Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/335

Rh embody a cult of the dead and are often named after the dead, and the nature of their ritual is in agreement with the general character of Melanesian religion in that death and a relation of the living to the dead stand out far more prominently than birth. Moreover, in the rites which follow the ceremonial representation of death which we might expect to symbolise birth or return to life, water has no place. I know of only one Melanesian ceremony in which water takes a prominent place in connection with the ceremonial representation of death and return of life. This is in the ceremony connected with incision in the island of Ambrim in the New Hebrides. After the operation of incision the boys stay for five days in a special house which is given the same name as the house of the Mangge or graded organisation. When the boys enter this house all those present in the village wail in exactly the same manner as after a death. While in the house, which they are not allowed to leave on any pretence whatever, the boys are given hardly any food and no water at all, only obtaining liquid nourishment by chewing the juicy part of the husk of the coconut. On the fourth day of the stay in this house the people of the village construct a representation of a canoe from banana stalks and put it in the sea so that it just touches the shore, and crotons are set up so as to leave a passage by which the boys can pass from the shore through the canoe into the sea. On the following morning, the fifth day of seclusion in the house which I suppose to represent a ceremonial death, the boys pass through the passage between the crotons and through the representation of a canoe and plunge into the sea, after which they return to land without again passing through the passage. The canoe is then taken out to sea by the men of the village and set adrift. Here we have a rite which would seem at first sight to be capable of interpretation as a ceremonial rebirth after a