The soul meets a dirty and a clean path. The good soul, being
instructed, chooses the dirty path: the other path is kept clean by bad
spirits 'in order to induce the unthinking to follow it,' as Bunyan's
Mr. Ignorance unwarily chose a by-path into hell. The soul next meets a
woman who tries to seduce him. He escapes her lures, and comes to two
women who try to trip him by whirling a rope. One of them is blind,
and the soul evades her. Next comes a deep narrow gap, in which flames
rise and fall. The good soul watches the fall of the flames, and leaps
across; there is no Brig o' Dread. Bed Indian souls cross by a log
which nearly spans the abyss. Two old women meet the good soul, and
take him 'to the Deity, Tha-Tha-Puli.' He tests the soul's strength and
skill by making him throw a nulla-nulla. 'When the Wathi Wathi see a
shooting star, they believe it to be the passage of such a nulla-nulla
through space, and say: "Tha-Tha-Puli is trying the strength of some
new spirit." The soul of a bad man, if it escapes the traps set for
it, is sure to fall into the hell of fire. Many of the natives have
had their beliefs modified by contact with the whites,' and I 'feel
doubtful,' says Mr. Cameron, 'whether the pit of fire was not of this
kind, and questioned my informant very closely on the subject, but he
assured me that there was no doubt whatever that the above was the
exact belief before the settlement of the country by the white men.'
It is the standing reply of believers in the borrowing theory that a
native, cross-examined, will always agree with whatever the European
inquirer wishes him to say. The natives examined by Mr. Cameron, Mrs.
Langloh Parker, Mr. Howitt, Mr. Manning, and others were exceptions.
They would not allow that their beliefs were borrowed.
This particular form of native belief is exactly analogous to that
of ancient Egypt, of Greece, of Fiji, and so on: not to the doctrine
of our missionaries. The believers in borrowing must therefore say
that the Wathi Wathi stole heaven, hell, and the ways thither from
missionaries, and adapted them, accidentally coinciding with Egyptians,
Greeks, Red Indians, Fijians, Aztecs, and the rest, as to a gulf to
be crossed, and temptations on the way to the abode of the powerful
being and the souls of the good. The native proverbial explanation
of a shooting star establishes, as historical fact, their belief in
Tha-Tha-Puli and his home for good spirits. Mr. Frazer has six pages
on beliefs about shooting stars.[54] One case is to our point. The
Yerrunthally of Queensland think that the souls of the dead climb to
a place among the stars by a rope; when they let the rope fall, it
'appeared to people on earth as a shooting star.'[55]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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