Famous Melanesians

The archipelago can itself be divided into two archipelagos, one to the west and one to the east, of which the west covers the Solomon Mountains and the east all the others". According to this geographic differentiation there is a regional differentiation, because while the religions of the West Islander (the Solomon Islanders) consist mainly in the worshipping and worshipping of the spirit of the dead, the religions of the East Islander are mainly characterized by the worshipping and worshipping of the spirit that is not ever to have been incarnated in people.

While both groups of island dwellers, the West and the East, recognize both professions of spirit, namely once human beings and never human beings, the religion of one group is focused more on spirit than on spirit, and the religion of the other group is more on wit.

Not surprisingly, the ghost-prone island dwellers have taken the system of sacrifices and the art of living to a higher plane than the ghost-prone island dwellers; this is particularly true of the system of sacrifices, which is much more advanced in the western world than in the eastern world.

It follows that if belief in the spirit is more expensive than belief in the spirit, it is also more beneficial for the development of civilization. Dr R.H. Codrington on the Melanesians. The whole area has the good fortune to have the proofs of the pastor Dr. R. H. Codrington, one of the most perceptive and precise watchers, who worked as a local misionary from 1864 to 1887 and gave us a very useful report on their traditions and convictions in his novel The Melanesians, which must always stay an antropological classical.

I will base my description of the veneration of the necropolis among these insulans mainly on Dr. Codrington's extensive proofs; and I will use his remarkable research to go into significant detail on this topic, since the detail captured by a close watcher is far more revealing than the hazy commonalities of shallow watcher, which all too often are all the information we have about the wild religions.

Melanese theories of the mind. First and foremost, all Central Melanesians believe that man consists of a human being and a human being, that the last separation of the human being from the human organism is the last separation of the human and that the human spirit lives on after life as a more or less aware and anactive being.

Whatever the definition of the spirit, the Melanesians are generally of the view that it will survive the bodily loss and go to a more or less remote area where the ghosts of all the deceased gather and for the most part survive indefinitely, although some of them, as we will now see, will be dying a second death and thus come to an end.

To the west of Melanesia, in the Solomon Isles, the residence of the deceased is said to be on certain isles, which differ in the creeds of the various inhabitants of the island; in the east of Melanesia, the residence of the deceased is regarded as an underground area known as Panoi. Distinguishing between spirits of might and spirits of no importance.

Spirits of the great and the recently deceased are mainly considered. Supernatural Force (Mana) gained by spirits and its place in the nation's religions is taken by the spirits of the younger deceased. Indeed, here as elsewhere, the livelihood of the deceased seems to depend on the memories of the survivors; if they are forgot, they stop existing.

It is also worth noting that in the Solomon Islands what we should call a person's physical forces and abilities are considered miraculous gifts that have been gained through communicating with a powerful spirit. When a man is a great soldier, it is not because he is poor, winking and courageous, but because he is assisted by the spirit of a fallen soldier, whose strength he has attracted by an adorned stony charms bound around his throat, or a bunch of leafs in his girdle, or a toot fixed to one of his hands, or a magic through whose repetition he can call upon the help of the spirit.

Now we can take a closer look at the Central Melanesians' theories and practices on this topic; and we will begin with their funerary practices, which shed much more light on their opinions on the deaths and the deaths. Funerals in the Solomon Islands. Terrestrial and naval funerals.

Upon returning from the funeral, the bereaved take a different path from the one on which they took the body to the tomb; they do this to distract the spirit from the trail and thus avoid it following them home. It is a clear demonstration of the local people's anxiety about the spirits of the new deceased.

On Savo Isle, ordinary Solomon men are tossed into the ocean and only tall men are born. In Wango in San Cristoval the same differentiation is made, where also the corpses of ordinary people are dumped into the ocean, but men of importance are laid to rest and some relics of them a head, a teeth or a fingerbone can be kept in a sanctuary in the town.

