The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead Part 41

Again, there is a very terrible giant armed with a great axe, who lies in wait for all and sundry. He makes no nice distinction between the married and the unmarried, but strikes out at all ghosts indiscriminately. Those whom he wounds dare not present themselves in their damaged state to the great G.o.d Ndengei; so they never reach the happy fields, but are doomed to roam the rugged mountains disconsolate.

However, many ghosts contrive to slip past him unscathed. It is said that after the introduction of fire-arms into the islands the ghost of a certain chief made very good use of a musket which had been providentially buried with his body. When the giant drew near and was about to lunge out with the axe in his usual style, the ghost discharged the blunderbuss in his face, and while the giant was fully engaged in dodging the hail of bullets, the chief rushed past him and now enjoys celestial happiness.[779] Some lay the scene of this encounter a little beyond the town of Nambanaggatai; for it is to be remembered that many of the places in the Path of the Souls were identified with real places in the Fijian Islands. And the name of the giant is Samu-yalo, that is, the Killer of Souls. He artfully conceals himself in some mangrove bushes just beyond the town, from which he rushes out in the nick of time to fell the pa.s.sing ghosts. Whenever he kills a ghost, he cooks and eats him and that is the end of the poor ghost. It is the second death.

The highway to the Elysian fields runs, or used to run, right through the town of Nambanaggatai; so all the doorways of the houses were placed opposite each other to allow free and uninterrupted pa.s.sage to the invisible travellers. And the inhabitants spoke to each other in low tones and communicated at a little distance by signs. The screech of a paroquet in the woods was the signal of the approach of a ghost or ghosts; the number of screeches was proportioned to the number of the ghosts,--one screech, one ghost, and so on.[780]

[Sidenote: A trap for unwary ghosts.]

Souls who escape the Killer of Souls pa.s.s on till they come to Naindelinde, one of the highest peaks of the Kauvandra mountains. Here the path ends abruptly on the brink of a precipice, the foot of which is washed by a deep lake. Over the edge of the precipice projects a large steer-oar, and the handle is held either by the great G.o.d Ndengei himself or, according to the better opinion, by his deputy. When a ghost comes up and peers ruefully over the precipice, the deputy accosts him.

"Under what circ.u.mstances," he asks, "do you come to us? How did you conduct yourself in the other world?" Should the ghost be a man of rank, he may say, "I am a great chief. I lived as a chief, and my conduct was that of a chief. I had great wealth, many wives, and ruled over a powerful people. I have destroyed many towns, and slain many in war."

"Good, good," says the deputy, "just sit down on the blade of that oar, and refresh yourself in the cool breeze." If the ghost is unwary enough to accept the invitation, he has no sooner seated himself on the blade of the oar with his legs dangling over the abyss, than the deputy-deity tilts up the other end of the oar and precipitates him into the deep water, far far below. A loud smack is heard as the ghost collides with the water, there is a splash, a gurgle, a ripple, and all is over. The ghost has gone to his account in Murimuria, a very second-rate sort of heaven, if it is nothing worse. But a ghost who is in favour with the great G.o.d Ndengei is warned by him not to sit down on the blade of the oar but on the handle. The ghost takes the hint and seats himself firmly on the safe end of the oar; and when the deputy-deity tries to heave it up, he cannot, for he has no purchase. So the ghost remains master of the situation, and after an interval for refreshment is sent back to earth to be deified.[781]

[Sidenote: Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven. The Fijian Elysium.]

In Murimuria, which, as I said, is an inferior sort of heaven, the departed souls by no means lead a life of pure and unmixed enjoyment.

Some of them are punished for the sins they committed in the flesh. But the Fijian notion of sin differs widely from ours. Thus we saw that the ghosts of men who did no murder in their lives were punished for their negligence by having to pound muck with clubs. Again, people who had not their ears bored on earth are forced in Hades to go about for ever bearing on their shoulders one of the logs of wood on which bark-cloth is beaten out with mallets, and all who see the sinner bending under the load jeer at him. Again, women who were not tattooed in their life are chased by the female ghosts, who scratch and cut and tear them with sharp sh.e.l.ls, giving them no respite; or they sc.r.a.pe the flesh from their bones and bake it into bread for the G.o.ds. And ghosts who have done anything to displease the G.o.ds are laid flat on their faces in rows and converted into taro beds. But the few who do find their way into the Fijian Elysium are blest indeed. There the sky is always cloudless; the groves are perfumed with delicious scents; the open glades in the forest are pleasant; there is abundance of all that heart can desire. Language fails to describe the ineffable bliss of the happy land. There the souls of the truly good, who have murdered many of their fellows on earth and fed on their roasted bodies, are lapped in joy for ever.[782]

[Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of transmigration.]

