" "I'll stick all their pigs!" "O brother, why did you leave me?" "O friend, how can I live without you?" To make good these threats one man will be seen prancing wildly about and stabbing with a spear at the invisible sorcerers; another catches up a cudgel and at one blow shivers a water-pot of the deceased into atoms, or rushes out like one demented and lays a palm-tree level with the ground. Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break. They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. They coo to him softly, they lift up the languid head, and then lay it gently down. Then in a frenzy of grief one of them will leap to his feet, shriek, bellow, stamp on the floor, grapple with the roof beams, shake the walls, as if he would pull the house down, and finally hurl himself on the ground and roll over and over howling as if his distress was more than he could endure. Another looks wildly about him. He sees a knife. He grasps it. His teeth are set, his mind is made up. "Why need he die?" he cries, "he, my friend, with whom I had all things in common, with whom I ate out of the same dish?" Then there is a quick movement of the knife, and down he falls. But he is not dead. He has only slit the flap of one of his ears, and the trickling blood bedabbles his body. Meantime with the hoarse cries of the men are mingled the weeping and wailing, the shrill screams and lamentations of the women; while above all the din and uproar rises the booming sound of the shell trumpets blown to carry the tidings of death to all the villages in the neighbourhood. But gradually the wild tumult dies away into silence. Grief or the simulation of it has exhausted itself: the people grow calm; they sit down, they smoke or chew betel, while some engage in the last offices of attention to the dead.[444]

[Sidenote: Hypocritical character of these demonstrations, which are intended to deceive the ghost.]

A civilised observer who witnessed such a scene of boisterous lamentation, but did not know the natives well, might naturally set down all these frantic outbursts to genuine sorrow, and might enlarge accordingly on the affectionate nature of savages, who are thus cut to the heart by the death of any one of their acquaintance. But the missionary who knows them better assures us that most of these expressions of mourning and despair are a mere blind to deceive and soothe the dreaded ghost of the deceased into a comfortable persuasion that he is fondly loved and sadly missed by his surviving relatives and friends. This view of the essential hypocrisy of the lamentations is strongly confirmed by the threats which sick people will sometimes utter to their attendants. "If you don't take better care of me," a man will sometimes say, "and if you don't do everything you possibly can to preserve my valuable life, my ghost will serve you out." That is why friends and relations are so punctilious in paying visits of respect and condolence to the sick. Sometimes the last request which a dying man addresses to his kinsfolk is that they will kill this or that sorcerer who has killed him; and he enforces the injunction by threats of the terrible things he will do to them in his disembodied state if they fail to avenge his death on his imaginary murderer. As all the relatives of a dead man stand in fear of his ghost, the body may not be buried until all of them have had an opportunity of paying their respects to it. If, as sometimes happens, a corpse is interred before a relative can arrive from a distance, he will on arrival break out into reproaches and upbraidings against the grave-diggers for exposing him to the wrath of the departed spirit.[445]

[Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs of the Kai. Preservation of the lower jawbone.]

When all the relations and friends have assembled and testified their sorrow, the body is buried on the second or third day after death. The grave is usually dug under the house and is so shallow that even when it has been closed the stench is often very perceptible. The ornaments which were placed on the body when it was laid out are removed before it is lowered into the grave, and the dead takes his last rest wrapt in a simple leaf-mat. Often a dying man expresses a wish not to be buried. In that case his corpse, tightly bandaged, is deposited in a corner of the house, and the products of decomposition are allowed to drain through a tube into the ground. When they have ceased to run, the bundle is opened and the bones taken out and buried, except the lower jawbone, which is preserved, sometimes along with one of the lower arm bones. The lower jawbone reminds the possessor of the duty of blood revenge which he owes to the deceased, and which the dying man may have inculcated on him with his last breath. The lower arm bone brings luck in the chase, especially if the departed relative was a mighty hunter. However, if the hunters have a long run of bad luck, they conclude that the ghost has departed to the under world and accordingly bury the lower arm bone and the lower jawbone with the rest of the skeleton. The length of the period of mourning is similarly determined by the good or bad fortune of the huntsmen. If the ghost provides them with game in abundance for a long time after his death, the days of mourning are proportionately extended; but when the game grows scarce or fails altogether, the mourning comes to an end and the memory of the deceased soon fades away.[446] The savage is a thoroughly practical man and is not such a fool as to waste his sorrow over a ghost who gives him nothing in return. Nothing for nothing is his principle. His relations to the dead stand on a strictly commercial basis.

