The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead

[Footnote 458: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 148 _sq._]

[Footnote 459: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 149.]

[Footnote 460: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 147.]

[Footnote 461: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 145.]

[Footnote 462: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 145.]

[Footnote 463: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 145 _sq._]

[Footnote 464: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 149 _sq._]

[Footnote 465: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 112, 150 _sq._]

[Footnote 466: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 151-154. In this pa.s.sage the ghosts are spoken of simply as spirits (_Geister_); but the context proves that the spirits in question are those of the dead.]

[Footnote 467: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 34-40.]

[Footnote 468: G. Bamler, "Tami," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. (Berlin, 1911) p. 489; compare _ib._ p. vii.]

[Footnote 469: H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 315 _sq._]

[Footnote 470: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ p. 518.]

[Footnote 471: G. Bamler, _l.c._]

[Footnote 472: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 518 _sq._]

[Footnote 473: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 519-522.]

[Footnote 474: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ p. 518.]

LECTURE XIV

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN AND DUTCH NEW GUINEA

[Sidenote: The Tami doctrine of souls and G.o.ds. The Tago spirits, represented by masked men.]

At the close of the last lecture I dealt with the Tami, a people of Melanesian stock who inhabit a group of islands off the mainland of New Guinea. I explained their theory of the human soul. According to them, every man has two distinct souls, a long one and a short one, both of which survive his death, but depart in different directions, one of them repairing to the lower world, and the other being last sighted off the coast of New Britain. But the knowledge which these savages possess of the spiritual world is not limited to the souls of men; they are acquainted with several deities (_buwun_), who live in the otherwise uninhabited island of Djan. They are beings of an amorous disposition, and though their real shape is that of a fish's body with a human head, they can take on the form of men in order to seduce women. They also cause epidemics and earthquakes; yet the people shew them no respect, for they believe them to be dull-witted as well as lecherous. At most, if a fearful epidemic is raging, they will offer the G.o.ds a lean little pig or a mangy cur; and should an earthquake last longer than usual they will rap on the ground, saying, "Hullo, you down there! easy a little!

We men are still here." They also profess acquaintance with a G.o.d named Anuto, who created the heaven and the earth together with the first man and woman. He is a good being; n.o.body need be afraid of him. At festivals and meat markets the Tami offer him the first portion in a little basket, which a lad carries away into the wood and leaves there.

As usual, the deity consumes only the soul of the offering; the bearer eats the material substance.[475] The Tami further believe in certain spirits called Tago which are very old, having been created at the same time as the village. Every family or clan possesses its own familiar spirits of this cla.s.s. They are represented by men who disguise their bodies in dense ma.s.ses of sago leaves and their faces in grotesque masks with long hooked noses. In this costume the maskers jig it as well as the heavy unwieldy disguise allows them to do. But the dance consists in little more than running round and round in a circle, with an occasional hop; the orchestra stands in the middle, singing and thumping drums.

Sometimes two or three of the masked men will make a round of the village, pelting the men with pebbles or hard fruits, while the women and children scurry out of their way. When they are not in use the masks are hidden away in a hut in the forest, which women and children may not approach. Their secret is sternly kept: any betrayal of it is punished with death. The season for the exhibition of these masked dances recurs only once in ten or twelve years, but it extends over a year or thereabout. During the whole of the dancing-season, curiously enough, coco-nuts are strictly tabooed; no person may eat them, so that the unused nuts acc.u.mulate in thousands. As coco-nuts ordinarily form a daily article of diet with the Tami, their prohibition for a year is felt by the people as a privation. The meaning of the prohibition and also of the masquerades remains obscure.[476]

[Sidenote: The superhuman beings with whom the Tami are chiefly concerned are the souls of the dead. Offerings to the dead.]

But while the Tami believe in G.o.ds and spirits of various sorts, the superhuman beings with whom they chiefly concern themselves are the souls of the dead. On this subject Mr. Bamler writes: "All the spirits whom we have thus far described are of little importance in the life and thought of the Tami; they are remembered only on special occasions. The spirits who fill the thoughts and attract the attention of the Tami are the _kani_, that is, the souls of the departed. The Tami therefore practise the worship of ancestors. Yet the memory of ancestors does not reach far back; people occupy themselves only with the souls of those relatives whom they have personally known. Hence the worship seldom extends beyond the grandfather, even when a knowledge of more remote progenitors survives. An offering to the ancestors takes the form of a little dish of boiled taro, a cigar, betel-nuts, and the like; but the spirits partake only of the image or soul of the things offered, while the material substance falls to the share of mankind. There is no fixed rule as to the manner or time of the offering. It is left to the caprice or childlike affection of the individual to decide how he will make it.

