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Exhibitions of fire walking, given by a priestly cult from the island of Mbengga, are too well known now to permit much discussion. Before these shows became popular features for tourist ships and visiting royalty I saw them dozens of times on their native ground. There have been any number of scientific treatises written to account for the phenomenon of bare Fijian feet which remain unscorched after contact with burning stones. As a physician I have studied the condition of the fire walkers before and after the ordeal, and I have always gone away with the feeling that I have seen a miracle. The old Mbengga myth which says that Ra Duna the Eel taught the hero Koma how to do the trick seems about as good an explanation as any I have heard.
Among the dark islanders magic things are usually grim, although there is a faded myth about the neli people, a race of elves with long golden hair. They dance by moonlight, and if one of the golden hairs touches a peeping mortal he forgets how to find his way home. They say that native boys and girls who stayed out late usually blamed it on the neli. But belief in the little folk is passing.
The giving of curses is a serious everyday affair. In groups less advanced than Fiji the witch doctor commits simple murder. I have mentioned the Poisoner’s College at Mou. And there is the celebrated case of Captain Bell, Government tax collector, who went out in the Solomons on his unpopular errand and was speared by savages, sent to carry out a practical draunikau.
Inspector Bill Tully was down in the primitive New Hebrides. One morning his breakfast had been laid on a veranda; below many natives were gathered for a lecture. Tully sat down to breakfast when a witch doctor, in full paint, stepped up and flourished a bamboo wand, telling the world he held the magic that would kill. “Go ahead,” challenged Tully, so the magician tapped his wand on a plate. A little powder sifted out. Scornfully the young inspector blew it away and ordered his boy to bring bacon and eggs.
Bill finished his breakfast in full view of a very watchful audience. So far so good. But he had scarcely bolted the last scrap when he felt a griping in his stomach; cold sweat broke out, and he knew that he had turned pale green. He must have been a sickening sight, for the gawping natives screamed and scampered to the woods. It took Bill some minutes to recover equilibrium. Then he remembered. He had taken a rather large dose of calomel, and the darned stuff had begun to operate shortly after the wizard tapped his plate.
Polynesian magic is not so black, perhaps, as that you’ll find all over Melanesia; but it is always there, hiding behind Christianity or even higher education. In the Cook Islands a father cursed his pretty daughter. He had elephantiasis, and she had jeered him for his “big-leg.” “Very well,” he said, “and may your especially beautiful legs, which have caused too much trouble already, swell up and become big as mine.” Accordingly her legs swelled, and she was disfigured. True, she had been sleeping in her father’s house for years, and the filarial mosquito is no respecter of persons.
The Maoris of New Zealand are superior Polynesians. When I was making a survey there Dr. Ellison, himself half Maori, told me of a case that had come under his direct observation. The Polynesians, he reminded me, are practically all spiritualists, and the average Maori has forgotten more about spiritualism than the European medium will ever know. Among the Tohunga cult there is power to bring death by a secret wish; in the Melanesian draunikau the victim is not affected until he knows that the curse is on him. But the Tohungas never telegraph their punches.
Dr. Ellison told me that a Mr. Haberley, half-Maori and an acquaintance of mine, was interested in the Wellington Museum and in search of fine Maori carvings. The quest took him to the region where Rua the Prophet held forth. Haberley found many neglected and rotting relics, but Rua defied him to lay hands on them. However, the collector took them to the museum. It wasn’t long before a serious illness overtook Haberley, who fell back on the customs of his mother’s people. He was of the Taranaki Maoris, so it was all in good form when he called in another Tohunga necromancer from Taranaki. Out of Mr. Haberley’s suavely educated lips came the command, “Save me if you can, and if you can’t, finish off Rua.” Very promptly the Tohunga put the bee on Rua the Prophet, who died during my survey of New Zealand. Haberley also died.