The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

S >> Sir James George Frazer >> The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3)

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[Sidenote: Ghosts in animals, such as sharks, alligators, snakes,
bonitos, and frigate-birds.]

From some of these instances we learn that Melanesian ghosts can
sometimes take up their abode in animals, such as cuscuses, eels, and
fish. The creatures which are oftenest used as vehicles by the spirits
of the dead are sharks, alligators, snakes, bonitos, and frigate-birds.
Snakes which haunt a sacred place are themselves sacred, because they
belong to or actually embody the ghost. Sharks, again, in all these
islands are very often thought to be the abode of ghosts; for men before
their death will announce that they will appear as sharks, and
afterwards any shark remarkable for size or colour which haunts a
certain shore or coast is taken to be somebody's ghost and receives the
name of the deceased. At Saa certain food, such as coco-nuts from
particular trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost-shark; and men of
whom it is known for certain that they will be sharks after their death
are allowed to anticipate the posthumous honours which await them by
devouring such food in the sacred place, just as if they were real
sharks. Sharks are very commonly believed to be the abode of ghosts in
Florida and Ysabel, and in Savo, where they are particularly numerous;
hence, though all sharks are not venerated, there is no living creature
so commonly held sacred by the Central Melanesians as a shark; and
shark-ghosts seem even to form a class of powerful supernatural beings.
Again, when a lizard was seen frequenting a house after a death, it
would be taken for the ghost returning to its old home; and many ghosts,
powerful to aid the mariner at sea, take up their quarters in
frigate-birds.[610]

[Sidenote: The belief in ghosts underlies the Melanesian conception of
magic.]

Again, a belief in powerful ghosts underlies to a great extent the
Melanesian conception of magic, as that conception is expounded by Dr.
Codrington. "That invisible power," he tells us, "which is believed by
the natives to cause all such effects as transcend their conception of
the regular course of nature, and to reside in spiritual beings, whether
in the spiritual part of living men or in the ghosts of the dead, being
imparted by them to their names and to various things that belong to
them, such as stones, snakes, and indeed objects of all sorts, is that
generally known as _mana_. Without some understanding of this it is
impossible to understand the religious beliefs and practices of the
Melanesians; and this again is the active force in all they do and
believe to be done in magic, white or black. By means of this men are
able to control or direct the forces of nature, to make rain or
sunshine, wind or calm, to cause sickness or remove it, to know what is
far off in time and space, to bring good luck and prosperity, or to
blast and curse. No man, however, has this power of his own; all that he
does is done by the aid of personal beings, ghosts or spirits."[611]

[Sidenote: Illness generally thought to be caused by ghosts.]

Thus, to begin with the medical profession, which is a branch of magic
long before it becomes a department of science, every serious sickness
is believed to be brought about by ghosts or spirits, but generally it
is to the ghosts of the dead that illness is ascribed both by the
Eastern and by the Western islanders. Hence recourse is had to ghosts
for aid both in causing and in curing sickness. They are thought to
inflict disease, not only because some offence, such as trespass, has
been committed against them, or because one who knows their ways has
instigated them thereto by sacrifice and spells, but because there is a
certain malignity in the feeling of all ghosts towards the living, who
offend them simply by being alive. All human faculties, apart from the
mere bodily functions, are supposed to be enhanced by death; hence the
ghost of a powerful and ill-natured man is only too ready to take
advantage of his increased powers for mischief.[612] Thus in the island
of Florida illness is regularly laid at the door of a ghost; the only
question that can arise is which particular ghost is doing the mischief.
Sometimes the patient imagines that he has offended his dead father,
uncle, or brother, who accordingly takes his revenge by stretching him
on a bed of sickness. In that case no special intercessor is required;
the patient himself or one of his kinsfolk will sacrifice and beg the
ghost to take the sickness away; it is purely a family affair. Sometimes
the sick man thinks that it is his own private or tame ghost who is
afflicting him; so he will leave the house in order to escape his
tormentor. But if the cause of sickness remains obscure, a professional
doctor or medicine-man will be consulted. He always knows, or at least
can ascertain, the ghost who is causing all the trouble, and he takes
his measures accordingly. Thus he will bind on the sick man the kind of
leaves that the ghost loves; he will chew ginger and blow it into the
patient's ears and on that part of the skull which is soft in infants;
he will call on the name of the ghost and entreat him to remove the
sickness. Should all these remedies prove vain, the doctor is by no
means at the end of his resources. He may shrewdly suspect that
somebody, who has an ill-will at the patient, has set his private ghost
to maul the sick man and do him a grievous bodily injury. If his
suspicions are confirmed and he discovers the malicious man who is
egging on the mischievous ghost, he will bribe him to call off his
ghost; and if the man refuses, the doctor will hire another ghost to
assault and batter the original assailant. At Wango in San Cristoval
regular battles used to be fought by the invisible champions above the
sickbed of the sufferer, whose life or death depended on the issue of
the combat. Their weapons were spears, and sometimes more than one ghost
would be engaged on either side.[613]

[Sidenote: Diagnosis of ghosts who have caused illness.]

