The myth of Qat is a jungle of facetiae and frolic, with one or two
serious incidents, such as the beginning of Death and the coming of Night.
His mother was, or became, a stone; stones playing a considerable part in
the superstitions.
The incorporeal Vuis, 'with nothing like a human life, have a much higher
place than Qat and his brothers in the religious system.' They have
neither names, nor shapes, nor legends, they receive sacrifice, and are in
some uncertain way connected with stones; these stones usually bear a
fanciful resemblance to fruits or animals (p. 275). The only sacrifice, in
Banks Islands, is that of shell-money. The mischievous spirits are Tamate,
ghosts of men. There is a belief in _mana_ (magical _rapport_). Dr.
Codrington cannot determine the connection of this belief with that in
spirits. Mana is the uncanny, is X, the unknown. A revived impression of
sense is _nunuai_, as when a tired fisher, half asleep at night, feels the
'draw' of a salmon, and automatically strikes.[15] The common ghost is a
bag of _nunuai_, as living man, in the opinion of some philosophers, is a
bag of 'sensations.' Ghosts are only seen as spiritual lights, which so
commonly attend hallucinations among the civilised. Except in the prayers
to Qat and Marawa, prayer only invokes the dead (p. 285). 'In the western
islands the offerings are made to ghosts, and consumed by fire; in the
eastern (Banks) isles they are made to spirits (beings, _Vui_), and
there is no sacrificial fire.' Now, the worship of ghosts goes, in these
isles, with the higher culture, 'a more considerable advance in the arts
of life;' the worship of non-ghosts, _Vui_, goes with the lower material
culture.[16] This is rather the reverse of what we should expect, in
accordance with the anthropological theory. According, however, to our
theory, Animism and ghost-worship may be of later development, and belong
to a higher level of culture, than worship of a being, or beings, that
never were ghosts. In Leper's Isle, 'ghosts do not appear to have prayers
or sacrifices offered to them,' but cause disease, and work magic.[17]
The belief in the soul, in Melanesia, does _not_ appear to proceed 'from
their dreams or visions in which deceased or absent persons are presented
to them, for they do not appear to believe that the soul goes out from the
dreamer, or presents itself as an object in his dreams,' nor does belief
in other spirits seem to be founded on 'the appearance of life or motion
in inanimate things.'[18]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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