[Sidenote: Mourning costume. Widows strangled to accompany their dead husbands.]

The mourning costume consists of strings round the neck, bracelets of reed on the arms, and a cylindrical hat of bark on the head. A widow is swathed in nets. The intention of the costume is to signify to the ghost the sympathy which the mourner feels for him in his disembodied state. If the man in his lifetime was wont to crouch shivering over the fire, a little fire will be kept up for a time at the foot of the grave in order to warm his homeless spirit.[447] The widow or widower has to discharge the disagreeable duty of living day and night for several weeks in a hovel built directly over the grave. Not unfrequently the lot of a widow is much harder. At her own request she is sometimes strangled and buried with her husband in the grave, in order that her soul may accompany his on the journey to the other world. The other relations have no interest in encouraging the woman to sacrifice herself, rather the contrary; but if she insists they fear to balk her, lest they should offend the ghost of her husband, who would punish them in many ways for keeping his wife from him. But even such voluntary sacrifices, if we may believe Mr. Ch. Keysser, are dictated rather by a selfish calculation than by an impulse of disinterested affection. He mentions the case of a man named Jabu, both of whose wives chose thus to attend their husband in death. The deceased was an industrious man, a skilful hunter and farmer, who provided his wives with abundance of food. As such men are believed to work hard also in the other world, tilling fields and killing game just as here, the widows thought they could not do better than follow him as fast as possible to the spirit land, since they had no prospect of getting such another husband here on earth. "How firmly convinced," adds the missionary admiringly, "must these people be of the reality of another world when they sacrifice their earthly existence, not for the sake of a better life hereafter, but merely in order to be no worse off there than they have been on earth." And he adds that this consideration explains why no man ever chooses to be strangled at the death of his wife. The labour market in the better land is apparently not recruited from the ranks of women.[448]

[Sidenote: House or village deserted after a death.]

The house in which anybody has died is deserted, because the ghost of the dead is believed to haunt it and make it unsafe at night. If the deceased was a chief or a man of importance, the whole village is abandoned and a new one built on another site.[449]

[Footnote 415: Stefan Lehner, "Bukaua," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. (Berlin, 1911) pp. 395-485.]

[Footnote 416: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 399, 433 sq., 437 sqq.]

[Footnote 417: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 399.]

[Footnote 418: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 414.]

[Footnote 419: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 466, 468.]

[Footnote 420: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 469.]

[Footnote 421: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 462 sqq., 466, 467, 471 sqq.]

[Footnote 422: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 462.]

[Footnote 423: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 444 sq.]

[Footnote 424: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 434 sqq.; compare id., pp. 478 sq.]

[Footnote 425: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 462.]

[Footnote 426: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 430, 470, 472 sq., 474 sq.]

[Footnote 427: S. Lehner, op. cit. p. 403.]

[Footnote 428: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 402-410.]

[Footnote 429: S. Lehner, op. cit. pp. 410-414.]

[Footnote 430: Ch. Keysser, "Aus dem Leben der Kaileute," in R. Neuhauss's Deutsch Neu-Guinea, iii. 3-6.]

[Footnote 431: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 12 sq., 17-20.]

[Footnote 432: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 9-12.]

[Footnote 433: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 111.]

[Footnote 434: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 113.]