With most natives it is a simple matter of business, the throwing of a sprat to catch a salmon; the man brings his offering only when he needs the help of the spirits. There is very little ceremony about it. The offerer will say, for example, 'There, I lay a cigar for you; smoke it and hereafter drive fish towards me'; or, 'Accompany me on the journey, and see to it that I do good business.' The place where the food is presented is the shelf for pots and dishes under the roof. Thus they imagine that the spirits exert a tolerably far-reaching influence over all created things, and it is their notion that the spirits take possession of the objects. In like manner the spirits can injure a man by thwarting his plans, for example, by frightening away the fish, blighting the fruits of the fields, and so forth. If the native is forced to conclude that the spirits are against him, he has no hesitation about deceiving them in the grossest manner. Should the requisite sacrifices be inconvenient to him, he flatly refuses them, or gives the shabbiest things he can find. In all this the native displays the same craft and cunning which he is apt to practise in his dealings with the whites. He fears the power which the spirit has over him, yet he tries whether he cannot outwit the spirit like an arrant block-head."[477]

[Sidenote: Crude motives for sacrifice.]

This account of the crude but quite intelligible motives which lead these savages to sacrifice to the spirits of their dead may be commended to the attention of writers on the history of religion who read into primitive sacrifice certain subtle and complex ideas which it never entered into the mind of primitive man to conceive and which, even if they were explained to him, he would in all probability be totally unable to understand.

[Sidenote: Lamboam, the land of the dead.]

According to the Tami, the souls of the dead live in the nether world.

The spirit-land is called Lamboam; the entrance to it is by a cleft in a rock. The natives of the mainland also call Hades by the name of Lamboam; but whereas according to them every village has its own little Lamboam, the Tami hold that there is only one big Lamboam for everybody, though it is subdivided into many mansions, of which every village has one to itself. In Lamboam everything is fairer and more perfect than on earth. The fruits are so plentiful that the blessed spirits can, if they choose, give themselves up to the delights of idleness; the villages are full of ornamental plants. Yet on the other hand we are informed that life beneath the ground is very like life above it: people work and marry, they squabble and wrangle, they fall sick and even die, just as people do on earth. Souls which die the second death in Lamboam are changed into vermin, such as ants and worms; however, others say that they turn into wood-spirits, who do men a mischief in the fields. It is not so easy as is commonly supposed to effect an entrance into the spirit-land. You must pa.s.s a river, and even when you have crossed it you will be very likely to suffer from the practical jokes which the merry old ghosts play on a raw newcomer. A very favourite trick of theirs is to send him up a panda.n.u.s tree to look for fruit. If he is simple enough to comply, they catch him by the legs as he is swarming up the trunk and drag him down, so that his whole body is fearfully scratched, if not quite ripped up, by the rough bark. That is why people put valuable things with the dead in the grave, in order that their ghosts on arrival in Lamboam may have the wherewithal to purchase the good graces of the facetious old stagers.[478]

[Sidenote: Return of the ghosts to earth, sometimes in the form of serpents.]

However, even when the ghosts have succeeded in effecting a lodgment in Lamboam, they are not strictly confined to it. They can break bounds at any moment and return to the upper air. This they do particularly when any of their surviving relations is at the point of death. Ghosts of deceased kinsfolk and of others gather round the parting soul and attend it to the far country. Yet sometimes, apparently, the soul sets out alone, for the anxious relatives will call out to it, "Miss not the way." But ghosts visit their surviving friends at other times than at the moment of death. For example, some families possess the power of calling up spirits in the form of serpents from the vasty deep. The spirits whom they evoke are usually those of persons who have died quite lately; for such ghosts cannot return to earth except in the guise of serpents. In this novel shape they naturally feel shy and hide under a mat. They come out only in the dusk of the evening or the darkness of night and sit on the shelf for pots and dishes under the roof. They have lost the faculty of speech and can express themselves only in whistles.

