Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/52

42 various savage areas; but never the fact. Her pollution is so deep and her life so difficult in consequence, that when further she is persuaded that her death would make an honourable ending, she has been known to object to European interference with the custom. Often she is definitely suspected of causing the husband's death, not necessarily by intent, but simply by virtue of the mystic bond between them. In Central Africa, for instance, if an adulterous wife puts salt into her husband's food he will surely die. In the Congo, the widow, as such, is accused of his death, and we may be sure she pays the penalty. In Madagascar she is reviled because her vintana (fate) has been stronger than her husband's, so that she is virtually the cause of his death. The Chiqato, according to Dobrizhoffer, did not wait for the husband to die, but killed the wife to give him a chance of recovery. Nothing is easier, as many examples show, than for a wife, by some incautious act at home, to occasion the death of the husband when far away at his hunting, fighting or fishing. Hence the widow is unpopular, and doubtless better out of the way. The conception that she must die to cheer her husband in his new abode appears to be "another story" dating from the animistic stage of thought.

As regards another custom connected with death, it may be fairly assumed that mourning, especially in its expletive forms, such as ceremonial wailing, the chanting of dirges and the ritual beating of the breast, was due in the first place to a real despair and grief at parting. Later on, these expressions of emotion become conventionalised, and the opinion of others as to the display of proper feeling has to be considered. Thus the Australians taunt each other with having shown insufficient misery at the death