The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume 2 (of 3) / The Belief Among the Polynesians

by James George Frazer

In the valley of Taipii (Typee), in the island of Nukahiva, Captain Porter visited "the chief place of religious ceremony." It was a platform of the usual sort situated in a fine grove at the foot of a steep mountain. On the platform was an idol of hard stone, rudely representing a deity in human shape of about life size and in a squatting posture. Arranged on either side of this idol, as well as in front and rear, were several other images of about the same size and of the same model, but better carved out of bread-fruit wood. The place was decorated with streamers of white cloth. A few paces from the grave were four fine war canoes, furnished with outriggers, and decorated with human hair, coral shells, and many white streamers. In the stern of each canoe was the effigy of a man with a paddle, steering, in full dress, decked with plumes, ear-rings, and all the usual ornaments. On enquiring of the natives, Captain Porter was informed that the dignified effigy seated in the stern of the most splendid canoe represented a priest who had been killed not long before by their enemies the Happahs. In the bottom of the priest's canoe Captain Porter found the putrefying bodies of two Taipiis (Typees) whom he and his men had recently killed in battle; and lying about the canoe he saw many other human carcasses, with the flesh still on them. The other canoes, he was told, belonged to different warriors who had been killed or had died not long since. "I asked them," continues Captain Porter, "why they had placed their effigies in the canoes, and also why they put the bodies of the dead Typees in that of the priest? They told me (as Wilson interpreted) that they were going to heaven, and that it was impossible to get there without canoes. The canoe of the priest being large, he was unable to manage it himself, nor was it right that he should, he being now a god. They had, therefore, placed in it the bodies of the Happas and Typees, which had been killed since his death, to paddle him to the place of his destination; but he had not been able yet to start, for the want of a full crew, as it would require ten to paddle her, and as yet they had only procured eight. They told me also that the taboo, laid in consequence of his death, would continue until he had started on his voyage, which he would not be able to do until they had killed two more of their enemies, and by this means completed the crew. I inquired if he took any sea stock with him. They told me he did, and pointing to some red hogs in an enclosure, said that they were intended for him, as well as a quantity of bread-fruit, coco-nuts, etc., which would be collected from the trees in the grove. I inquired if he had far to go; they replied, no: and pointing to a small square stone enclosure, informed me that was their heaven, that he was to go there. This place was tabooed, they told me, for every one except their priests."[129]

But it was deemed necessary to provide a dead priest or chief with human victims for other purposes than to paddle his canoe to heaven. When a great chief died, two commoners were sometimes sacrificed for the purpose of escorting him to the abode of bliss; one of them carried the chief's girdle, and the other bore the head of the pig that had been slaughtered for the funeral feast. The head was intended as a present to the warden of the infernal regions, who, if he did not get this perquisite, would revile and stone the ghost, and shut the door in his face.[130] The number of human victims sacrificed at the death of a priest varied with the respect and fear which he had inspired in his lifetime;[131] a common number seems to have been three.[132]

The runaway English sailor, Roberts, who had long resided in the islands, assured the Russian explorer Lisiansky "that, on the death of a priest, three men must be sacrificed; two of whom are hung up in the burying-ground, while the third is cut to pieces, and eaten by visitors; all but the head, which is placed upon one of the idols. When the flesh of the first two are wasted away, the bones that remain are burnt. The custom of the country requires, that the men destined for sacrifice should belong to some neighbouring nation, and accordingly they are generally stolen. This occasions a war of six, and sometimes of twelve, months: its duration, however, depends upon the nearest relation of the deceased priest; who, as soon as he is acquainted with his death, retires to a place of taboo; and till he chooses to come out, the blood of the two parties does not cease to flow. During his retirement, he is furnished with everything he may require, human flesh not excepted."[133]