Nevertheless the souls of the dead were not universally believed to depart by the Spirit Path to the other world or to stay there for ever.

To a certain extent the doctrines of transmigration found favour with the Fijians. Some of them held that the spirits of the dead wandered about the villages in various shapes and could make themselves visible or invisible at pleasure. The places which these vagrant souls loved to haunt were known to the people, who in pa.s.sing by them were wont to make propitiatory offerings of food or cloth. For that reason, too, they were very loth to go abroad on a dark night lest they should come bolt upon a ghost. Further, it was generally believed that the soul of a celebrated chief might after death enter into some young man of the tribe and animate him to deeds of valour. Persons so distinguished were pointed out and regarded as highly favoured; great respect was paid to them, they enjoyed many personal privileges, and their opinions were treated with much consideration.[783]

[Sidenote: Few souls saved under the old Fijian dispensation.]

On the whole, when we survey the many perils which beset the way to the Fijian heaven, and the many risks which the souls of the dead ran of dying the second death in the other world or of being knocked on the head by the living in this, we shall probably agree with the missionary Mr. Williams in concluding that under the old Fijian dispensation there were few indeed that were saved. "Few, comparatively," he says, "are left to inhabit the regions of Mbulu, and the immortality even of these is sometimes disputed. The belief in a future state is universal in Fiji; but their superst.i.tious notions often border upon transmigration, and sometimes teach an eventual annihilation."[784]

[Sidenote: Concluding observations.]

Here I must break off my survey of the natural belief in immortality among mankind. At the outset I had expected to carry the survey further, but I have already exceeded the usual limits of these lectures and I must not trespa.s.s further on your patience. Yet the enquiry which I have opened seems worthy to be pursued, and if circ.u.mstances should admit of it, I shall hope at some future time to resume the broken thread of these researches and to follow it a little further through the labyrinth of human history. Be that as it may, I will now conclude with a few general observations suggested by the facts which I have laid before you.

[Sidenote: Strength and universality of the natural belief in immortality among savages. Wars between savage tribes spring in large measure from their belief in immortality. Economic loss involved in sacrifices to the dead.]

In the first place, then, it is impossible not to be struck by the strength, and perhaps we may say the universality, of the natural belief in immortality among the savage races of mankind. With them a life after death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture, of hope and fear; it is a practical certainty which the individual as little dreams of doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence. He a.s.sumes it without enquiry and acts upon it without hesitation, as if it were one of the best-ascertained truths within the limits of human experience. The belief influences his att.i.tude towards the higher powers, the conduct of his daily life, and his behaviour towards his fellows; more than that, it regulates to a great extent the relations of independent communities to each other. For the state of war, which normally exists between many, if not most, neighbouring savage tribes, springs in large measure directly from their belief in immortality; since one of the commonest motives for hostility is a desire to appease the angry ghosts of friends, who are supposed to have perished by the baleful arts of sorcerers in another tribe, and who, if vengeance is not inflicted on their real or imaginary murderers, will wreak their fury on their undutiful fellow-tribesmen. Thus the belief in immortality has not merely coloured the outlook of the individual upon the world; it has deeply affected the social and political relations of humanity in all ages; for the religious wars and persecutions, which distracted and devastated Europe for ages, were only the civilised equivalents of the battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst almost all races of savages of whom we possess a record. Regarded from this point of view, the faith in a life hereafter has been sown like dragons' teeth on the earth and has brought forth crop after crop of armed men, who have turned their swords against each other. And when we consider further the gratuitous and wasteful destruction of property as well as of life which is involved in sacrifices to the dead, we must admit that with all its advantages the belief in immortality has entailed heavy economical losses upon the races--and they are practically all the races of the world--who have indulged in this expensive luxury. It is not for me to estimate the extent and gravity of the consequences, moral, social, political, and economic, which flow directly from the belief in immortality. I can only point to some of them and commend them to the serious attention of historians and economists, as well as of moralists and theologians.

[Sidenote: How does the savage belief in immortality bear on the question of the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? The answer depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature. The view of the grandeur and dignity of man.]

My second observation concerns, not the practical consequences of the belief in immortality, but the question of its truth or falsehood. That, I need hardly say, is an even more difficult problem than the other, and as I intimated at the outset of the lectures I find myself wholly incompetent to solve it. Accordingly I have confined myself to the comparatively easy task of describing some of the forms of the belief and some of the customs to which it has given rise, without presuming to pa.s.s judgment upon them. I must leave it to others to place my collections of facts in the scales and to say whether they incline the balance for or against the truth of this momentous belief, which has been so potent for good or ill in history. In every enquiry much depends upon the point of view from which the enquirer approaches his subject; he will see it in different proportions and in different lights according to the angle and the distance from which he regards it. The subject under discussion in the present case is human nature itself; and as we all know, men have formed very different estimates of themselves and their species. On the one hand, there are those who love to dwell on the grandeur and dignity of man, and who swell with pride at the contemplation of the triumphs which his genius has achieved in the visionary world of imagination as well as in the realm of nature.