In Ysabel the doctor employs an ingenious apparatus for discovering the
cause of sickness and ascertaining its cure. He suspends a stone at one
end of a string while he holds the other end in his hand. Then he
recites the names of all the people who died lately, and when the stone
swings at anybody's name, he knows that the ghost of that man has caused
the illness. It remains to find out what the ghost will take to relax
his clutch on the sick man, it may be a mash of yams, a fish, a pig, or
perhaps a human substitute. The question is put and answered as before;
and whatever the oracle declares to be requisite is offered on the dead
man's grave. Thus the ghost is appeased and the sufferer is made
whole.[614] In these islands a common cause of illness is believed to be
an unwarrantable intrusion on premises occupied by a ghost, who punishes
the trespasser by afflicting him with bodily pains and ailments, or it
may be by carrying off his soul. At Maewo in Aurora, one of the New
Hebrides, when there is reason to think that a sickness is due to
ghostly agency, the friends of the sick man send for a professional
dreamer, whose business it is to ascertain what particular ghost has
been offended and to make it up with him. So the dreamer falls asleep
and in his sleep he dreams a dream. He seems to himself to be in the
place where the patient was working before his illness; and there he
spies a queer little old man, who is really no other than the ghost. The
dreamer falls into conversation with him, learns his name, and winning
his confidence extracts from him a true account of the whole affair. The
fact is that in working at his garden the man encroached, whether
wittingly or not is no matter, on land which the ghost regards as his
private preserve; and to punish the intrusion the ghost carried off the
intruder's soul and impounded it in a magic fence in his garden, where
it still languishes in durance vile. The dreamer at once tenders a frank
and manly apology on behalf of his client; he assures the ghost that the
trespass was purely inadvertent, that no personal disrespect whatever
was intended, and he concludes by requesting the ghost to overlook the
offence for this time and to release the imprisoned soul. This appeal to
the better feelings of the ghost has its effect; he pulls up the fence
and lets the soul out of the pound; it flies back to the sick man, who
thereupon recovers. Sometimes an orphan child is made sick by its dead
mother, whose ghost draws away the soul of the infant to keep her
company in the spirit land. In such a case, again, a dreamer is employed
to bring back the lost soul from the far country; and if he can persuade
the mother's ghost to relinquish the tiny soul of her baby, the child
will be made whole.[615] Once more certain long stones in the Banks'
Islands are inhabited by ghosts so active and robust that if a man's
shadow so much as falls on one of them, the ghost in the stone will
clutch the shadow and pull the soul clean out of the man, who dies
accordingly. Such stones, dangerous as they unquestionably are to the
chance passer-by, nevertheless for that very reason possess a valuable
property which can be turned to excellent account. A man, for example,
will put one of these stones in his house to guard it like a watch-dog
in his absence; and if he sends a friend to fetch something out of it
which he has forgotten, the messenger, on approaching the house, will
take good care to call out the owner's name, lest the ghost in the
stone, mistaking him for a thief and a robber, should pounce out on him
and do him a mischief before he had time to explain.[616]

[Sidenote: Contrast between Melanesian and European medicine.]

Thus it appears that for a medical practitioner in Melanesia the first
requisite is an intimate acquaintance, not with the anatomy of the human
frame and the properties of drugs, but with ghosts, their personal
peculiarities, habits, and haunts. Only by means of the influence which
such a knowledge enables him to exert on these powerful and dangerous
beings can the good physician mitigate and assuage the sufferings of
poor humanity. His professional skill, while it certainly aims at the
alleviation of physical evils, attains its object chiefly, if not
exclusively, by a direct appeal to those higher, though invisible,
powers which encompass the life of man, or at all events of the
Melanesian. The firm faith in the spiritual and the unseen which these
sable doctors display in their treatment of the sick presents a striking
contrast to the procedure of their European colleagues, who trust
exclusively to the use of mere physical remedies, such as drugs and
lancets, now carving the body of the sufferer with knives, and now
inserting substances, about which they know little, into places about
which they know nothing. Has not science falsely so called still much to
learn from savagery?

