Ndrau-ni-kau is the Fijian word meaning “magic-of-leaves.” You might call it the foundation of the old-time religion. No Melanesian believes that he can grow ill or die from natural causes like dysentery or influenza—look for the enemy who has hired a sorcerer to lay you low. Even the diagnosis of the District Medical Officer will not change the native mind. The curse is on him, therefore the cursed will die unless some more potent witch doctor is called in to magic away the spell. The Melanesian’s ghost-religion is dreadful. When a man dies and is planted underground his soul loses its kindly nature; your sweet and gentle mother or father or grandfather turns into a tevoro, a fiend plotting mischief to his own. And the tevoro becomes a principal actor in the long ritual which brings a plague on your house.
The professional making of a draunikau is as complicated a process as that used by the demonologists of medieval Europe. As in the cruder magic of the puri-puri men, the practitioner obtains a bit of clothing or hair or feces from his victim’s person. These things, mixed with leaves, are shut up in a bamboo joint—or more modernly, in a bottle. The mage who follows this craft is merely employed by the hater to work evil on the hated.
Although the approved methods might be roughly classified as the Seven Ways of Cursing, one general practice is for the performer to take his bottle of draunikau to some chosen graveyard where the tevoro lies underground. The curse called tava vatu is said to be the most difficult to beat. Among the graves grows a special plant called uthi whose leaves the magician roasts on hot stones, and calls out that this is the draunikau by which So-and-so must die; out of the smoking leaves the voice of the victim cries aloud. Then the draunikau is buried and the victim will die in about four days, unless the curse is prayed off by a rival expert, who sprinkles his own special brew on the hot stones and repeats, “This is the sorosorovi by which the man shall live.” The sorosorovi, wrapped in leaves, is taken to the sick man’s house and displayed so prominently that the tevoro will mistake it for the draunikau and float into it. So now he’s caught, and the benevolent witch doctor throws the package into water. The devil is foiled, and becomes so angry that he will enter the body of the witch doctor who first summoned him, and this man will die in four days.
Kena balavu is a slower torment; every time you heat the draunikau the object of hatred becomes ill; when it cools he becomes better. The patient’s sickness is determined by the mixture put in the bottle. If it is a hair from his head, then he will have head-sickness, if parings from his toenails, then foot-sickness, and so on. A rival doctor may lift the spell by finding the bamboo where the hell’s broth is buried; he will heat the bamboo and rinse it in salt water, then dose and massage the sufferer with magic leaves. The sorcerer who comes to cure is called the “antagonist.” Before the antagonist digs up the draunikau he must pour kava for four nights over the spot where it is buried. But if the patient dies, then the witch doctor who cursed him must save his own life by stealing to the victim’s body and jabbing it with some sharp instrument, or, after the man is buried, he must pierce the grave with a spear. Otherwise the magician will die in four nights. And if friends wrap a breadfruit in mummy-apple leaves and put it under the corpse’s arm, the evil wizard will die of heart disease.
Kena leka is another hot-stone draunikau, very swift because the death ritual has been said by moonlight. The tevoro floats from the grave to some large tree by a lake or river. Sova yanggona is among the most popular of the curses. On the grave of one of the victim’s ancestors a libation of kava is poured, with supplications for death. Tei nia, the coconut curse, is said to have no antagonism. The operator waters sacred ground with kava, then plants a coconut. When it sprouts he transplants it—and his man is dead.
Ndrimi is a Solomon Island importation. Dip your finger in the magic-of-leaves and touch the hated one. The more potent ndrimi doctors can bring sickness by pointing a finger. This power gives Solomon Islanders a prestige in Fiji. If a black boy from Bougainville wants a pretty local girl he merely says ndrimi—and gets her.
The classic forms have often inter-pollenized, and Christianity and water-front trading have added comedy. There are a number of specialists who mix whisky and the Bible with their efforts to kill or cure. Hard liquor is forbidden the natives, so a full bottle adds charm to necromancy. One of our native medical practitioners witnessed the work of an up-to-date witch doctor, called in to antagonize a draunikau. He prescribed a tablespoonful of whisky and a verse from the New Testament, then began taking his own medicine, in liquid form. As our N.M.P. reported it, “He seemed quite drunk.”
This modern technique, plus the dreadful sova yanggona, had to do with a recent cause célèbre, which I am leading up to. Here the magicians used the lantern-and-mirror technique. They went by night to an ancestral cemetery where one man held a lantern, another a mirror and the third poured kava with the death-prayer. Pleased with his drink, the tevoro awoke.... Look in the mirror and see his cruel face! See, he is shaking the grave-dust from his body! Now ask him to follow you!
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What I have heard has come to me after much curious prying. I had been down there nearly twenty years before I could dig any of it out. It is not general knowledge among the whites. The missionaries should have known, but too many of them never turn to see what’s going on behind their backs. Superior natives, especially Fijians, have furnished the most valuable data. Benuve Vakatawa, N.M.P., whose work had been among his people, became quite an authority. Once I asked him how the native reconciled the two religions, the old gods and the new God. Did they not call upon Jehovah and Jesus to protect them from the evil old Fijian divinities? He shook his head. I asked, “What is the true religion in Fiji, Christianity or Magic?” He said unhesitatingly, “Magic.” Christianity was just a cloak, held up before European eyes to hide the worship of devils and satanic miracles. The people did not want Europeans to interfere with ancient demonology, he said, but Christianity had its place—it was “society,” as the European knows it in his dances, theaters and ouija-board parties. It had an amusement value.