The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead Volume I Part 25

Another equally effective cure for sickness caused by ghosts is this.

You take a stout stick, cleave it down the middle so that the two ends remain entire, and give it to two men to hold. Then the sick man pokes his head through the cleft; after that you rub him with the stick from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. In this way you obviously sc.r.a.pe off the bloodsucking ghosts who are clinging like flies or mosquitoes to his person, and having thus transferred them to the cleft stick you throw it away or otherwise destroy it. The cure is now complete, and if the patient does not recover, he cannot reasonably blame the doctor, who has done all that humanly speaking could be done to bring back the bloom of health to the poor sick man.[443]

[Sidenote: Extravagant demonstrations of grief at the death of a sick man.]

If, however, the sick man obstinately persists in dying, there is a great uproar in the village. For the fear of his ghost has now fallen like a thunderclap on all the people. His disembodied spirit is believed to be hovering in the air, seeing everything that is done, hearing every word that is spoken, and woe to the unlucky wight who does not display a proper degree of sorrow for the irreparable loss that has just befallen the community. Accordingly shrieks of despair begin to resound, and crocodile tears to flow in cataracts. The whole population a.s.semble and give themselves up to the most frantic demonstrations of grief. Cries are raised on all sides, "Why must he die?" "Wherefore did they bewitch him?" "Those wicked, wicked men!" "I'll do for them!" "I'll hew them in pieces!" "I'll destroy their crops!" "I'll fell all their palm-trees!"

"I'll stick all their pigs!" "O brother, why did you leave me?" "O friend, how can I live without you?" To make good these threats one man will be seen prancing wildly about and stabbing with a spear at the invisible sorcerers; another catches up a cudgel and at one blow s.h.i.+vers a water-pot of the deceased into atoms, or rushes out like one demented and lays a palm-tree level with the ground. Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break.

They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. They coo to him softly, they lift up the languid head, and then lay it gently down. Then in a frenzy of grief one of them will leap to his feet, shriek, bellow, stamp on the floor, grapple with the roof beams, shake the walls, as if he would pull the house down, and finally hurl himself on the ground and roll over and over howling as if his distress was more than he could endure. Another looks wildly about him. He sees a knife. He grasps it.

His teeth are set, his mind is made up. "Why need he die?" he cries, "he, my friend, with whom I had all things in common, with whom I ate out of the same dish?" Then there is a quick movement of the knife, and down he falls. But he is not dead. He has only slit the flap of one of his ears, and the trickling blood bedabbles his body. Meantime with the hoa.r.s.e cries of the men are mingled the weeping and wailing, the shrill screams and lamentations of the women; while above all the din and uproar rises the booming sound of the sh.e.l.l trumpets blown to carry the tidings of death to all the villages in the neighbourhood. But gradually the wild tumult dies away into silence. Grief or the simulation of it has exhausted itself: the people grow calm; they sit down, they smoke or chew betel, while some engage in the last offices of attention to the dead.[444]

[Sidenote: Hypocritical character of these demonstrations, which are intended to deceive the ghost.]

A civilised observer who witnessed such a scene of boisterous lamentation, but did not know the natives well, might naturally set down all these frantic outbursts to genuine sorrow, and might enlarge accordingly on the affectionate nature of savages, who are thus cut to the heart by the death of any one of their acquaintance. But the missionary who knows them better a.s.sures us that most of these expressions of mourning and despair are a mere blind to deceive and soothe the dreaded ghost of the deceased into a comfortable persuasion that he is fondly loved and sadly missed by his surviving relatives and friends. This view of the essential hypocrisy of the lamentations is strongly confirmed by the threats which sick people will sometimes utter to their attendants. "If you don't take better care of me," a man will sometimes say, "and if you don't do everything you possibly can to preserve my valuable life, my ghost will serve you out." That is why friends and relations are so punctilious in paying visits of respect and condolence to the sick. Sometimes the last request which a dying man addresses to his kinsfolk is that they will kill this or that sorcerer who has killed him; and he enforces the injunction by threats of the terrible things he will do to them in his disembodied state if they fail to avenge his death on his imaginary murderer. As all the relatives of a dead man stand in fear of his ghost, the body may not be buried until all of them have had an opportunity of paying their respects to it. If, as sometimes happens, a corpse is interred before a relative can arrive from a distance, he will on arrival break out into reproaches and upbraidings against the grave-diggers for exposing him to the wrath of the departed spirit.[445]

[Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs of the Kai. Preservation of the lower jawbone.]