Spirits of the great men and women born ashore become spirits of the country and the spirits of the citizens immersed in the ocean. Marine spirits have greatly affected the imaginations of the indigenous peoples of the southeastern Solomon Islands; and since these humans like to portray their lives with sculptures and paintings, they clearly show us how they imagine these marine spirits.

So when people at sea are in jeopardy, they try to appease the minds by putting arrea walnuts and scraps of nourishment into the waters and pray to the minds not to be upset. Even the shark is to be stimulated by the spirit of the deceased. It' interesting and educational that in this part of the globe seed-demon, which can be considered purely natural spirit, are in fact spirit of the deaths.

Burn sacrifice in honor of the deceased. On other Solomon Islands, similar to the funeral celebrations, snacks are poured on the fire. For example, on the Shortlands Islands, when a famous leader called Gorai passed away, his corpse was burned and his family threw pearls of meat and other belongings into the fire.

One of his girls tossed a bowl of coffee into the fire. Females were dancing a burial ball around the stake until the corpse was eaten. and the deceased's possessions? By volatilizing the solids of nourishment, do you make them more available to the thin, unfounded natures of mind?

Are you destroying the spirit's belongings so that he won't come back personally to get it and persecute and harass the lives of the people? Shall the ghosts of the deceased dwell in the fire on the stove, so that the sacrifices thrown into the fire are transferred directly to them?

I can' t say whether it is with such notions that the Solomon Islanders are throwing meal for people. However, we are said that the arms are not meant to escort the spirit to the country of the Spirits; they are hanged only in memory of a great and esteemed man.

"They fell the fruits of a man's death with the same sentiment as a sign of respectfulness and love, not with the idea of these things that serve him in the spirit kingdom; he did not, they say, from them, if he was still living, he will never have them.

" However, they think that the spirit will benefit from the funeral; for if a man is slain and his corpse is left untouched, his troubled spirit will visit the place. Spirits of those who have been entombed in Florida go to Betindalo, which seems to be located in the southeast of the great Guadalcanar Isle.

It is almost the only example of a ghost ship in Melanesia. The spirits can be hear chirping on the way to the shuttle; and again on the bank, while they wait for the shuttle, a noise of their dance is breaking the silence of the nights; but no one can see the dances.

Only when they touch down on the other side do they know they're gone. There, a spirit hits them in the nose with a stick to see if the gristle is as punctured as it should be; spirits whose nose has become sufficiently dull in their lives easily continue along the way, but all others have pains and difficulties in finding their way into the kingdom of shadows.

But although the spirits of the deceased leave for Betindalo as they usually do, their spirits not only follow their graves, but also come to the offerings made to them and can hear themselves dance and scream on whistles at noon. The Solomon Islanders' faith that the spirits of the deceased are living on the isles.

Two deaths. In Bugotu on the Isle of Ysabel (one of the Solomon Islands), too, the spirits of the deceased are to go to an isle and still visit their tombs and show themselves to the victims at dusk. On the Isle of the Deceased is a swimmingpool with a small prun.

Each new spirit must appear before him and he inspects their palms to see if they carry the sign of the holy frigatebird that is carved on them; when they have the sign, the spirit goes over the log and mixes with the deceased spirit in the afterlife.

However, spirits who do not have the sign on their hand are thrown into the bay and disappear from their spiritual life: this is the second dead. This same idea of a second fatality hits us in a slightly different way among the locals of Saa in Malanta, another of the Solomon Islands.

The spirits of all these humans are swimming across the ocean to two small islets named Marapa, which are situated off Marau in Guadalcanar. The spirits of the kids are living there on one isle and the spirits of the adults on another; for the elderly would be tormented by the babble of the kids if they all lived together on one isle.

But in another respect, the lives of the deceased ghosts on these isles are very similar to those on the planet. Live men who end up on the isles see nothing of these things; there is a swimmingpool where they can listen to laughs and cheerful screams and where the shores are moist with unseen swimmers.

