Their assiduity in serving their gods is remarkably conspicuous. Not only the _whattas_, or offering places of the _morais_, are commonly loaded with fruit and animals, but there are few houses where you do not meet with a small place of the same sort near them. Many of them are so rigidly scrupulous, that they will not begin a meal without first laying aside a morsel for the _Eatooa_; and we had an opportunity, during this voyage, of seeing their superstitious zeal carried to a most pernicious height in the instance of human sacrifices; the occasions of offering which, I doubt, are too frequent. Perhaps they have recourse to them when misfortunes occur; for they asked, if one of our men, who happened to be confined when we were detained by a contrary wind, was _taboo_? Their prayers are also very frequent, which they chant, much after the manner of the songs in their festive entertainments. And the women, as in other cases, are also obliged to show their inferiority in religious observances; for it is required of them, that they should partly uncover themselves, as they pass the _morais_; or take a considerable circuit to avoid them. Though they have no notion, that their god must always be conferring benefits without sometimes forgetting them, or suffering evil to befall them, they seem to regard this less than the attempts of some more inauspicious being to hurt them. They tell us, that _Etee_ is an evil spirit, who sometimes does them mischief; and to whom, as well as to their god, they make offerings. But the mischiefs they apprehend from any superior invincible beings, are confined to things merely temporal. They believe the soul to be both immaterial and immortal. They say that it keeps fluttering about the lips during the pangs of death; and that then it ascends, and mixes with, or, as they express it, is eaten by the deity. In this state it remains for some time; after which, it departs to a certain place destined for the reception of the souls of men, where it exists in eternal night; or, as they sometimes say, in twilight, or dawn. They have no idea of any permanent punishment after death for crimes that they have committed on earth; for the souls of good and bad men are eat indiscriminately by God. But they certainly consider this coalition with the deity as a kind of purification necessary to be undergone, before they enter a state of bliss. For, according to their doctrine, if a man refrain from all connection with women some months before death, he passes immediately into his eternal mansion without such a previous union; as if already, by this abstinence, he were pure enough to be exempted from the general lot.