Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/259

 of Contact ivitk Inanimate Objects. 247

All the rest of the men lay on the ground, face downwards close together, and the boys walked on this living pavement to approach the seated figures.

Further, in other stages of the initiation the boys were carried.

In British New Guinea (A. C. Haddon, " Migrations of Cultures in British New Guinea," in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1920) among the initiation rites of boys to manhood we also find examples of non-contact with the ground. At one stage, the terminal feast of initiation among the Mawai, each boy stands on a dead pig, and whilst so standing is decorated emblematically. Again, after a probationary period of a month, the boy is steamed, and his mother tells him to stand on a dead pig, and he is invested with a loin cloth, and the initiation is complete. Among the Goi-efu, on reaching puberty the boy, in the presence of the community, stands on a dead pig which his father has to provide, and whilst so standing is given moral and social instruction, as well as invested with a token of his manhood. New weapons are given him, and he is obliged to celebrate his initiation by killing a man or a wild pig afterwards. The same is found among the Binandele, in which tribe girls also stand on pigs ; and similarly among other New Guinea tribes as well. This use of a pig, which at first sight seems a pecuhar custom, is explained by the relationship of human flesh to pig flesh among the South Sea Islanders generally, the former being commonly called " long pig." There is also the legend of Dabadaba in support of this. It was he who persuaded the people to substitute pigs for men at sacrifices. The Goi-efu alternative of killing a man or a pig is further support for this theory. It is thus permissible to deduce, though there may be no surviving example of the practice, that in former times at initiation festivals the initiate stood on a human being. The old Australian aboriginal ceremonies witnessed by ColHns seem to show that it was so. In other stages of the