When all the relations and friends have a.s.sembled and testified their sorrow, the body is buried on the second or third day after death. The grave is usually dug under the house and is so shallow that even when it has been closed the stench is often very perceptible. The ornaments which were placed on the body when it was laid out are removed before it is lowered into the grave, and the dead takes his last rest wrapt in a simple leaf-mat. Often a dying man expresses a wish not to be buried. In that case his corpse, tightly bandaged, is deposited in a corner of the house, and the products of decomposition are allowed to drain through a tube into the ground. When they have ceased to run, the bundle is opened and the bones taken out and buried, except the lower jawbone, which is preserved, sometimes along with one of the lower arm bones. The lower jawbone reminds the possessor of the duty of blood revenge which he owes to the deceased, and which the dying man may have inculcated on him with his last breath. The lower arm bone brings luck in the chase, especially if the departed relative was a mighty hunter. However, if the hunters have a long run of bad luck, they conclude that the ghost has departed to the under world and accordingly bury the lower arm bone and the lower jawbone with the rest of the skeleton. The length of the period of mourning is similarly determined by the good or bad fortune of the huntsmen. If the ghost provides them with game in abundance for a long time after his death, the days of mourning are proportionately extended; but when the game grows scarce or fails altogether, the mourning comes to an end and the memory of the deceased soon fades away.[446] The savage is a thoroughly practical man and is not such a fool as to waste his sorrow over a ghost who gives him nothing in return. Nothing for nothing is his principle. His relations to the dead stand on a strictly commercial basis.

[Sidenote: Mourning costume. Widows strangled to accompany their dead husbands.]

The mourning costume consists of strings round the neck, bracelets of reed on the arms, and a cylindrical hat of bark on the head. A widow is swathed in nets. The intention of the costume is to signify to the ghost the sympathy which the mourner feels for him in his disembodied state.

If the man in his lifetime was wont to crouch s.h.i.+vering over the fire, a little fire will be kept up for a time at the foot of the grave in order to warm his homeless spirit.[447] The widow or widower has to discharge the disagreeable duty of living day and night for several weeks in a hovel built directly over the grave. Not unfrequently the lot of a widow is much harder. At her own request she is sometimes strangled and buried with her husband in the grave, in order that her soul may accompany his on the journey to the other world. The other relations have no interest in encouraging the woman to sacrifice herself, rather the contrary; but if she insists they fear to balk her, lest they should offend the ghost of her husband, who would punish them in many ways for keeping his wife from him. But even such voluntary sacrifices, if we may believe Mr. Ch.

Keysser, are dictated rather by a selfish calculation than by an impulse of disinterested affection. He mentions the case of a man named Jabu, both of whose wives chose thus to attend their husband in death. The deceased was an industrious man, a skilful hunter and farmer, who provided his wives with abundance of food. As such men are believed to work hard also in the other world, tilling fields and killing game just as here, the widows thought they could not do better than follow him as fast as possible to the spirit land, since they had no prospect of getting such another husband here on earth. "How firmly convinced," adds the missionary admiringly, "must these people be of the reality of another world when they sacrifice their earthly existence, not for the sake of a better life hereafter, but merely in order to be no worse off there than they have been on earth." And he adds that this consideration explains why no man ever chooses to be strangled at the death of his wife. The labour market in the better land is apparently not recruited from the ranks of women.[448]

[Sidenote: House or village deserted after a death.]

The house in which anybody has died is deserted, because the ghost of the dead is believed to haunt it and make it unsafe at night. If the deceased was a chief or a man of importance, the whole village is abandoned and a new one built on another site.[449]

[Footnote 415: Stefan Lehner, "Bukaua," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. (Berlin, 1911) pp. 395-485.]