A curious mode of preparing a dead man to appear to advantage before the gods in the other world was to flay his corpse. A Catholic missionary tells us that when a dead body began to swell up, in consequence of internal putrefaction, it was customary to flay it and to preserve the skin as a precious relic in the family treasury, where the eye of a profane stranger could never fall on it.[134] The reason for observing the custom is not mentioned by this missionary, but it is explained by another missionary, Father Amable. It happened that the king or head chief of the island of Tahuata died, and that his body was brought to the house of the queen on the bay where Father Amable resided. For thirty days she kept the corpse in the house and occupied herself with skinning it with her fingers. Questioned by the missionary as to her reasons for this strange procedure, she answered that her husband's body must be without spot or stain, in order that the great goddess Upu might give him leave to dwell in her land and to bathe in her lake. For this deity rules over a sort of submarine Eden, planted with all sorts of excellent fruits and beautified by the calm waters of an azure lake. The natives of Tahuata believe that the souls of all who die in the archipelago assemble on the top of a high mountain called Kiukiu. When a great multitude of souls is there gathered together, the sea opens and the souls fall plump down into the paradise of the goddess Upu. However, not all of them are permitted to enter the happy land and to enjoy the pleasures which it offers. Only such are admitted as have owned in their lifetime many servants and many pigs and have not been wicked. Further, none may enter in who bear on their body any marks of tattooing.[135] Hence the reason for flaying dead bodies seems to have been to efface, by removing the skin, the tattooed marks which would have acted as a fatal bar to the entrance of the ghost into paradise. As to the souls of slaves and the poor, in the opinion of the natives of Tahuata they go to a gloomy land, which is never illumined by the sun, and where there is nothing but muddy water to drink.[136] Nevertheless the people would seem to have believed that the souls of the dead lingered for a time beside their mouldering bodies before they took their departure for the far country. In this belief they sacrificed to them pigs, some baked, and some alive. The baked pigs they put in a hollow log and hung from the roof of the hut, and they said that a god named Mapuhanui, who in the beginning had bestowed pigs on men, used to come and feast on the carcasses in company with the ghost. But when they offered live pigs, they tethered the animals to the hut in which the dead body lay, and they fed them till the flesh dropped from the skeleton; after that they allowed the pigs to die of hunger.[137] Perhaps, like some other peoples, they imagined that the ghost hovered about his remains so long as the flesh adhered to the bones, but that when even that faint semblance of life had vanished he went away and had no further occasion for pigs, whether alive or dead.

However, the souls of the dead were not supposed to be permanently confined to the other world. After a long sojourn in it, all alike, whatever the region they inhabited in their disembodied state, could return to earth and be born again.[138] Indeed, according to the natives of Nukahiva, the interval between death and reincarnation was not unduly long; for "every one here is persuaded, that the soul of a grandfather is transmitted by Nature into the body of his grandchildren; and that, if an unfruitful wife were to place herself under the corpse of her deceased grandfather, she would be sure to become pregnant."[139] Occasionally the soul of a dead person might even inhabit the body of an animal. Once when a whale was stranded on one of the islands, a priestess declared that it was the soul of a certain priest, which would wander until eight human victims were sacrificed to the gods. In vain her son would have substituted turtles for human beings; the people would not hear of it; the prescribed victims were captured from a neighbouring tribe and put to death in order to lay the ghost of the whale, or rather of the priest who had animated the whale's body.[140]

But the souls of the dead were also believed to return from the spirit land for other purposes than to be born again in the flesh. They might come as ghosts to haunt and torment the living, and as such they were greatly dreaded by the people.[141] The first watch of the night was the hour when they were supposed especially to come on errands of mischief.[142] Particularly dreaded were the ghosts of high priests and great chiefs, who retained in their spiritual form the passions and the rancours which they had nursed in life, and who returned in ghostly shape to earth to meddle with the affairs of the living, and to punish even trivial offences. To guard against these dangerous intrusions, the intervention of a priest or priestess was deemed indispensable; it was his or her business to counteract a spell cast on a family, or to heal a sickness inflicted on an individual by one of these ghostly vagrants.[143] Such was the fear of wandering ghosts that no Marquesan would dare to stir a step abroad at night without the light of a torch; for well he knew that evil spirits lurked beside the path to knock down and throttle any rash wayfarer who should dare to leave his footsteps unillumined.[144] Indeed, we are told that, of all beliefs in the minds of the natives, the belief in ghosts was the most deeply rooted. It is impossible to express the dread which they felt of spectres and apparitions; nobody was exempt from it. But it was only at night that these phantoms were to be feared. Though they remained invisible, they revealed themselves to the terror-stricken wanderer by sound and touch; the least noise heard in the darkness disclosed their presence; the least contact with them was a sentence of death, sudden or slow, but sure. Hence, if a man was obliged to go out after sunset, he would always take somebody with him to bear him company, even if he had to wake a comrade for the purpose. Among the women the fear of ghosts was yet greater, many of them would not stir abroad on a moonless night even in company. In passing by a burial-ground or a solitary tomb, people used to throw food towards it for the purpose of appeasing the ghost, who otherwise would have attacked them.[145]