These whistles the seer, who is generally a woman, understands perfectly and interprets to his or her less gifted fellows. In this way a considerable body of information, more or less accurate in detail, is collected as to life in the other world. More than that, it is even possible for men, and especially for women, to go down alive into the nether world and prosecute their enquiries at first hand among the ghosts. Women who possess this remarkable faculty transmit it to their daughters, so that the profession is hereditary. When anybody wishes to ascertain how it fares with one of his dead kinsfolk in Lamboam, he has nothing to do but to engage the services of one of these professional mediums, giving her something which belonged to his departed friend. The medium rubs her forehead with ginger, muttering an incantation, lies down on the dead man's property, and falls asleep. Her soul then goes down in a dream to deadland and elicits from the ghosts the required information, which on waking from sleep she imparts to the anxious enquirer.[479]

[Sidenote: Sickness caused by a spirit.]

Sickness accompanied by fainting fits is ascribed to the action of a spirit, it may be the ghost of a near relation, who has carried off the "long soul" of the sufferer. The truant soul is recalled by a blast blown on a triton-sh.e.l.l, in which some chewed ginger or _ma.s.soi_ bark has been inserted. The booming sound attracts the attention of the vagrant spirit, while the smell of the bark or of the ginger drives away the ghost.[480]

[Sidenote: Tami lads supposed to be swallowed by a monster at circ.u.mcision; the monster and the bull-roarer are both called _kani_.]

The name which the Tami give to the spirits of the dead is _kani_; but like other tribes in this part of New Guinea they apply the same term to the bull-roarer and also to the mythical monster who is supposed to swallow the lads at circ.u.mcision. The ident.i.ty of the name for the three things seems to prove that in the mind of the Tami the initiatory rites, of which circ.u.mcision is the princ.i.p.al feature, are closely a.s.sociated with their conception of the state of the human soul after death, though what the precise nature of the a.s.sociation may be still remains obscure.

Like their neighbours on the mainland of New Guinea, the Tami give out that the novices at initiation are swallowed by a monster or dragon, who only consents to disgorge his prey in consideration of a tribute of pigs, the rate of the tribute being one novice one pig. In the act of disgorging the lad the dragon bites him, and the bite is visible to all in the cut called circ.u.mcision. The voice of the monster is heard in the hum of the bull-roarers, which are swung at the ceremony in such numbers and with such force that in still weather the booming sound may be heard across the sea for many miles. To impress women and children with an idea of the superhuman strength of the dragon deep grooves are cut in the trunks of trees and afterwards exhibited to the uninitiated as the marks made by the monster in tugging at the ropes which bound him to the trees. However, the whole thing is an open secret to the married women, though they keep their knowledge to themselves, fearing to incur the penalty of death which is denounced upon all who betray the mystery.

[Sidenote: The rite of circ.u.mcision. Seclusion and return of the newly circ.u.mcised lads.]

The initiatory rites are now celebrated only at intervals of many years.

When the time is come for the ceremony, women are banished from the village and special quarters prepared for them elsewhere; for they are strictly forbidden to set foot in the village while the monster or spirit who swallows the lads has his abode in it. A special hut is then built for the accommodation of the novices during the many months which they spend in seclusion before and after the operation of circ.u.mcision.

The hut represents the monster; it consists of a framework of thin poles covered with palm-leaf mats and tapering down at one end. Looked at from a distance it resembles a whale. The backbone is composed of a betel-nut palm, which has been grubbed up with its roots. The root with its fibres represents the monster's head and hair, and under it are painted a pair of eyes and a great mouth in red, white, and black. The pa.s.sage of the novices into the monster's belly is represented by causing them to defile past a row of men who hold bull-roarers aloft over the heads of the candidates. Before this march past takes place, each of the candidates is struck by the chief with a bull-roarer on his chin and brow. The operation of circ.u.mcising the lads is afterwards performed behind a screen set up near the monster-shaped house. It is followed by a great feast on swine's flesh. After their wounds are healed the circ.u.mcised lads have still to remain in seclusion for three or four months. Finally, they are brought back to the village with great pomp.

For this solemn ceremony their faces, necks, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s are whitened with a thick layer of chalk, while red stripes, painted round their mouths and eyes and prolonged to the ears, add to the grotesqueness of their appearance. Their eyes are closed with a plaster of chalk, and thus curiously arrayed and blindfolded they are led back to the village square, where leave is formally given them to open their eyes. At the entrance to the village they are received by the women, who weep for joy and strew boiled field-fruits on the way. Next morning the newly initiated lads wash off the crust of chalk, and have their hair, faces, necks, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s painted bright red. This ends their time of seclusion, which has lasted five or six months; they now rank as full-grown men.[481]

[Sidenote: Simulation of death and resurrection.]

