Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/69

Rh logical unity really represents the mistiness of their views.

It is generally believed that, when a person dies, his spirit goes to live in a great dark forest, and, if he is a bad person, his spirit becomes an evil spirit (nkwiya). If a man is burnt to death, they think that the whole man,—body, soul, and spirit,—is annihilated. It is thought that in the forest the spirits have a great town, where they eat, drink, and marry, each person with his own clan, as they did in their former earthly life. The spirit (mwanda) is able to leave the forest and visit the mundane towns, and do just as he likes. The spirit that visits the former scenes of his life and works havoc is considered an evil spirit or demon (nkwiya). Good spirits never leave their forest town to wander about hurting and troubling the living. Living people are not able to go to this forest, as they do not know the road. It is only the dead that find the way.

When the family of a buried man has much and frequent illness, they dig up the corpse and burn it, thinking its spirit is a witch (ndoki) desirous of catching those of its family left in the town and taking them to the forest. By burning the corpse they think the spirit (nkwiya) is destroyed, and an end put to its witchcraft. It is not supposed that the witch killed, cooked, and ate the victim, but that the witch took the victim to the forest town for purposes of its own. These evil spirits operate as a rule through the living upon the living, and the ordeal is given to the suspected persons to see if such spirits are operating through them. Their anger is first against the spirit (ndoki) and then against the medium, and their desire is to kill the medium so as to drive the spirit back to its dark abode. A person can be a medium and not know it, and the work of the ordeal is to discover whether he is being used as a medium or not.