[Footnote 435: Compare Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (London, 1912), ii. 221 sq.: "It has often been attempted to exhibit the mental life of savage peoples as profoundly different from our own; to assert that they act from motives, and reach conclusions by means of mental processes, so utterly different from our own motives and processes that we cannot hope to interpret or understand their behaviour unless we can first, by some impossible or at least by some hitherto undiscovered method, learn the nature of these mysterious motives and processes. These attempts have recently been renewed in influential quarters. If these views were applied to the savage peoples of the interior of Borneo, we should characterise them as fanciful delusions natural to the anthropologist who has spent all the days of his life in a stiff collar and a black coat upon the well-paved ways of civilised society. We have no hesitation in saying that, the more intimately one becomes acquainted with these pagan tribes, the more fully one realises the close similarity of their mental processes to one's own. Their primary impulses and emotions seem to be in all respects like our own. It is true that they are very unlike the typical civilised man of some of the older philosophers, whose every action proceeded from a nice and logical calculation of the algebraic sum of pleasures and pains to be derived from alternative lines of conduct; but we ourselves are equally unlike that purely mythical personage. The Kayan or the Iban often acts impulsively in ways which by no means conduce to further his best interests or deeper purposes; but so do we also. He often reaches conclusions by processes that cannot be logically justified; but so do we also. He often holds, and upon successive occasions acts upon, beliefs that are logically inconsistent with one another; but so do we also." For further testimonies to the reasoning powers of savages, which it would be superfluous to affirm if it were not at present a fashion with some theorists to deny, see Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, pp. 420 sqq. And on the tendency of the human mind in general, not of the savage mind in particular, calmly to acquiesce in inconsistent and even contradictory conclusions, I may refer to a note in Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Second Edition, p. 4. But indeed to observe such contradictions in practice the philosopher need not quit his own study.]

[Footnote 436: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 111 sq.]

[Footnote 437: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 112.]

[Footnote 438: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 140. As to the magical tubes in which the sorcerer seals up some part of his victim's soul, see id., p. 135.]

[Footnote 439: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 140 sq.]

[Footnote 440: Mr. Keysser indeed affirms that in the mind of the Kai sorcery "is regarded as the cause of all deaths" (op. cit. p. 102), and again that "all men without exception die in consequence of the baneful acts of these sorcerers and their accomplices" (p. 134); and again that "even in the case of old people they assume sorcery to be the cause of death; to sorcery, too, all misfortunes whatever are ascribed" (p. 140). But that these statements are exaggerations seems to follow from Mr. Keysser's own account of the wounds, sicknesses, and deaths which these savages attribute to ghosts and not to sorcerers.]

[Footnote 441: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 141.]

[Footnote 442: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 133 sq.]

[Footnote 443: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 141 sq.]

[Footnote 444: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 80 sq., 142.]

[Footnote 445: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 142.]

[Footnote 446: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 82, 83.]

[Footnote 447: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 82, 142 sq.]

[Footnote 448: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. pp. 83 sq., 143.]

[Footnote 449: Ch. Keysser, op. cit. p. 83.]



LECTURE XIII

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA (continued)

[Sidenote: Offerings to appease ghosts.]

In the last lecture I gave you some account of the fear and awe which the Kai of German New Guinea entertain for the spirits of the dead. Believing that the ghost is endowed with all the qualities and faculties which distinguished the man in his lifetime, they naturally dread most the ghosts of warlike, cruel, violent, and passionate men, and take the greatest pains to soothe their anger and win their favour. For that purpose they give the departed spirit all sorts of things to take with him to the far country. And in order that he may have the use of them it is necessary to smash or otherwise spoil them. Thus the spear that is given him must be broken, the pot must be shivered, the bag must be torn, the palm-tree must be cut down. Fruits are offered to the ghost by dashing them in pieces or hanging a bunch of them over the grave. Objects of value, such as boars' tusks or dogs' teeth, are made over to him by being laid on the corpse; but the economical savage removes these precious things from the body at burial. All such offerings and sacrifices, we are told, are made simply out of fear of the ghost. It is no pleasure to a man to cut down a valuable palm-tree, which might have helped to nourish himself and his family for years; he does it only lest a worse thing should befall him at the hands of the departed spirit.[450]

[Sidenote: Mode of discovering the sorcerer who caused a death.]