However, the lives of the people on these isles are not forever. Soon, the simple people' s minds turn into the nest of the white ant, which serves as nourishment for the more rugged minds. "People who were mighty on the face of the world' s earthly spirit will last much longer. As long as they are recalled and revered by the lives, their unbroken power of nature is unbroken; but when people turn around and leave them to adore some of the younger corpses, they are no longer given nourishment as offerings, so that they consume themselves and turn into empty pockets of blank ant shells, just like the people.

That'?s the second kill. But while the spirits are surviving, they can go back to Saa from the island and visit their villages and family. If a man wants to see a spirit for some simple reasons, he can always do so by taking a dash of lemon from his crate of betels and putting it on his brow.

The spirit then seems very clear to him. Funeral rites in Ysabel. or open canoehouse, which became a kind of sanctuary or sanctuary of the deaths. In Santa Cruz on the Solomon Islands, the body is found in a very profound tomb in the building. You even put nourishment in front of the head, no question for the use of the spirit.

However, they envisage the spirits of the deceased going to the great Tamami Vulcano, where they are burned in the caldera and thus remain in the raging area. But also the corpses' spirits follow the woods of Santa Cruz; on damp and black night the locals see them sparkle like fireflies in the darkness and are frightened when they see them.

)to the spirit of the late chieftain. Until they are obtained, be careful not to move. Convictions and traditions of the island's inhabitants in relation to the deceased. The Underground Whereabouts of the Heavens. So far we have dealt with the convictions and practice regarding the deaths of the Western Melanesians of the Solomon Islands and Santa Cruz.

Now we turn to those of the Eastern Melanesians living in the Torres Isles, the Bank Isles and the New Hebrides. There is a great difference between the spirits of these two areas, since the spirits of the Western Melanesians all dwell on an island, but the spirits of all Eastern Melanesians dwell subterraneously in a subterraneous area generally called Panoi.

Before they leave, the minds gather ashore and at the entrance to the Underground, where you can listen to the spooky crews dance on moonlit night, screaming and hooting on the clutches of the country shrimps. It' s not simple to get an accurate and coherent representation of the place of the deceased and the state of the spirit in the indigenous people; nor, as Dr. Codrington rightly points out, would it be sensible to await complete and accurate information on a topic over which the information resources may not be above anyone's allusions.

But as far as one can see Panoi or the whereabouts of the deceased, it is by and large a lucky area. It is in many ways similar to the country of the alive; for there are homes and towns and trees full of scarlet foliage and sun and night. Spirits speak, chant and dance, there is no club house there, and although men and wives cohabit, there is no getting married or giving in matrimony.

In this country, too, everything is very peaceable, for there is no such thing as fighting and no tyrants oppressing the population. But the spirit of a great man goes down like a great man among the spirits shining in all his jewels and pieces of jewelry; but like everything else in the Netherworld, these ornamentations are only unfounded shades for all the valiant spectacles they make.

Those swine that were slain at his burial party and the meal piled up on his tomb cannot go down with him to this distant land; for none of these things, not even swine have been made. Spirits in the underworld don't randomly intermingle. There' s one section for those who were executed, another for those who were beaten with a club and another for those who were wicked.

When the spirits of those who have been killed shake the reed of the darts that have inflicted their deadly wound. The spirits in the underworld have no idea of the things they cannot see and listen to; but the spirits call on them in times of need and distress as if they could listen and help.

Spirits are dying at the second kill. But some say that there are two such empires, each named Panoi, and that when the deceased dies in the higher kingdom, they resurrect from the deceased in the lower kingdom, where they never perish, but only turn into blank antholes.

It' s interesting and not insignificant to note that some of these island inhabitants distinguish between the destiny of good men and the destiny of evil men after their deaths. Locals of the banks' island town, one of the most important ones, think that Panoi is a good place and that only the good spirits can be there.

