Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/158

136 sacrifice, each beat him on the breast with their hands, calling on the tindatho, and giving him the victim. This was enough sometimes to cause death, otherwise they cut his throat. Then the sacrificer burnt a bit in the fire for the tindatho. Did the men assembled eat of the sacrifice? Bera, the principal chief, at any rate used to do so till Wadrokal went there as a teacher; he would cook an arm in the oven and eat it, having first sacrificed with a portion. Only six years ago Soga at Manggotu sacrificed a man. He accused some Bugotu visitors of charming one of his own friends to death; eight of them he killed, but one he bound and took to the place where his friend was buried; there he offered him to the ghost, now a tindatho, of the man supposed to have been bewitched; but he did not eat of the sacrifice. In these, however, and in the lesser sacrifices, there is not commonly present the notion of propitiation, nor perhaps of substitution. When, as in the case of Dikea, misfortune is supposed to have followed on some offence, the offended tindalo is propitiated by the sacrifice, and this is done in case of sickness. But generally the object is rather to gain the favour and to retain the good will of the disembodied spirit.

In Saa, near Cape Zelee in Malanta, there is found in some sacrifices a distinct substitution of the victim for the person on whose behalf the offering is made. The ghost of some departed warrior or otherwise powerful man becomes a lio’a; that of a warrior, if on experiment he is found to act, is like the keramo of Florida, a ghost of battle or of killing, lio'a ni ma'e. The names of many, as of recent chiefs, are generally known, but some are known only to those who have learnt the means of access to them. There is no one word used for sacrificing; there are seven rites which an educated native of the place classes with the sacrifices of other islands, (1) The simplest is called Tau taha, as when one returning from a voyage puts food to the case containing the relics of his father, as did Ara'ana. In the course of a voyage also, when landing on an uninhabited islet, they will throw food and call on father, grandfather, and other deceased friends, and in any danger