But the greatest service that the Kai can render to a dead man is to take vengeance on the sorcerer who caused his death by witchcraft. The first thing is to discover the villain, and in the search for him the ghost obligingly assists his surviving kinsfolk. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to resort to a stratagem in order to secure his help. Thus, for example, one day while the ghost, blinded by the strong sunlight, is cowering in a dark corner or reposing at full length in the grave, his relatives will set up a low scaffold in a field, cover it with leaves, and pile up over it a mass of the field fruits which belonged to the dead man, so that the whole erection may appear to the eye of the unsuspecting ghost a heap of taro, yams, and so forth, and nothing more. But before the sun goes down, two or three men steal out from the house, and ensconce themselves under the scaffold, where they are completely concealed by the piled-up fruits. When darkness has fallen, out comes the ghost and prowling about espies the heap of yams and taro. At sight of the devastation wrought in his field he flies into a passion, and curses and swears in the feeble wheezy whisper in which ghosts always speak. In the course of his fluent imprecations he expresses a wish that the miscreants who have wasted his substance may suffer so and so at the hands of the sorcerer. That is just what the men in hiding have been waiting for. No sooner do they hear the name of the sorcerer than they jump up with a great shout; the startled ghost takes to his heels; and all the people in the village come pouring out of the houses. Very glad they are to know that the murderer has been found out, and sooner or later they will have his blood.[451]

[Sidenote: Another way of detecting the sorcerer.]

Another mode of eliciting the requisite information from the ghost is this. In order to allow him to communicate freely with his mouldering body, his relations insert a tube through the earth of the grave down to the corpse; then they sprinkle powdered lime on the grave. At night the ghost comes along, picks up the powdered lime, and makes off in a bee line for the village where the sorcerer who bewitched him resides. On the way he drops some of the powder here and there, so that next morning, on the principle of the paper-chase, his relatives can trace his footsteps to the very door of his murderer. In many districts the people tie a packet of lime to the knee of a corpse so that his ghost may have it to hand when he wants it.[452]

[Sidenote: Cross-questioning the ghost by means of fire.]

But the favourite way of cross-questioning the ghost on subject of his decease is by means of fire. A few men go out before nightfall from the village and sit down in a row, one behind the other, on the path. The man in front has a leaf-mat drawn like a hood over his head and back in order that the ghost may not touch him from behind unawares. In his hand he holds a glowing coal and some tinder, and as he puts the one to the other he calls to the ghost, "Come, take, take, take; come, take, take, take," and so on. Meantime his mates behind him are reckoning up the names of all the men near and far who are suspected of sorcery, and a portion of the village youth have clambered up trees and are on the look-out for the ghost. If they do not see his body they certainly see his eye twinkling in the gloom, though the uninstructed European might easily mistake it for a glow-worm. No sooner do they catch sight of it than they bawl out, "Come hither, fetch the fire, and burn him who burnt thee." If the tinder blazes up at the name of a sorcerer, it is flung towards the village where the man in question dwells. And if at the same time a glow-worm is seen to move in the same direction, the people entertain no doubt that the ghost has appeared and fetched the soul of the fire.[453]

[Sidenote: Necessity of destroying the sorcerer who caused a death.]

In whichever way the author of the death may be detected, the avengers of blood set out for the village of the miscreant and seek to take his life. Almost all the wars between villages or tribes spring from such expeditions. The sorcerer or sorcerers must be extirpated, nay all their kith and kin must be destroyed root and branch, if the people are to live in peace and quiet. The ghost of the dead calls, nay clamours for vengeance, and if he does not get it, he will wreak his spite on his negligent relations. Not only will he give them no luck in the chase, but he will drive the wild swine into the fields to trample down and root up the crops, and he will do them every mischief in his power. If rain does not fall, so that the freshly planted root crops wither; or if sickness is rife, the people recognise in the calamity the wrath of the ghost, who can only be appeased by the slaughter of the wicked magician or of somebody else. Hence the avengers of blood often do not set out until a fresh death, an outbreak of sickness, failure in the chase, or some other misfortune reminds the living of the duty they owe to the dead. The Kai is not by nature warlike, and he might never go to war if it were not that he dreads the vengeance of ghosts more than the wrath of men.[454]

[Sidenote: Slayers dread the ghosts of the slain.]