In these initiatory rites, as in the similar rites of the neighbouring tribes on the mainland of New Guinea, we may perhaps detect a simulation of death and of resurrection to a new and higher life. But why circ.u.mcision should form the central feature of such a drama is a question to which as yet no certain or even very probable answer can be given. The bodily mutilations of various sorts, which in many savage tribes mark the transition from boyhood to manhood, remain one of the obscurest features in the life of uncultured races. That they are in most cases connected with the great change which takes place in the s.e.xes at p.u.b.erty seems fairly certain; but we are far from understanding the ideas which primitive man has formed on this mysterious subject.

[Sidenote: The natives of Dutch New Guinea.]

That ends what I have to say as to the notions of death and a life hereafter which are entertained by the natives of German New Guinea. We now turn to the natives of Dutch New Guinea, who occupy roughly speaking the western half of the great island. Our information as to their customs and beliefs on this subject is much scantier, and accordingly my account of them will be much briefer.

[Sidenote: Geelvink Bay and Doreh Bay. The Noofoor or Noomfor people.

Their material culture and arts of life.]

Towards the western end of the Dutch possession there is on the northern coast a deep and wide indentation known as Geelvink Bay, which in its north-west corner includes a very much smaller indentation known as Doreh Bay. Scattered about in the waters of the great Geelvink Bay are many islands of various sizes, such as Biak or Wiak, j.a.ppen or Jobi, Run or Ron, Noomfor, and many more. It is in regard to the natives who inhabit the coasts or islands of Geelvink Bay that our information is perhaps least imperfect, and it is accordingly with them that I shall begin. In physical appearance, expression of the face, mode of wearing the hair, and still more in manners and customs these natives of the coast and islands differ from the natives of the mountains in the interior. The name given to them by Dutch and German writers is Noofoor or Noomfor. Their original home is believed to be the island of Biak or Wiak, which lies at the northern entrance of the bay, and from which they are supposed to have spread southwards and south-westwards to the other islands and to the mainland of New Guinea.[482] They are a handsomely built race. Their colour is usually dark brown, but in some individuals it shades off to light-brown, while in others it deepens into black-brown. The forehead is high and narrow; the eye is dark brown or black with a lively expression; the nose broad and flat, the lips thick and projecting. The cheekbones are not very high. The facial angle agrees with that of Europeans. The hair is abundant and frizzly. The people live in settled villages and subsist by agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Their large communal houses are raised above the ground on piles; on the coast they are built over the water. Each house has a long gallery, one in front and one behind, and a long pa.s.sage running down the middle of the dwelling, with the rooms arranged on either side of it. Each room has its own fireplace and is occupied by a single family.

One such communal house may contain from ten to twenty families with a hundred or more men, women, and children, besides dogs, fowls, parrots, and other creatures. When the house is built over the water, it is commonly connected with the sh.o.r.e by a bridge; but in some places no such bridge exists, and at high water the inmates can only communicate with the sh.o.r.e by means of their canoes. The staple food of the people is sago, which they extract from the sago-palm; but they also make use of bread-fruit, together with millet, rice, and maize, whenever they can obtain these cereals. Their flesh diet includes wild pigs, birds, fish, and trepang. While some of them subsist mainly by fishing and commerce, others devote themselves almost exclusively to the cultivation of their gardens, which they lay out in clearings of the dense tropical forest, employing chiefly axes and chopping-knives as their instruments of tillage. Of ploughs they, like most savages, seem to know nothing. The rice and other plants which they raise in these gardens are produced by the dry method of cultivation. In hunting birds they employ chiefly bows and arrows, but sometimes also snares. The arrows with which they shoot the birds of paradise are blunted so as not to injure the splendid plumage of the birds. Turtle-sh.e.l.ls, feathers of the birds of paradise, and trepang are among the princ.i.p.al articles which they barter with traders for cotton-goods, knives, swords, axes, beads and so forth. They display some skill and taste in wood-carving. The art of working in iron has been introduced among them from abroad and is now extensively practised by the men. They make large dug-out canoes with outriggers, which seem to be very seaworthy, for they accomplish long voyages even in stormy weather. The making of pottery, basket-work, and weaving, together with pounding rice and cooking food, are the special business of women. The men wear waistbands or loin-cloths made of bark, which is beaten till it becomes as supple as leather. The women wear petticoats or strips of blue cotton round their loins, and as ornaments they have rings of silver, copper, or sh.e.l.l on their arms and legs.[483] Thus the people have attained to a fair degree of barbaric culture.

[Sidenote: Fear of ghosts. Ideas of the spirit-world.]