[Sidenote: The weather believed to be regulated by ghosts and spirits.
Weather-doctors.]

But it is not the departments of medicine and surgery alone, important
as these are to human welfare, which in Melanesia are directed and
controlled by spiritual forces. The weather in those regions is also
regulated by ghosts and spirits. It is they who cause the wind to blow
or to be still, the sun to shine forth or to be overcast with clouds,
the rain to descend or the earth to be parched with drought; hence
fertility and abundance or dearth and famine prevail alternately at the
will of these spiritual directors. From this it follows that men who
stand on a footing of intimacy with ghosts and spirits can by judicious
management induce them to adapt the weather to the varying needs of
mankind. But it is to be observed that the supernatural beings, who are
the real sources of atmospheric phenomena, have delegated or deputed a
portion of their powers not merely to certain material objects, such as
stones or leaves, but to certain set forms of words, which men call
incantations or spells; and accordingly all such objects and formulas
do, by virtue of this delegation, possess in themselves a real and we
may almost say natural influence over the weather, which is often
manifested in a striking congruity or harmony between the things
themselves and the effects which they are calculated to produce. This
adaptation of means to end in nature may perhaps be regarded as a
beautiful proof of the existence of spirits and ghosts working their
purposes unseen behind the gaily coloured screen or curtain of the
physical universe. At all events men who are acquainted with the ghostly
properties of material objects and words can turn them to account for
the benefit of their friends and the confusion of their foes, and they
do so very readily if only it is made worth their while. Hence it comes
about that in these islands there are everywhere weather-doctors or
weather-mongers, who through their familiarity with ghosts and spirits
and their acquaintance with the ghostly or spiritual properties of
things, are able to control the weather and to supply their customers
with wind or calm, rain or sunshine, famine or abundance, at a
reasonable rate and a moderate figure.[617] The advantages of such a
system over our own blundering method of managing the weather, or rather
of leaving it to its own devices, are too obvious to be insisted on. To
take a few examples. In the island of Florida, when a calm is wanted,
the weather-doctor takes a bunch of leaves, of the sort which the ghost
loves, and hides the bunch in the hollow of a tree where there is water,
at the same time invoking the ghost with the proper charm. This
naturally produces rain and with the rain a calm. In the seafaring life
of the Solomon Islanders the maker of calms is a really valuable
citizen.[618] The Santa Cruz people are also great voyagers, and their
wizards control the weather on their expeditions, taking with them the
stock or log which represents their private or tame ghost and setting it
up on a stage in the cabin. The presence of the familiar ghost being
thus secured, the weather-doctor will undertake to provide wind or calm
according to circumstances.[619] We have already seen how in these
islands the wizard makes rain by pouring water on the wooden posts which
represent the rain-ghosts.[620]

[Sidenote: Black magic working through personal refuse or rubbish of the
victim.]

Such exercises of ghostly power for the healing of the sick and the
improvement of the weather are, when well directed and efficacious,
wholly beneficial. But ghostly power is a two-edged weapon which can
work evil as well as good to mankind. In fact it can serve the purpose
of witchcraft. The commonest application of this pernicious art is one
which is very familiar to witches and sorcerers in many parts of the
world. The first thing the wizard does is to obtain a fragment of food,
a bit of hair, a nail-clipping, or indeed anything that has been closely
connected with the person of his intended victim. This is the medium
through which the power of the ghost or spirit is brought to bear; it
is, so to say, the point of support on which the magician rests the
whole weight of his infernal engine. In order to give effect to the
charm it is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to possess some
personal relic, such as a bone, of the dead man whose ghost is to set
the machinery in motion. At all events the essential thing is to bring
together the man who is to be injured and the ghost or spirit who is to
injure him; and this can be done most readily by placing the personal
relics or refuse of the two men, the living and the dead, in contact
with each other; for thus the magic circuit, if we may say so, is
complete, and the fatal current flows from the dead to the living. That
is why it is most dangerous to leave any personal refuse or rubbish
lying about; you never can tell but that some sorcerer may get hold of
it and work your ruin by means of it. Hence the people are naturally
most careful to hide or destroy all such refuse in order to prevent it
from falling into the hands of witches and wizards; and this sage
precaution has led to habits of cleanliness which the superficial
European is apt to mistake for what he calls enlightened sanitation, but
which a deeper knowledge of native thought would reveal to him in their
true character as far-seeing measures designed to defeat the nefarious
art of the sorcerer.[621]

[Sidenote: Black magic working without any personal relic of the victim.
The ghost-shooter.]