If the expedition has been successful, if the enemy's village has been surprised and stormed, the men and old women butchered, and the young women taken prisoners, the warriors beat a hasty retreat with their booty in order to be safe at home, or at least in the shelter of a friendly village, before nightfall. Their reason for haste is the fear of being overtaken in the darkness by the ghosts of their slaughtered foes, who, powerless by day, are very dangerous and terrible by night. Restlessly through the hours of darkness these unquiet spirits follow like sleuth-hounds in the tracks of their retreating enemies, eager to come up with them and by contact with the bloodstained weapons of their slayers to recover the spiritual substance which they have lost. Not till they have done so can they find rest and peace. That is why the victors are careful not at first to bring back their weapons into the village but to hide them somewhere in the bushes at a safe distance. There they leave them for some days until the baffled ghosts may be supposed to have given up the chase and returned, sad and angry, to their mangled bodies in the charred ruins of their old home. The first night after the return of the warriors is always the most anxious time; all the villagers are then on the alert for fear of the ghosts; but if the night passes quietly, their terror gradually subsides and gives place to the dread of their surviving enemies.[455]

[Sidenote: Seclusion of man-slayers from fear of their victims' ghosts.]

As the victors in a raid are supposed to have more or less of the soul-stuff or spiritual essence of their slain foes adhering to their persons, none of their friends will venture to touch them for some time after their return to the village. Everybody avoids them and goes carefully out of their way. If during this time any of the villagers suffers from a pain in his stomach, he thinks that he must have inadvertently sat down where one of the warriors had sat before him. If somebody endures the pangs of toothache, he makes sure that he must have eaten a fruit which had been touched by one of the slayers. All the refuse of the meals of these gallant men must be most carefully put away lest a pig should devour it; for if it did do so, the animal would certainly die, which would be a serious loss to the owner. Hence when the warriors have satisfied their hunger, any food that remains over is burnt or buried. The fighting men themselves are not very seriously incommoded, or at all events endangered, by the ghosts of their victims; for they have taken the precaution to disinfect themselves by the sap of a certain creeper, which, if it does not render them absolutely immune to ghostly influence, at least fortifies their constitution to a very considerable extent.[456]

[Sidenote: Feigned indignation of a man who has connived at the murder of a relative.]

Sometimes, instead of sending forth a band of warriors to ravage, burn, and slaughter the whole male population of the village in which the wicked sorcerer resides, the people of one village will come to a secret understanding with the people of the sorcerer's village to have the miscreant quietly put out of the way. A hint is given to the scoundrel's next of kin, it may be his brother, son, or nephew, that if he will only wink at the slaughter of his obnoxious relative, he will receive a handsome compensation from the slayers. Should he privately accept the offer, he is most careful to conceal his connivance at the deed of blood, lest he should draw down on his head the wrath of his murdered kinsman's ghost. So, when the deed is done and the murder is out, he works himself up into a state of virtuous sorrow and indignation, covers his head with the leaves of a certain plant, and chanting a dirge in tones of heart-rending grief, marches straight to the village of the murderers. There, on the public square, surrounded by an attentive audience, he opens the floodgates of his eloquence and pours forth the torrent of an aching heart. "You have slain my kinsman," says he, "you are wicked men! How could you kill so good a man, who conferred so many benefits on me in his lifetime? I knew nothing of the plot. Had I had an inkling of it, I would have foiled it. How can I now avenge his death? I have no property with which to hire men of war to go and punish his murderers. Yet in spite of everything my murdered kinsman will not believe in my innocence! He will be angry with me, he will pay me out, he will do me all the harm he can. Therefore do you declare openly whether I had any share whatever in his death, and come and strew lime on my head in order that he may convince himself of my innocence." This appeal of injured innocence meets with a ready response. The people dust the leaves on his head with powdered lime; and so, decorated with the white badge of spotless virtue, and enriched with a boar's tusk or other valuable object as the price of his compliance, he returns to his village with a conscience at peace with all the world, reflecting with satisfaction on the profitable transaction he has just concluded, and laughing in his sleeve at the poor deluded ghost of his murdered relative.[457]

[Sidenote: Comedy acted to deceive the ghost of a murdered kinsman.]

