[Lecture XVIII.]—The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Northern and Eastern Melanesia
The natives of Northern Melanesia or the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, etc.), their material culture, commercial habits, and want of regular government, pp. 393-395; their theory of the soul, 395 sq.; their fear of ghosts, 396; offerings to the dead, 396 sq.; burial customs, 397 sq.; preservation of the skulls, 398; customs and beliefs concerning the dead among the Sulka of New Britain, 398-400, among the Moanus of the Admiralty Islands, 400 sq. and among the natives of the Kaniet Islands, 401 sq.; natural deaths commonly attributed to sorcery, 402; divination to discover the sorcerer who caused the death, 402; death customs in the Duke of York Island, cursing the sorcerer, skulls preserved, feasts and dances, 403; prayers to the dead, 403 sq.; the land of the dead and the fate of the departed souls, hard lot of impecunious ghosts, 404-406.
The natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji), their material culture and political constitution, 406-408; means of subsistence, 408; moral character, 408 sq.; scenery of the Fijian islands, 409 sq.; the Fijian doctrine of souls, 410-412; souls of rascals caught in scarves, 412 sq.; fear of sorcery and precautions against it, 413 sq.; beneficial effect of the fear in enforcing habits of personal cleanliness, 414; fear of ghosts and custom of driving them away, 414 sq.; killing a ghost, 415 sq.; outwitting grandfather's ghost, 416; special relation of grandfather to grandchild, 416; grandfather's soul reborn in his grandchild, 417 sq.
[Lecture XIX.]—The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji) (continued)
Indifference of the Fijians to death, p. 419; their custom of killing the sick and aged with the consent of the victims, 419-424; their readiness to die partly an effect of their belief in immortality, 422 sq.; wives strangled or buried alive to accompany their husbands to the spirit land, 424-426; servants and dependants killed to attend their dead lords, 426; sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of dead chiefs, 426 sq.; boys circumcised in order to save the lives of their fathers or fathers' brothers, 427; saturnalia attending such rites of circumcision, 427 sq.; the Nanga, or sacred enclosure of stones, dedicated to the worship of ancestors, 428 sq.; first-fruits of the yams offered to the ancestors in the Nanga, 429; initiation of young men in the Nanga, drama of death and resurrection, sacrament of food and water, 429-432; the initiation followed by a period of sexual licence, 433; the initiatory rites apparently intended to introduce the novices to the ancestral spirits and endow them with the powers of the dead, 434 sq.; the rites seem to have been imported into Fiji by immigrants from the west, 435 sq.; the licence attending these rites perhaps a reversion to primitive communism for the purpose of propitiating the ancestral spirits, 436 sq.; description of the Nanga or sacred enclosure of stones, 437 sq.; comparison with the cromlechs and other megalithic monuments of Europe, 438.
[Lecture XX.]—The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji) (concluded)
Worship of parents and other dead relations in Fiji, pp. 439 sq.; Fijian notion of divinity (kalou), 440; two classes of gods, namely, divine gods and human gods or deified men, 440 sq.; temples (bures) 441 sq.; worship at the temples, 443; priests (betes), their oracular inspiration by the gods, 443-446; human sacrifices on various occasions, such as building a house or launching a new canoe, 446 sq.; high estimation in which manslaughter was held by the Fijians, 447 sq.; consecration of manslayers and restrictions laid on them, probably from fear of the ghosts of their victims, 448 sq.; certain funeral customs based apparently on the fear of ghosts, 450 sqq.; persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food with their hands, 450 sq.; seclusion of gravediggers, 451; mutilations, brandings, and fasts in honour of the dead, 451 sq.; the dead carried out of the house by a special opening to prevent the return of the ghost, 452-461; the other world and the way thither, 462 sqq.; the ghostly ferry, 462 sq.; the ghost and the pandanus tree, 463 sq.; hard fate of the unmarried dead, 464; the Killer of Souls, 464 sq.; ghosts precipitated into a lake, 465 sq.; Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven, 466; the Fijian Elysium, 466 sq.; transmigration and annihilation, the few that are saved, 467.
Concluding observations, 467-471; strength and universality of the belief in immortality among savages, 468; the state of war among savage and civilised peoples often a direct consequence of the belief in immortality, 468 sq.; economic loss involved in sacrifices to the dead, 469; how does the savage belief in immortality bear on the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? 469; the answer depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature, 469-471; the conclusion left open, 471.
[Note.]—Myth of the Continuance of Death