Surely, they say, such a glorious creature was not born for mortality, to be snuffed out like a candle, to fade like a flower, to pa.s.s away like a breath. Is all that penetrating intellect, that creative fancy, that vaulting ambition, those n.o.ble pa.s.sions, those far-reaching hopes, to come to nothing, to shrivel up into a pinch of dust? It is not so, it cannot be. Man is the flower of this wide world, the lord of creation, the crown and consummation of all things, and it is to wrong him and his creator to imagine that the grave is the end of all. To those who take this lofty view of human nature it is easy and obvious to find in the similar beliefs of savages a welcome confirmation of their own cherished faith, and to insist that a conviction so widely spread and so firmly held must be based on some principle, call it instinct or intuition or what you will, which is deeper than logic and cannot be confuted by reasoning.

[Sidenote: The view of the pettiness and insignificance of man.]

On the other hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and l.u.s.t, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of s.p.a.ce, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and stars have crumbled into dust, shall be built upon their ruins in the long long hereafter? It is not so, it cannot be. The claim is nothing but the outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion.

They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its destiny nothing but a product of childish ignorance, the hallucinations of hysteria, the ravings of insanity, or the concoctions of deliberate fraud and imposture. They dismiss the whole of them as a pack of superst.i.tions and lies, unworthy the serious attention of a rational mind; and they say that if such drivellings do not refute the belief in immortality, as indeed from the nature of things they cannot do, they are at least fitted to invest its high-flown pretensions with an air of ludicrous absurdity.

[Sidenote: The conclusion left open.]

Such are the two opposite views which I conceive may be taken of the savage testimony to the survival of our conscious personality after death. I do not presume to adopt the one or the other. It is enough for me to have laid a few of the facts before you. I leave you to draw your own conclusion.

[Footnote 701: Berthold Seeman, _Viti, an Account of a Government Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Islands_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 391 _sq._]

[Footnote 702: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 216.]

[Footnote 703: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 216, 218 _sq._; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 112.]

[Footnote 704: Hazlewood, quoted by Capt. J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 246 _sq._]

[Footnote 705: Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 83 _sq._; Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 217 _sqq._]

[Footnote 706: Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 49, 86, 351, 352; Th.

Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 221-223; B. Seeman, _Viti_, pp.

392-394.]

[Footnote 707: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 191 _sq._]

[Footnote 708: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 223, 231.]

[Footnote 709: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 87; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 226, 227; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 157 _sqq._]

[Footnote 710: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 87 _sq._; Th. Williams, _op.

cit._ i. 224 _sq._; Capt. J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 250; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), pp. 166 _sq._ As for the treatment of castaways, see J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 249; Th.

Williams, _op. cit._ i. 210. The latter writer mentions a recent case in which fourteen or sixteen s.h.i.+pwrecked persons were cooked and eaten.]

[Footnote 711: The Rev. Lorimer Fison, in a letter to me dated August 26th, 1898. I have already quoted the pa.s.sage in _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, i. 378.]

[Footnote 712: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 225 _sq._]

[Footnote 713: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 231.]

[Footnote 714: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 97; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 53.]

[Footnote 715: John Jackson's Narrative, in Capt. J. E. Erskine's _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 464 _sq._, 472 _sq._ The genital members of the men over whom the canoe was dragged were cut off and hung on a sacred tree (_akau-tambu_), "which was already artificially prolific in fruit, both of the masculine and feminine gender." The tree which bore such remarkable fruit was commonly an ironweed tree standing in a conspicuous situation. As to these sacrifices compare Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii.

97; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, pp. xvi. _sq._]

[Footnote 716: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i, 112.]

[Footnote 717: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55.]

[Footnote 718: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, pp. xx., xxi.

_sq._; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 247; B. Seeman, _Viti_ (Cambridge, 1862), p. 401.]

[Footnote 719: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55 _sq._ The writer witnessed what he calls the ceremony of consecration in the case of a young man of the highest rank in Somosomo and he has described what he saw. In this case a special hut was not built for the manslayer, and he was allowed to pa.s.s the nights in the temple of the war G.o.d.]

[Footnote 720: See above, pp. 205 _sq._, 229 _sq._, 258, 279 _sq._, 323, 396, 415.]

[Footnote 721: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55.]

[Footnote 722: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 98, 99 _sq._ Compare Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 163: "A person who has defiled himself by touching a corpse is called _yambo_, and is not allowed to touch food with his hands for several days." The custom as to a surviving widow is mentioned by Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 198.]

[Footnote 723: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 167.]