Sometimes the worthy soul who thus for a valuable consideration consents to waive all his personal feelings, will even carry his self-abnegation so far as to be present and look on at the murder of his kinsman. But true to his principles he will see to it that the thing is done decently and humanely. When the struggle is nearly over and the man is down, writhing on the ground with the murderers busy about him, his loving kinsman will not suffer them to take an unfair advantage of their superior numbers to cut him up alive with their knives, to chop him with their axes, or to smash him with their clubs. He will only allow them to stab him with their spears, repeating of course the stabs again and again till the victim ceases to writhe and quiver, and lies there dead as a stone. Then begins the real time of peril for the virtuous kinsman who has been a spectator and director of the scene; for the ghost of the murdered man has now deserted its mangled body, and, still blinded with blood and smarting with pain, might easily and even excusably misunderstand the situation. It is essential, therefore, in order to prevent a painful misapprehension, that the kinsman should at once and emphatically disclaim any part or parcel in the murder. This he accordingly does in language which leaves no room for doubt or ambiguity. He falls into a passion: he rails at the murderers: he proclaims his horror at their deed. All the way home he refuses to be comforted. He upbraids the assassins, he utters the most frightful threats against them; he rushes at them to snatch their weapons from them and dash them in pieces. But they easily wrench the weapons from his unresisting hands. For the whole thing is only a piece of acting. His sole intention is that the ghost may see and hear it all, and being convinced of the innocence of his dear kinsman may not punish him with bad crops, wounds, sickness, and other misfortunes. Even when he has reached the village, he keeps up the comedy for a time, raging, fretting and fuming at the irreparable loss he has sustained by the death of his lamented relative.[458]

[Sidenote: Pretence of avenging the ghost of a murdered sorcerer.]

Similarly when a chief has among his subjects a particular sorcerer whom he fears but with whom he is professedly on terms of friendship, he will sometimes engage a man to murder him. No sooner, however, is the murder perpetrated than the chief who bespoke it hastens in seeming indignation with a band of followers to the murderer's village. The assassin, of course, has got a hint of what is coming, and he and his friends take care not to be at home when the chief arrives on his mission of vengeance. Balked by the absence of their victim the avengers of blood breathe out fire and slaughter, but content themselves in fact with smashing an old pot or two, knocking down a deserted hut, and perhaps felling a banana-tree or a betel-palm. Having thus given the ghost of the murdered man an unequivocal proof of the sincerity of their friendship, they return quietly home.[459]

[Sidenote: The Kai afraid of ghosts.]

The habits of Kai ghosts are to some extent just the contrary of those of living men. They sleep by day and go about their business by night, when they frighten people and play them all kinds of tricks. Usually they appear in the form of animals. As light has the effect of blinding or at least dazzling them, they avoid everything bright, and hence it is easy to scare them away by means of fire. That is why no native will go even a short way in the dark without a bamboo torch. If it is absolutely necessary to go out by night, which he is very loth to do, he will hum and haw loudly before quitting the house so as to give notice to any lurking ghost that he is coming with a light, which allows the ghost to scuttle out of his way in good time. The people of a village live in terror above all so long as a corpse remains unburied in it; after nightfall nobody would then venture out of sight of the houses. When a troop of people go by night to a neighbouring village with flaring torches in their hands, nobody is willing to walk last on the path; they all huddle together for safety in the middle, till one man braver than the rest consents to act as rearguard. The rustling of a bush in the evening twilight startles them with the dread of some ghastly apparition; the sight of a pig in the gloaming is converted by their fears into the vision of a horrible spectre. If a man stumbles, it is because a ghost has pushed him, and he fancies he perceives the frightful thing in a tree-stump or any chance object. No wonder a Kai man fears ghosts, since he believes that the mere touch of one of them may be fatal. People who fall down in fits or in faints are supposed to have been touched by ghosts; and on coming to themselves they will tell their friends with the most solemn assurance how they felt the death-cold hand of the ghost on their body, and how a shudder ran through their whole frame at contact with the uncanny being.[460]