Unfortunately, however, an adept in the black art can work his fell
purpose even without any personal relic of his victim. In the Banks'
Islands, for example, he need only procure a bit of human bone or a
fragment of some lethal weapon, it may be a splinter of a club or a chip
of an arrow, which has killed somebody. This he wraps up in the proper
leaves, recites over it the appropriate charm, and plants it secretly in
the path along which his intended victim is expected to pass. The ghost
of the man who owned the bone in his life or perished by the club or the
arrow, is now lurking like a lion in the path; and if the poor fellow
strolls along it thinking no evil, the ghost will spring at him and
strike him with disease. The charm is perfectly efficient if the man
does come along the path, but clearly it misses fire if he does not. To
remedy this defect in the apparatus a sorcerer sometimes has recourse to
a portable instrument, a sort of pocket pistol, which in the Banks'
Islands is known as a ghost-shooter. It is a bamboo tube, loaded not
with powder and shot, but with a dead man's bone and other magical
ingredients, over which the necessary spell has been crooned. Armed with
this deadly weapon the sorcerer has only to step up to his unsuspecting
enemy, whip out the pocket pistol, uncork the muzzle by removing his
thumb from the orifice, and present it at the victim; the fatal
discharge follows in an instant and the man drops to the ground. The
ghost in the pistol has done his work. Sometimes, however, an accident
happens. The marksman misses his victim and hits somebody else. This
occurred, for example, not very many years ago in the island of Mota. A
man named Isvitag was waiting with his ghost-shooter to pop at his
enemy, but in his nervous excitement he let fly too soon, just as a
woman with a child on her hip stepped across the path. The shot, or
rather the ghost, hit the child point-blank, and it was his sister's
child, his own next of kin! You may imagine the distress of the
affectionate uncle at this deplorable miscarriage. To prevent
inflammation of the wound he, with great presence of mind, plunged his
pocket pistol in water, and this timely remedy proved so efficacious
that the child took no hurt.[622]

[Sidenote: Prophecy inspired by ghosts.]

Another department of Melanesian life in which ghosts figure very
prominently is prophecy. The knowledge of future events is believed to
be conveyed to the people by a ghost or spirit speaking with the voice
of a man, who is himself unconscious while he speaks. The predictions
which emanate from the prophet under these circumstances are in the
strictest sense inspired. His human personality is for the time being in
abeyance, and he is merely the mouthpiece of the powerful spirit which
has temporarily taken possession of his body and speaks with his voice.
The possession is indeed painfully manifest. His eyes glare, foam bursts
from his mouth, his limbs writhe, his whole body is convulsed. These are
the workings of the mighty spirit shaking and threatening to rend the
frail tabernacle of flesh. This form of inspiration is not clearly
distinguishable from what we call madness; indeed the natives do not
attempt to distinguish between the two things; they regard the madman
and the prophet as both alike inspired by a ghost or spirit, and a man
will sometimes pretend to be mad in order that he may get the reputation
of being a prophet. At Saa a man will speak with the voice of a powerful
man deceased, while he twists and writhes under the influence of the
ghost; he calls himself by the name of the deceased who speaks through
him, and he is so addressed by others; he will eat fire, lift enormous
weights, and foretells things to come. When the inspiration, or
insanity, is particularly violent, and the Banks' Islanders think they
have had quite enough of it, the friends of the prophet or of the madman
will sometimes catch him and hold him struggling and roaring in the
smoke of strong-smelling leaves, while they call out the names of the
dead men whose ghosts are most likely to be abroad at the time, for as
soon as the right name is mentioned the ghost departs from the man, who
then returns to his sober senses. But this method of smoking out a ghost
is not always successful.[623]

[Sidenote: Divination by means of ghosts.]

