Note (return) — LECTURE XVI

We will now consider the various modes in which the Eastern Melanesians dispose of their dead; for funeral customs commonly furnish some indication of the ideas which a people entertain as to the state of the soul after death. The Banks' Islanders generally buried their dead in the forest not far from the village; but if the deceased was a great man or died a remarkable death, they might inter him in the village near the men's clubhouse (gamal). A favourite son or child might be buried in the house itself; but in such cases the grave would be opened after fifty or a hundred days and the bones taken up and hidden in the forest, though some of them might be hung up in the house. However, in some places there was, and indeed still is, a custom of keeping the putrefying corpse unburied in the house as a mark of affection. At Gaua, in Santa Maria, the body was dried over slow fires for ten days or more, till nothing but skin and bones remained; and the women who watched over it during these days drank the juices of putrefaction which dripped from the decaying flesh. The same thing used formerly to be done in Mota, another of the Banks' Islands. The corpses of great men in these islands were adorned in all their finery and laid out on the open space in the middle of the village. Here bunches of coco-nuts, yams, and other food were heaped up beside the body; and an orator of fluent speech addressed the ghost telling him that when he had gone down to Panoi, the spirit land, and the ghosts asked him after his rank, he was to give them a list of all the things heaped beside his dead body; then the ghosts would know what a great man he was and would treat him with proper deference. The orator dealt very candidly with the moral character of the deceased. If he had been a bad man, the speaker would say, "Poor ghost, will you be able to enter Panoi? I think not." The food which is piled up beside the body while the orator is pronouncing the eulogium or the censure of the departed is afterwards heaped up on the grave or buried in it. At Gaua they kill pigs and hang up the carcases or parts of them at the grave. The object of all this display is to make a favourable impression on the ghosts in the spirit land, in order that they may give the newly deceased man a good reception. When the departed was an eminent warrior or sorcerer, his friends will sometimes give him a sham burial and hide his real grave, lest people should dig up his bones and his skull to make magic with them; for the relics of such a man are naturally endowed with great magical virtue.575