[Sidenote: Services rendered to the living by ghosts of the dead.]

But it would be a mistake to imagine that the ghosts of the dead are a source of danger, annoyance, and discomfort, and nothing more. That is not so. They may and do render the Kai the most material services in everyday life, particularly by promoting the supply of food both vegetable and animal. I have said that these practical savages stand towards their departed kinsfolk on a strictly commercial footing; and I will now illustrate the benefits which the Kai hope to receive from the ghosts in return for all the respect and attention lavished on them. In the first place, then, so long as a ghost remains in the neighbourhood of the village, it is expected of him that he shall make the crops thrive and neither tread them down himself nor allow wild pigs to do so. The expectation is reasonable, yet the conduct of the ghost does not always answer to it. Occasionally, whether out of sheer perverseness or simple absence of mind, he will sit down in a field; and wherever he does so, he makes a hollow where the fruits will not grow. Indeed any fruit that he even touches with his foot in passing, shrivels up. Where these things have happened, the people offer boiled taro and a few crabs to the ghosts to induce them to keep clear of the crops and to repose their weary limbs elsewhere than in the tilled fields.[461]

[Sidenote: Ghosts help Kai hunters to kill game.]

But the most important service which the dead render to the living is the good luck which they vouchsafe to hunters. Hence in order to assure himself of the favour of the dead the hunter hangs his nets on a grave before he uses them. If a man was a good and successful hunter in his lifetime, his ghost will naturally be more than usually able to assist his brethren in the craft after his death. For that reason when such a man has just died, the people, to adopt a familiar proverb, hasten to make hay while the sun shines by hunting very frequently, in the confident expectation of receiving ghostly help from the deceased hunter. In the evening, when they return from the chase, they lay a small portion of their bag near his grave, scatter a powder which possesses the special virtue of attracting ghosts, and call out, "So-and-so, come and eat; here I set down food for you, it is a part of all we have." If after such an offering and invocation the night wind rustles the tops of the trees or shakes the thatch of leaves on the roofs, they know that the ghost is in the village. The twinkle of a glow-worm near his grave is the glitter of his eye. In the morning, too, before they sally forth to the woods, one of the next of kin to the dead huntsman will go betimes to his grave, stamp on it to waken the sleeper below, and call out, "So-and-so, come! we are now about to go out hunting. Help us to a good bag!" If they have luck, they praise the deceased as a good spirit and in the evening supply his wants again with food, tobacco, and betel. The sacrifice, as usually happens in such cases, does not call for any great exercise of self-denial; since the spirit consumes only the spiritual essence of the good things, while he leaves their material substance to be enjoyed by the living.[462]

[Sidenote: Ill-treatment of a ghost who fails to help hunters.]

However, it sometimes happens that the ghost disappoints them, and that the hunters return in the evening hungry and empty-handed. This may even be repeated day after day, and still the people will not lose hope. They think that the ghost is perhaps busy working in his field, or that he has gone on a visit and will soon come home. To give him time to do his business or see his friends at leisure, they will remain in the village for several days. Then, when they imagine that he must surely have returned, they go out into the woods and try their luck again. But should there still be no ghost and no game, they begin to be seriously alarmed. They think that some evil must have befallen him. But if time goes on and still he gives no sign and the game continues scarce and shy, their feelings towards the ghost undergo a radical alteration. Passion getting the better of prudence, they will even reproach him with ingratitude, taunt him with his uselessness, and leave him to starve. Should he after that still remain deaf to their railing and regardless of the short commons to which they have reduced him, they will discharge a volley of abuse at his grave and trouble themselves about him no more. However, if, not content with refusing his valuable assistance in the chase, the ghost should actually blight the crops or send wild boars into the fields to trample them down, the patience of the long-suffering people is quite exhausted: the vials of their wrath overflow; and snatching up their cudgels in a fury they belabour his grave till his bones ache, or even drive him with blows and curses altogether from the village.[463]

[Sidenote: The journey of ghosts to the spirit land.]

