The chief is usually sure of admission into high society in the next world. The Maori paradise was a paradise of the aristocracy; heroes and men of lofty lineage went to the skies. But common souls, in passing from one division to another of the New Zealand Hades, lost a little of their vitality each time, until at last they died outright. Polynesian fancy {233} sometimes mingled the seen and the unseen in strange juxtaposition. The Fijian route to the world beyond, Mbulu, lay through a real town with ordinary inhabitants. But it had also an invisible portion, where dwelt the family of Samuyalo who held inquest on departed spirits. If this trial was surmounted, a second judgment awaited them at the hands of Ndengei, by which they were assigned to one or other of the divisions of the underworld. A great chief who had destroyed many towns and slain many in war, passed to Mburotu, where amid pleasant glades the occupants lived in families and planted and fought. But bachelors, those who had killed no enemy, or would not have their ears bored, women who refused to be tatooed, and generally those who had not lived so as to please the gods, were doomed to various forms of penal suffering and degradation. Courage and daring are of immense social importance, and are among the most important elements in primitive virtue. Strength, valour, skill in war and hunting, lift men into leadership, and the pre-eminence won here is retained hereafter. But these qualities are not limited to chiefs. The happy land of the Greenlanders, Torngarsuk, received the valiant workers, men who had taken many whales and seals, borne much hardship, and been drowned at sea, and women who had died in childbirth. A mild and unwarlike tribe in Guatemala might be persuaded that to die by any {234} other than a natural death was to forfeit all hope of life hereafter, the bodies of the slain being left to the vultures and wild beasts. On the other hand, the Nicaraguan Aztecs declared that the shades of those who died in their beds went downwards till they came to nought; while those who fell in battle for their country passed to the East, to the rising of the sun.