Note (return) — LECTURE XVII

In Ysabel the doctor employs an ingenious apparatus for discovering the cause of sickness and ascertaining its cure. He suspends a stone at one end of a string while he holds the other end in his hand. Then he recites the names of all the people who died lately, and when the stone swings at anybody's name, he knows that the ghost of that man has caused the illness. It remains to find out what the ghost will take to relax his clutch on the sick man, it may be a mash of yams, a fish, a pig, or perhaps a human substitute. The question is put and answered as before; and whatever the oracle declares to be requisite is offered on the dead man's grave. Thus the ghost is appeased and the sufferer is made whole.614 In these islands a common cause of illness is believed to be an unwarrantable intrusion on premises occupied by a ghost, who punishes the trespasser by afflicting him with bodily pains and ailments, or it may be by carrying off his soul. At Maewo in Aurora, one of the New Hebrides, when there is reason to think that a sickness is due to ghostly agency, the friends of the sick man send for a professional dreamer, whose business it is to ascertain what particular ghost has been offended and to make it up with him. So the dreamer falls asleep and in his sleep he dreams a dream. He seems to himself to be in the place where the patient was working before his illness; and there he spies a queer little old man, who is really no other than the ghost. The dreamer falls into conversation with him, learns his name, and winning his confidence extracts from him a true account of the whole affair. The fact is that in working at his garden the man encroached, whether wittingly or not is no matter, on land which the ghost regards as his private preserve; and to punish the intrusion the ghost carried off the intruder's soul and impounded it in a magic fence in his garden, where it still languishes in durance vile. The dreamer at once tenders a frank and manly apology on behalf of his client; he assures the ghost that the trespass was purely inadvertent, that no personal disrespect whatever was intended, and he concludes by requesting the ghost to overlook the offence for this time and to release the imprisoned soul. This appeal to the better feelings of the ghost has its effect; he pulls up the fence and lets the soul out of the pound; it flies back to the sick man, who thereupon recovers. Sometimes an orphan child is made sick by its dead mother, whose ghost draws away the soul of the infant to keep her company in the spirit land. In such a case, again, a dreamer is employed to bring back the lost soul from the far country; and if he can persuade the mother's ghost to relinquish the tiny soul of her baby, the child will be made whole.615 Once more certain long stones in the Banks' Islands are inhabited by ghosts so active and robust that if a man's shadow so much as falls on one of them, the ghost in the stone will clutch the shadow and pull the soul clean out of the man, who dies accordingly. Such stones, dangerous as they unquestionably are to the chance passer-by, nevertheless for that very reason possess a valuable property which can be turned to excellent account. A man, for example, will put one of these stones in his house to guard it like a watch-dog in his absence; and if he sends a friend to fetch something out of it which he has forgotten, the messenger, on approaching the house, will take good care to call out the owner's name, lest the ghost in the stone, mistaking him for a thief and a robber, should pounce out on him and do him a mischief before he had time to explain.616