Such an outcast ghost, if he does not seek his revenge by prowling in the neighbourhood and preying on society at large, will naturally bethink himself of repairing to his long home in the under world. For sooner or later the spirits of the dead congregate there. It is especially when the flesh has quite mouldered away from his bones that the ghost packs up his little traps and sets out for the better land. The entrance to the abode of bliss is a cave to the west of Saddle Mountain. Here in the gully there is a projecting tree-stump on which the ghosts perch waiting for a favourable moment to jump into the mouth of the cavern. When a slight earthquake is felt, a Kai man will often say, "A ghost has just leaped from the tree into the cave; that is why the earth is shaking." Down below the ghosts are received by Tulmeng, lord of the nether world. Often he appears in a canoe to ferry them over to the further shore. "Blood or wax?" is the laconic question which he puts to the ghost on the bank. He means to say, "Were you killed or were you done to death by magic?" For it is with wax that the sorcerer stops up the fatal little tubes in which he encloses the souls of his enemies. And the reason why the lord of the dead puts the question to the newcomer is that the ghosts of the slain and the ghosts of the bewitched dwell in separate places. Right in front of the land of souls rises a high steep wall, which cannot be climbed even by ghosts. The spirits have accordingly to make their way through it and thereupon find themselves in their new abode. According to some Kai, before the ghosts are admitted to ghost land they must swing to and fro on a rope and then drop into water, where they are washed clean of bloodstains and all impurity; after which they ascend, spick and span, the last slope to the village of ghosts.

[Sidenote: Life of ghosts in the other world.]

Tulmeng has the reputation of being a very stern ruler in his weird realm, but the Kai really know very little about him. He beats refractory souls, and it is essential that every ghost should have his ears and nose bored. The operation is very painful, and to escape it most people take the precaution of having their ears and noses bored in their lifetime. Life in the other world goes on just like life in this one. Houses are built exactly like houses on earth, and there as here pigs swarm in the streets. Fields are tilled and crops are got in; ghostly men marry ghostly women, who give birth to ghostly children. The same old round of love and hate, of quarrelling and fighting, of battle, murder and sudden death goes on in the shadowy realm below ground just as in the more solid world above ground. Sorcerers are there also, and they breed just as bad blood among the dead as among the living. All things indeed are the same except for their shadowy unsubstantial texture.[464]

[Sidenote: Ghosts die and turn into animals.]

But the ghosts do not live for ever in the nether world. They die the second death and turn into animals, generally into cuscuses. In the shape of animals they haunt the wildest, deepest, darkest glens of the rugged mountains. No one but the owner has the right to set foot on such haunted ground. He may even kill the ghostly animals. Any one else who dared to disturb them in their haunts would do so at the peril of his life. But even the owner of the land who has killed one of the ghostly creatures is bound to appease the spirit of the dead beast. He may not cut up the carcase at once, but must leave it for a time, perhaps for a whole night, after laying on it presents which are intended to mollify and soothe the injured spirit. In placing the gifts on the body he says, "Take the gifts and leave us that which was a game animal, that we may eat it." When the animal's ghost has appropriated the spiritual essence of the offerings, the hunter and his family may eat the carcase. Should one of these ghostly creatures die or be killed, its spirit turns either into an insect or into an ant-hill. Children who would destroy such an ant-hill or throw little darts at it, are warned by their elders not to indulge in such sacrilegious sport. When the insect also dies, the series of spiritual transformations is at an end.[465]