Note (return) — LECTURE XVII

Sometimes the favour of a ghost is obtained by human sacrifices. On these occasions the flesh of the victim does not, like the flesh of a pig, furnish the materials of a sacrificial banquet; but little bits of it are eaten by young men to improve their fighting power and by elders for a special purpose. Such sacrifices are deemed more effectual than the sacrifices of less precious victims; and advantage was sometimes taken of a real or imputed crime to offer the criminal to some ghost. So, for example, within living memory Dikea, chief of Ravu, convicted a certain man of stealing tobacco, and sentenced him to be sacrificed; and the grown lads ate pieces of him cooked in the sacrificial fire. Again, the same chief offered another human sacrifice in the year 1886. One of his wives had proved false, and he sent her away vowing that she should not return till he had offered a human sacrifice to Hauri. Also his son died, and he vowed to kill a man for him. The vow was noised abroad, and everybody knew that he would pay well for somebody to kill. Now the Savo people had bought a captive boy in Guadalcanar, but it turned out a bad bargain, for the boy was lame and nearly blind. So they brought him to Dikea, and he gave them twenty coils of shell money for the lad. Then the chief laid his hand on the victim's breast and cried, "Hauri! here is a man for you," and his followers killed him with axes and clubs. The cripple's skull was added to the chief's collection, and his legs were sent about the country to make known what had been done. In Bugotu of Ysabel, when the people had slain an enemy in fight, they used to bring back his head in triumph, cut slices off it, and burn them in sacrifice. And if they took a prisoner alive, they would bring him to the sacred place, the grave of the man whose ghost was to be honoured. There they bound him hand and foot and buffeted him till he died, or if he did not die under the buffets they cut his throat. As they beat the man with their fists, they called on the ghost to take him, and when he was dead, they burned a bit of him in the fire for the ghost.595