Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/162

140 notion of a sacrifice as these more eastern people understand it. In the use of the word in the Banks' Islands which has been taken as equivalent to 'sacrifice,' viz. oloolo, it is important to observe that the word is not employed in reference to the spirit to whom the offering' is made, but to the man himself who presents the offering to the spirit, which is the same thing as to say that the word oloolo does not exactly mean to sacrifice. Still there is a sacrificial offering, and it is a means of propitiating a spirit after an offence, as well as a means of obtaining what is desired. Food also is by no means commonly the thing offered; in the Banks' Islands perhaps nothing but native money is the offering.

The spirits who are approached with these offerings are almost always connected with stones on which the offerings are made. Such stones have some of them been sacred to some spirit from ancient times, and the knowledge of the way to approach the spirit who is connected with them has been handed down to the man who now possesses it. But any man may find a stone for himself, the shape of which strikes his fancy, or some other object, an octopus in his hole, a shark, a snake, an eel, which seems to him something unusual, and therefore connected with a spirit. He gets money and scatters it about the stone, or on the place where he has seen the object of his fancy; then he goes home to sleep. He dreams that some one takes him to a place and shews him the pigs or money he is to have because of his connexion with the thing that he has found. This thing in the Banks' Islands becomes his tano-oloolo, the place of his offering, the object in regard to which offering is made to obtain pigs or money. His neighbours begin to know that he has it, and that his increasing wealth has its origin there; they come to him therefore and obtain through him the good offices of the spirit he has come to know. He hands down the knowledge of this to his son or nephew. If a man is sick he gives another who