After them, the minds of killer wizards and wizards did not suffer torturers and adulterous criminals to set foot in the fortunate world. For example, the spirit of a killer is struck at the doorway by the spirit of his sacrifice, who resists and rejects him. They are quarrelling, they are agitated, shelterless, regrettable, malicious, they migrate back to earth: they are eating the worst nourishment, their breathing is bothersome, they are harming the alive, although they are eating the hearts of the people who are haunting them in tombs and forests.

In this way, these men believe that the state of the spirit after dying is dependent on the kind of lifestyle that a man lived on the ground; if he was good, he will be lucky; if he was evil, he will be unhappy. descend of the live into the realm of the deceased. Eastern Melanesians think that live humans can descend into the country of the deceased and come back lively to the higher realm.

They sometimes do this in the physical world, but sometimes only in the mind when they sleep or are weak, for then their soul leaves their physical world and can migrate down to Panoi. Sometimes when the spirits find their way into the country of spirits, they are warned by kind spirits not to have anything to eat there, so that they do not become spirits by participating in spiritual nourishment and never come back to the country of the spirits.

Disposing of the East Indians' deaths. In Gaua, Santa Maria, the human organism was left to dry over long, slowly burning fire for ten whole nights, until nothing but bone and fleece was left; and the woman who guarded it during those few nights was drinking the juice of rottenness dripping from the rotting beef.

This was also done in Mota, another island of banks. All the bodies of the great men on these isles were decorated in all their splendour and placed in the open square in the centre of the town. There were bundles of coconut, sweet potatoes and other foods piled up beside the bodies; and a speaker who spoke fluently told the mind that when he went down to Panoi, the spirits and the spirits asked him his status, should give them a listing of all things piled up beside his corpse; then the spirits would know what a great man he was, and would be treating him with appropriate respect.

Had he been a wicked man, the presenter would say: "Poor spirit! will you be able to come into Panoi? "The meal that piles up next to the corpse, while the presenter sings the deceased's hymn of praise or censorship, is then poured up on the tomb or in it.

It is the aim of all this exhibition to make a positive impact on the spirits in Ghostland, so that they can give the new dead a good welcome. If the dead man was a great fighter or magician, his mates will sometimes give him a false funeral and conceal his true tomb, so that men will not excavate his bone and his head to conjure with them; for the relic of such a man is of course gifted with great mischief.

spirits that have been expelled from the town. Dislodging the spirits of those suffering from wounds and sore throat. In Ureparapara the spirit is expelled from the town as follows. At one end of the town, the archtillery was filled with sacks of bewitched rocks and bamboo items.

Two men sitting in the deceased's home give the marching signals, one of whom holds two pieces of stone in his hand on either side and clashes them together. So they take the unwilling spirit out of the town into the woods little by little, where they abandon him to find his own way into the country of the deaf.

This was because her husband's spirit stayed in the home all those few nights and of course he would be expecting to see his spouse in the wedding ward. In Motlav the humans are not so harsh on the lowly spirits: they do not expel all spirits from their old houses, but only the spirits of those who had the misery during their life to be plagued with severe wounds and sore.

Exile of such minds can therefore be seen as a precautionary health measure to avoid the spread of the illness by the souls. If a man who is suffering badly from wounds or ulcer dies, the folks in his town who take the necessary steps to take a message west to warn the villagers of the next town to be ready to give the spirit a hearty welcome.

Because it is known that spirits always go westwards when leaving the human organism in the direction of the sunset. So, when the unfortunate man is gone, they buried his sick corpse in the villagers and put all their energy into driving his souls out. They blow on shell trumpet and beat the back with the stems of coconut leaves to drive the spirit away from their own villages and further to the next.

Meanwhile, the people of this small town are prepared to welcome their unwelcomed visitors and to literally cross their borders; they soon push them into the country of their nearest neighbors. The hunt continues from town to town until the spirit is chased into the ocean on the bank facing the sunset.