[Footnote 416: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 399, 433 _sq._, 437 _sqq._]

[Footnote 417: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 399.]

[Footnote 418: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 414.]

[Footnote 419: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 466, 468.]

[Footnote 420: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 469.]

[Footnote 421: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 462 _sqq._, 466, 467, 471 _sqq._]

[Footnote 422: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 462.]

[Footnote 423: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 444 _sq._]

[Footnote 424: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 434 _sqq._; compare _id._, pp.

478 _sq._]

[Footnote 425: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 462.]

[Footnote 426: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 430, 470, 472 _sq._, 474 _sq._]

[Footnote 427: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 403.]

[Footnote 428: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 402-410.]

[Footnote 429: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 410-414.]

[Footnote 430: Ch. Keysser, "Aus dem Leben der Kaileute," in R.

Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 3-6.]

[Footnote 431: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 12 _sq._, 17-20.]

[Footnote 432: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 9-12.]

[Footnote 433: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 111.]

[Footnote 434: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 113.]

[Footnote 435: Compare Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_ (London, 1912), ii. 221 _sq._: "It has often been attempted to exhibit the mental life of savage peoples as profoundly different from our own; to a.s.sert that they act from motives, and reach conclusions by means of mental processes, so utterly different from our own motives and processes that we cannot hope to interpret or understand their behaviour unless we can first, by some impossible or at least by some hitherto undiscovered method, learn the nature of these mysterious motives and processes. These attempts have recently been renewed in influential quarters. If these views were applied to the savage peoples of the interior of Borneo, we should characterise them as fanciful delusions natural to the anthropologist who has spent all the days of his life in a stiff collar and a black coat upon the well-paved ways of civilised society. We have no hesitation in saying that, the more intimately one becomes acquainted with these pagan tribes, the more fully one realises the close similarity of their mental processes to one's own. Their primary impulses and emotions seem to be in all respects like our own.

It is true that they are very unlike the typical civilised man of some of the older philosophers, whose every action proceeded from a nice and logical calculation of the algebraic sum of pleasures and pains to be derived from alternative lines of conduct; but we ourselves are equally unlike that purely mythical personage. The Kayan or the Iban often acts impulsively in ways which by no means conduce to further his best interests or deeper purposes; but so do we also. He often reaches conclusions by processes that cannot be logically justified; but so do we also. He often holds, and upon successive occasions acts upon, beliefs that are logically inconsistent with one another; but so do we also." For further testimonies to the reasoning powers of savages, which it would be superfluous to affirm if it were not at present a fas.h.i.+on with some theorists to deny, see _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp.

420 _sqq._ And on the tendency of the human mind in general, not of the savage mind in particular, calmly to acquiesce in inconsistent and even contradictory conclusions, I may refer to a note in _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, Second Edition, p. 4. But indeed to observe such contradictions in practice the philosopher need not quit his own study.]

[Footnote 436: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 111 _sq._]

[Footnote 437: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 112.]

[Footnote 438: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 140. As to the magical tubes in which the sorcerer seals up some part of his victim's soul, see _id._, p. 135.]

[Footnote 439: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 140 _sq._]

[Footnote 440: Mr. Keysser indeed affirms that in the mind of the Kai sorcery "is regarded as the cause of all deaths" (_op. cit._ p. 102), and again that "all men without exception die in consequence of the baneful acts of these sorcerers and their accomplices" (p. 134); and again that "even in the case of old people they a.s.sume sorcery to be the cause of death; to sorcery, too, all misfortunes whatever are ascribed"

(p. 140). But that these statements are exaggerations seems to follow from Mr. Keysser's own account of the wounds, sicknesses, and deaths which these savages attribute to ghosts and not to sorcerers.]

[Footnote 441: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 141.]

[Footnote 442: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 133 _sq._]

[Footnote 443: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 141 _sq._]

[Footnote 444: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 80 _sq._, 142.]

[Footnote 445: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 142.]

[Footnote 446: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 83.]

[Footnote 447: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 142 _sq._]

[Footnote 448: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 83 _sq._, 143.]