Note 51.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

It is not easy to formulate a clear idea of the original source of mana. It is said to be impersonal, to be present in the atmosphere of life and communicable to persons and to things. To that extent it resembles the impersonal power or potentiality we have found elsewhere. But wherever it is manifested it is connected with some personal being who originates and directs it.51.1 It is not a quality inherent in men of more than ordinary power and skill. “If a man,” writes Bishop Codrington, “has been successful in fighting, … he has certainly got the mana of a spirit or of some deceased ancestor to empower him.” And again: “No man has this power of his own; all that he does is done by the aid of personal beings, ghosts or spirits; he cannot be said, as a spirit can, to be mana himself, using the word to express a quality; he can be said to have mana, it may be said to be with him, the word being used as a substantive.”51.2 It would thus seem as if it were an essential characteristic not of personal beings—even of powerful personal beings—in general, but belonging to the world of spirits, including the spirits of the dead. Yet not to all spirits; for elsewhere we read: “It must not be supposed that every ghost becomes an object of worship,” as a source of mana. “A man in danger may call upon his father, his grandfather, or his uncle; his nearness of kin is sufficient ground for it. The ghost who is to be worshipped is the spirit of a man who in his lifetime had mana in him; the souls of common men are the common herd of ghosts, nobodies alike before and after death. The supernatural power abiding in the powerful living man abides in his ghost after death with increased vigour and more ease of movement.”51.3 Thus we are found in something like what logicians call a vicious circle. Only those ghosts have mana, or are mana, after death who had mana in their lifetime. But if they had mana in their lifetime, it was because they derived it from ghosts or other spirits. In any case mana appears to be conceived of as transcending humanity, belonging to the mysterious region of the Unknown, embodied in its primitive denizens, flowing from them, by the channel of material objects (amulets), forms of words (charms) or names, to certain human beings, and taken back by the latter into the same great reservoir of power when they die, thence to be communicated afresh to favoured mortals, and so on for ever. Probably, however, no such definite concept finds a place in the Melanesian brain; the mode of savage thought hardly admits of such crystallization.