There, the thugs finally discard the stems that were used to beat the spirit and go home, in the complete certainty that he has abandoned the isle and gone down to his own place, so that he cannot plague anyone with the grievous illness he has had.

for the spirits of childbirth. The spirits of a woman who passed away in childbirth receive particular care. And if the mom is dying and the kid is alive, her spirit will not go to the underworld without taking the kid. To fool the spirit, they loose wrapped a slice of a tribe of bananas in sheets and place it on the breast of the deceased woman when they put it in her tomb.

He clutches the bunch to her chest and thinks it's her child and goes happily to Ghostland. While she is walking, the stem of the bananas slides around in the leafs and she envisions that it is the child who is moving, for she does not have all her mind that her spirits are initially in a natural anaesthetised state when she exits her trusted state.

However, when she reaches the land of the dead and finds that she has been fooled, and when perhaps even some cruel spirits mock her woody little one, she comes to the ground in sorrow and anger to search for and abduct the true one. However, the survivalists know what to look forward to and have taken the precautions to take the unborn son to another home where the mum will never find him; but she seeks it again and again and she is a sorrowful and furious spirit.

Sometimes the burial is followed by a long line of funerals, which are indeed one of the most important institution of these isles. In the different isles the number of festivals and the duration of their repetition varies greatly and also depends on the way in which the dead person was detained.

Celebrations are the fifth and 10th anniversaries after one' s passing and then every 10th to 100 th anniversaries, or even, in the case of a sire, a woman or a woman until the thundredth. Now these festivities seem to serve mainly in remembrance, but they also serve the deceased, for the Spirit is of course pleased when he sees that his companions remind him and do their duties so well through him.

The banquet meals for the deceased are set aside with the words "This is for you". At first glance, the practise of putting the mind aside at a range of funerary celebrations seems when Dr. Codrington realizes that the spirits do not agree with the theories that they are living subterraneous.

However, the plea proposed in this way is more flimsy than actual, because we must always remember that in all nations there are no practicable difficulties for the spirits to obtain a suspension from the other side of the globe and to go on holiday, so to speak, to pay a surprising stopover to their grieving mourners.

Bury old men and women alive. No. Aborigines of Vaté or Efat, one of the New Hebrides, raised a great howl about a fatality and scraped their faces until they poured all over. The corpses of the deceased were inhumed. At the time a skeleton was placed in the tomb, a swine was taken to the place and its forehead cut off and cast into the tomb to be funeral.

" The indigenous peoples probably thought the pig's mind was a tossed to the spirit to keep him from entering and bringing other humans to the land of the graved. We can take it with the same intent, they bury with the deceased the cushions and other things he had used during his time.

As he wished, they buried a round, deeply wounded hole around his abdomen and sank him into his tomb in a seated position. Living hogs were then taken to the edge of the tomb and each of them was tied to one of the old man's hands with a string.

So when the swine had passed over to him, so to speak, the strings were severed and the beasts were taken away to be fried and ate at the burial party; but the old man took the hearts of the swine into the spirits' country, and the more he took from them, the more warm and satisfying was the welcome he received from the spirits.

Behavior of the spirit at the time of dying. In Maewo in Aurora, one of the New Hebrides, the corpse is laid to rest in a tomb near the school. "and then they start building large piles of rocks over the tomb.

Then, when the man who died was a very great man who had many yards and swine, they counted fifty and then killed swine and chopped off the tip of the livers of every heifer.

" If they don't murder swine for the sake of their deceased boyfriend, they think that his spirit has no real life, but rather depends pitifully on confused reptiles. They all weep again after the victim, smearing their faces and body with ash and wearing laces around their neck for a hundred nights as a sign that they are not ingested.

That estimation of the comparison value of mind and mind is interpreted from the words of a New Hebrew indigenous; it is uniquely similar to what is sometimes presented to us as one of the most beautiful fruit of philosophical and religious thought. The journey of the spirit to the other one.

If a Maewo spirit giggles at the foolishness of his survivors' kin, who mourn as those who have no hopes, he turns his back on his old house and walks along the hill line until he reaches a place where two cliffs with a gorge between them.

