Note 103.2 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The churinga are, moreover, endowed with power, with mana, which not merely heals wounds, but when they are brought ceremonially in contact with the body produces other physical, mental, and even moral effects. In the Kaitish tribe the performance of some ceremonies, in the course of which the churinga are handled, renders a man so full of this mana, or, as they call it, churinga, using the very word, that he becomes for the time taboo.103.2 In addition, the churinga have virtue to make the yams and the grass-seed grow; they frighten the game, or enable a man to secure it, and so forth. They are handled in a manner which it is no exaggeration to call devout. They are polished with red ochre to “soften” them, a term that, as Messrs Spencer and Gillen remark, “very evidently points to the fact that the [churinga] is regarded as something much more than a piece of wood or stone. It is intimately associated with the ancestor, and has ‘feelings,’ just as human beings have, which can be soothed by rubbing in the same way in which those of living men can be.” We gather that a man will sing to his churinga, that the subject of his song will be the mythical story of the ancestor (or the previous incarnation) to whom it belonged, and that as he sings and rubs it with his hand, “he gradually comes to feel that there is some special association between him and the sacred object—that a virtue of some kind passes from it to him, and also from him to it.” So from generation to generation it gathers more and more of what our authors describe as magical power—what would certainly be called in Melanesia mana—the mystic potentiality already discussed.104.1