This deep-seated fear of the dead has survived the conversion, real or nominal, of the Marquesans to Christianity. No native would even now venture into a cave where the remains of the dead have been deposited, not though the greatest treasures were to be found there, for such spots are believed to be constantly haunted by the ghosts of the departed. Nobody, it is said, would live in a house in which somebody has died; every such dwelling is immediately burnt down. Hence, when a person is grievously sick, a little primitive hut is erected beside the house, and he is carried out to die in it, and when he is dead, the hut is in like manner destroyed with fire.[146] A woman will sometimes commit suicide in order that her ghost may haunt and torment her unfaithful husband.[147]

On the other hand, ghosts in the olden time had also their utility, for they could be summoned up by a priest or priestess to give information on various subjects, such as the issue of an illness. On these occasions the wizard would hold a conversation with the spirit, whose voice could be heard by the listeners, though his or her shape, as usual, was invisible in the darkness. Sceptics thought that such communications were made by means of ventriloquism, and indeed a priestess, who had professed to evoke the soul of a dead chieftainess, solemnly maintained that she could make the voice of anybody, whether dead or alive, to speak from her stomach.[148]

In such beliefs and customs are contained as in germ the whole theory and practice of the worship of the dead.

Note.—We possess no thorough account of the native Marquesan society and religion as these existed before they were transformed by European influence. Some of the writers who have described the islanders and their customs spent only a few days or at most a few weeks among them. Captain Cook was at the Marquesas only five days, from the 6th to the 11th of April 1774.[149] The French explorer Marchand spent eight days in the islands from the 13th to the 21st of June 1791.[150] The Russian explorers Krusenstern and Lisiansky were with their two ships, the Nadeshda and Neva, at Nukahiva for ten days, from the 7th to the 17th of May 1804; along with them was the naturalist Langsdorff, who wrote an independent account of the voyage.[151] But though their stay was short, they had the advantage of meeting with two Europeans, an Englishman named E. Roberts, and a Frenchman named Jean (or Joseph) Baptiste Cabri, who had lived long in the islands and spoke the native language. These men acted as interpreters to the Russians and supplied them with most of the information which they give in their books concerning the customs and beliefs of the Marquesans. Roberts told them that he had been seven years in Nukahiva and two years previously in Santa Christina (Tau-ata); that he had been put ashore on the latter island out of an English merchant ship, the crew of which had mutinied against their captain and could not prevail upon him to join their party; and that in Nukahiva he had lately married a relation of the king's, by which he acquired great consideration, so that it would be easy for him to be of assistance to them. At the same time he earnestly warned them against the Frenchman, who had also resided for some years in Nukahiva, but whose character he painted in very dark colours. The two Russian captains, Krusenstern and Lisiansky, accordingly put their trust in Roberts and drew most of their information concerning the natives from him. On the other hand their naturalist, Langsdorff, made most use of the Frenchman. He admitted, indeed, that the Englishman was a man of better character, greater natural intelligence, and much higher education; but on the other hand he tells us that the Frenchman had been longer in the island and possessed a more thorough mastery of the language and a greater intimacy with the natives, among whom he had lived as a savage among savages so long that he had almost forgotten his own native tongue. But Langsdorff took care to question both these men and only accepted as true statements in which they agreed with each other, and to this agreement he naturally attached the greater weight because his two informants were bitterly hostile to each other and therefore were unlikely to unite in deceiving him.[152] On the whole, then, the account which Langsdorff gives of Marquesan society and religion is perhaps more trustworthy as well as fuller than that of his two compatriots and companions, Krusenstern and Lisiansky.