It jumps over the abyss and if it ends up on the other side, it is actually corpse; but if it gets too little, it will return to it. All the spirits of the deceased are assembled at the end of the earth, where the hills go down into the ocean, to encounter him. If, in his own time, he has killed someone with a bat or dart or driven a person to his deaths with a spear, he must now run the course of the spear of the angry spirits of his sacrifices, who strike and rend him and prick him with a dagger such as the pig. They mock him with the words: "While you were still in the universe, you thought you were a brave man; but now we will take avenge.

There is another point on the way where a spirit, when it is falling, is torn to shreds; and when it avoids this danger, a wild swine awaits it, devouring the spirits of all people who do not grow panda nut bushes in their lives on the ground, from which matting is made.

However, the sage who plant pandaanus is now reaping the fruits of his labor; for when the swine rushes on his deceased mind, the mind quickly raves up the pandaanus and thus eludes his persecutor. If a person's ear has not been punctured in his lifetime, his mind must not be drinking it. If he has not been Tattoos, his mind must not be eating good foods.

It is the spirits of mighty men that are revered. Adoration was mainly for the recently deceased and well-memorized. How a corpse soldier was revered as a fighting spirit. And when they came to the calm waters, they ceased to paddle and wait until they felt the canoeing stone under them, and when they felt it, they said: This is a spirit.

" They cried out the name of several, and when they came to the name Ganindo, the boat swung again. When they returned victoriously with the enemy's minds, they cast a javelin into the rooftop of Ganindo's home and shouted around him, "Our spirit is to slay!

" And then they offered him seafood and other foods. During this ceremonial parade the relic was placed on a relic plateau and the offerings were dedicated to the new spirit of war. The other warrior spirits worshipped in Florida are known for not being indigenous to the islands, but famous soldiers of the West Islands, where it is thought that the miraculous force is strong-arm.

A sacrifice for the deceased. All over the Central Melanesia Isles, the spirit and ghost offer prayer and sacrifice. But the easiest and most common sacrifice is to give a small part of the nourishment to the deceased; this is probably a general practise in Melanesia. Throw aside a piece of meal that is prepared for consumption, for example sweet potatoes, a hollyhock or a piece of walnut; and where they are drinking cava, a few droplets of a draught is made as a part of or in memory of their deceased friend, with which they will be satisfied.

Simultaneously, the provider may name someone who is either recently deceased or particularly memorable; or without the specific reference to an individual, he may offer the victim generally to the spirits of former members of the fellowship. In some places, such as Santa Cruz, it is customary to place meal on a grave or in front of a memory picture, but the victim is soon taken away and ate by the people.

sacrifice in the Solomon Islands. On the Solomon Islands the sacrifice rite is more advanced. "They think that in my country," he said, "spirits are many, some very mighty and others not. If our nation wants to struggle with any other place, the heads of the villages and the sacrifices and the old and the elders and the young gather in the place which is holy to this spirit; and his name is Harumae.

If they were so gathered to offer, the head offering went and took a swine; and if it were not a wheelbarrow swine, they would not offer it to this spirit, he would refuse it and not devour it. He then took the heirloom and the piece of meat and entered the home (the shrine) and called this spirit and said:'Harumae!

The fire then burns strongly up to the top and the building is full of the scent of pigs - a symbol that the spirit has heared. And when the sacrificeor went in, he went not bravely, but with reverence; and this is the mark of it; when he goes into the sacred home, he puts away his purse, and thoroughly cleans es his hand, to show that the Spirit will not abject him.

One should note that this Harumae, who was given sacrifice as a belligerent spirit who was powerful in the battle, was not deceased for many years when the above report on the nature of the sacrifice was composed for him. If the Melanesians had been abandoned, this Harumae could have become the battle-good of San Cristoval, just as another man of meat and bone is known in Central Africa, who has become the war-good of Uganda.