There are many methods by which ghosts and spirits are believed to make
known to men who employ them the secret things which the unassisted
human intelligence could not discover; and some of them hardly perhaps
need the intervention of a professional wizard. These methods of
divination differ very little in the various islands. In the Solomon
Islands, for instance, when an expedition has started in a fleet of
canoes, there is sometimes a hesitation whether they shall proceed, or a
doubt as to what direction they should take. Thereupon a diviner may
declare that he has felt a ghost step on board; for did not the canoe
tip over to the one side? Accordingly he asks the invisible passenger,
"Shall we go on? Shall we go to such and such a place?" If the canoe
rocks, the answer is yes; if it lies on an even keel, the answer is no.
Again, when a man is sick and his friends wish to know what ghost is
vexing or, as they say, eating him, a diviner or wizard is sent for. He
comes bringing an assistant, and the two sit down, the wizard in front
and the assistant at his back, and they hold a stick or bamboo by the
two ends. The wizard then begins to slap the end of the bamboo he holds,
calling out one after another the names of men not very long deceased,
and when he names the one who is afflicting the sick man the stick of
itself becomes violently agitated.[624] We are not informed, but we may
probably assume, that it is the ghost and not the man who really
agitates the stick. A somewhat different mode of divination was
occasionally employed at Motlav in the Banks' Islands in order to
discover a thief or other criminal. After a burial they would take a
bag, put some Tahitian chestnut and scraped banana into it, and tie it
to the end of a hollow bamboo tube about ten feet long in such a way
that the end of the tube was inserted in the mouth of the bag. Then the
bag was laid on the dead man's grave, and the diviners grasped the other
end of the bamboo. The names of the recently dead were then called over,
and while this was being done the men felt the bamboo grow heavy in
their hands, for a ghost was scrambling up from the bag into the hollow
of the bamboo. Having thus secured him they carried the imprisoned ghost
in the bamboo into the village, where the roll of the recent dead was
again called over in order to learn whose ghost had been caught in the
trap. When wrong names were mentioned, the free end of the bamboo moved
from side to side, but at the mention of the right name it revolved
briskly. Having thus ascertained whom they had to deal with, they
questioned the entrapped ghost, "Who stole so and so? Who was guilty in
such a case?" Thereupon the bamboo, moved no doubt by the ghost inside,
pointed at the culprit, if he was present, or made signs as before when
the names of the suspected evildoers were mentioned.[625]

[Sidenote: Taboo based on a fear of ghosts.]

Of the many departments of Central Melanesian life which are permeated
by a belief in ghostly power the last which I shall mention is the
institution of taboo. In Melanesia, indeed, the institution is not so
conspicuous as it used to be in Polynesia; yet even there it has been a
powerful instrument in the consolidation of the rights of private
property, and as such it deserves the attention of historians who seek
to trace the evolution of law and morality. As understood in the Banks'
Islands and the New Hebrides the word taboo (_tambu_ or _tapu_)
signifies a sacred and unapproachable character which is imposed on
certain things by the arbitrary will of a chief or other powerful man.
Somebody whose authority with the people gives him confidence to make
the announcement will declare that such and such an object may not be
touched, that such and such a place may not be approached, and that such
and such an action may not be performed under a certain penalty, which
in the last resort will be inflicted by ghostly or spiritual agency. The
object, place, or action in question becomes accordingly taboo or
sacred. Hence in these islands taboo may be defined as a prohibition
with a curse expressed or implied. The sanction or power at the back of
the taboo is not that of the man who imposes it; rather it is that of
the ghost or spirit in whose name or in reliance upon whom the taboo is
imposed. Thus in Florida a chief will forbid something to be done or
touched under a penalty; he may proclaim, for example, that any one who
violates his prohibition must pay him a hundred strings of shell money.
To a European such a proclamation seems a proof of the chief's power;
but to the native the chiefs power, in this and in everything, rests on
the persuasion that the chief has his mighty ghost at his back. The
sense of this in the particular case is indeed remote, the fear of the
chiefs anger is present and effective, but the ultimate sanction is the
power of the ghost. If a common man were to take upon himself to taboo
anything he might do so; people would imagine that he would not dare to
make such an announcement unless he knew he could enforce it; so they
would watch, and if anybody violated the taboo and fell sick afterwards,
they would conclude that the taboo was supported by a powerful ghost who
punished infractions of it. Hence the reputation and authority of the
man who imposed the taboo would rise accordingly; for it would be seen
that he had a powerful ghost at his back. Every ghost has a particular
kind of leaf for his badge; and in imposing his taboo a man will set the
leaf of his private ghost as a mark to warn trespassers of the spiritual
power with which they have to reckon; when people see a leaf stuck, it
may be, on a tree, a house, or a canoe, they do not always know whose it
is; but they do know that if they disregard the mark they have to deal
with a ghost and not with a man,[626] and the knowledge is a more
effectual check on thieving and other crimes than the dread of mere
human justice. Many a rascal fears a ghost who does not fear the face of
man.