Author: Robert Wood Williamson

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781230352343

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...of mourning is at an end, and the sorrowing relatives return to their normal mode of life. Nowadays the Government, on sanitary grounds, forbids the burial of bodies within the village enclosure, requiring them to be interred in cemeteries just outside the village; and it has placed other restrictions upon the practice of the chief mourners sleeping by the grave. The latter, at all events, of these injunctions, is not, I think, entirely obeyed; indeed my first experience of the fear caused by their belief that I was a Government official arose from infringement of a burial regulation. The religious views of the Mekeo people differ considerably from those of the Solomon Islanders. In the first place, though they may have had an origin in some idea analogous to that of mana, it cannot be said of them that this is now their fundamental basis, or indeed that the idea of mana, as understood in the Solomons, forms part of them. Another difference is that, whilst in the Solomons the people fear, and endeavour to propitiate, individual ghosts, in Mekeo this is not so, their fears relating rather to ghosts generally. This second element of difference may, perhaps, be in some way connected with the first one, at all events so far as the ghosts are concerned, for the special fear of, and desire to please or secure the help of, an individual ghost in the Solomon Islands is based on the belief that this particular ghost is largely endowed with mana; and where, as in Mekeo, the ghosts are only regarded as a general body, the question of the amount of mana possessed by any one ghost does not arise. 158 SORCERERS I think I shall be substantially correct if I say that the religion of the Mekeo people is a belief in certain individual mythical beings, in...