Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/336

28 period of death in which the act of rebirth is symbolised by the act of plunging into water after passing through a narrow passage, the community being rejoined by going ashore in the ordinary way. Owing to its adoption of the principle that any event may be interpreted as if it were its opposite or were reversed, the psycho-analytic school will not be at all disturbed by the fact that the boys pass through the passage which they will regard as a symbol of that by which men enter the world before they plunge into the water which they believe to be the representation of the amniotic fluid. Putting this little difficulty on one side this ceremony might seem at first sight to provide a striking example of the symbolic representation of rebirth by means of water. Every ceremony should, however, be considered in relation to the rest of the ritual of the people, and an examination of other features of the culture of the region suggests that a very different meaning can be assigned to the ceremonial canoe and the plunging into water. It will have been noticed that after the main part of the ceremony the artificial canoe is taken out to sea and set adrift. A prominent feature of the ceremonial of death in other islands of that part of the New Hebrides, though not so far as I could ascertain in Ambrim itself, is that after the death of a man many of his effects together with food are placed on a canoe which is then set adrift. There is little doubt that this ceremony is a survival of an older practice, still followed in other parts of Oceania, in which the body of a dead man is placed in a canoe with the necessaries for his journey to the island of the dead and the canoe is taken out to sea and set adrift exactly as in the concluding part of the ceremony of incision in Ambrim. I have elsewhere shown that the ceremony of the practice